Meteorfall — The First Month
It’s been a month since Meteorfall’s launch, and I wanted to write a follow up article to the retro I wrote about Meteorfall’s development and first week sales numbers. It’s been a busy month!
QoL improvements, bug fixes, and iPhone X support
The first month was been a whirlwind of activity. I spent most of the first week answering emails and tweets about the game. Once that cooled down, I got to work on improving the game.
After the initial bug fix update, I set out to develop an update that addressed two main concerns — a) iPhone X support b) many of the encounters (Rest / Blacksmith / Shop) etc… felt unsatisfying when you were either at full health, or didn’t have gold.
I had done some iPhone X improvements during development. Meteorfall started development before the iPhone X form factor even existed, so I had to retrofit the game half way through the beta test. Once I made changes to support the narrow width, I was still left with a problem that many players were complaining the the game was ‘too zoomed in’. To address this, I adjusted the orthographic size of the camera in Unity. Unfortunately, a lot of the UI in Meteorfall is rendered in world-space instead of screen-space, so certain elements that should be locked to certain parts of the screen (eg: top bar / bottom bar) were now floating in the middle of the screen.
What I ended up doing (I don’t recommend this — I’m just sharing as an anecdote of how I solved it) is to first detect if Meteorfall is running on an 18:9 device. If it is, I first adjust the orthographic size of the camera, which effectively zooms it out. From there, instead of using absolute position for certain UI elements, I programmatically place them based on a % of the screen height. So for instance, in most resolutions, I could safely place the characters deck on the same spot on the screen. With 18:9, to prevent things from looking weird, I updated the deck to always place 65% of the way down the screen.
The update also featured new ‘Earn Gold’ and ‘Train’ encounters, which take the place of encounters that players would otherwise be unable to use. I was happy to let Lady Luck determine what events showed up, but I’m also sympathetic to how players feel about scenarios like this, so I put in some effort to change it. I do agree that as I tested the changes myself, it made certain encounters more satisfying.
I also added a few balance changes to the update based on general consensus that Greybeard was too strong compared to the heroes. I regret not having concrete metrics for the changes, but I heard enough anecdotes that I was reasonably certain that I wanted to tweak Greybeard’s card pool and power level a bit.
The Necrodude Update
The ‘Necrodude’ update is what I’ve been calling the first major content update, which adds a new Necromancer character to the mix named Mulford. (Not surprisingly, Evgeny Viitman (the artist) coined the term ‘Necrodude’, as well as the name ‘Mulford’. Fun fact — Evgeny waffled between Mulford and Muldorf, and I can’t decide what his name should actually be. I think both are amusing, in different ways)
I was really happy to start working on the Necrodude update. Working on stuff like iPhone X support and bug fixes is necessary, but not so fun. Working on new cards & playstyles — yes please!
One of the first goals I had with Mulford was to design some cards with some new mechanics. Many of the cards that are currently in Meteorfall were conceived of early on in the process, and I wanted to try some new mechanics with this update. I’ll probably do a separate update just to talk about the design of Mulford in the near future.
My general goal and philosophy is that I’d like to do a few content updates to Meteorfall for free. As stated in my original post, I genuinely enjoy working on and actually playing Meteorfall. It’s not a job, I’m not relying on the income, and so I have some flexibility with respect to the time I spend on it. The personal satisfaction I get from improving the game and adding new stuff that I also get to play goes a long way for me. Creating a game that gets consistently recommended by players as a ‘must play’ deck-builder/mobile game is one of my main long term goals.
I also really like the idea of expanding the Meteorfall universe in future games, and I see that any time that is spent improving and adding to Meteorfall is progress towards that goal. You can definitely expect to see characters from Meteorfall making cameos in future games from Slothwerks, and vice versa. All these stories take place in the same universe.
Features & Promos
After the launch week, I didn’t really expect to get any more promotion from Apple, but thankfully, I was wrong.
The first feature was a front page feature on the Chinese iOS App Store. A big shout out to my publisher in China, ZPlay, for working with Apple on the feature. I was contacted by them about a potential feature in China, and I immediately read the Apple ‘Dropwell’ guidelines, and put together the necessary marketing materials. The sales in China were a very substantial part of the overall revenue (which is not included in the sales numbers below). I’ll just say that I was very happy with the results, and I don’t think I would’ve had even a fraction of the sales without the localization and marketing assistance that ZPlay provided.
Not surprisingly, getting featured on the front page of the App Store in China made a bit impact on the position of Meteorfall in China. Here’s the impact as shown on App Annie:
The second feature was a nice little promo on the home page of the iOS App Store in the US, which featured Meteorfall as part of a ‘Groundhog Day’ apps. This include a nice placement, as well as the app icon featured prominently. It’s hard to say for certain, but it did seem like this placement made an impact on sales. I’d expected sales to continue going down, but they got a nice bump on the same day as the feature. (Worth noting that Google Play did get a bump as well, so hard to say if it was the feature on the App Store, or something else) Nevertheless, from a personal satisfaction standpoint, it felt great to be included in the feature.
Lastly, a couple of people messaged me to tell me that Meteorfall was featured on a ‘Games You Missed’ Snapchat on IGN. Again — hard to calculate what impact this might have had on sales, but it was another unexpected feature that felt really exciting when it happened.
First Month Sales
And of course, we come to the first month sales. As expected, things have slowed down a bit from the crazy sales spike of the first week. That said, I’ve been super happy with the sales performance, and how its performed since the first week.
One post I read recently from Jake Birkett (Shadowhand dev) was about using the first week of game sales to predict annual revenue. I’m curious to see how that plays out for Meteorfall. Meteorfall did roughly $17,000 in sales in the first week. Jake’s data suggests that an average game on Steam could expect to do about 4.5x the first week’s revenue for the year, so it’ll be interesting to see how Meteorfall compares to that. To put it in perspective, my initial sales estimate for Meteorfall was ~$20,000, so the sales performance so far has been nothing short of amazing to me. As a data point, it took Meteorfall 18 days to hit the ‘2x first week’ milestone, and I’m curious to see how the long tail looks.
Moving on to the actual numbers, Meteorfall has made $34,800 since launch, not including revenue from China. Below you can see what that looked like over time:
Android gained steadily in terms of overall percentage (starting at around 15%) and settling at around 25%. This is very much in line with the data posted by Tinytouchtales regarding the one-year anniversary of Card Crawl , in terms of ratio between the platforms.
One other side effect of launching Meteorfall that I thought was interesting is that sales of my other game, Tales of the Adventure Company, have gotten quite a relatively nice boost from the release of Meteorfall as well. Released in 2014, sales for the game have been mostly 0–1 sales per day for quite a long time. Launching Meteorfall has increased that to up to 10 sales per day in some cases, averaging around 4 to 5. I imagine most of these sales are coming from players looking for other games by the same developer. I’m curious to see how sales of Meteorfall are affected in the future when I launch new games. The boost from Meteorfall since launch was enough to bring in an extra 182 units for Tales of the Adventure Company.
Conclusion
Meteorfall has continued to post great numbers in terms of sales through the first month, doing about $300–$400 in sales per day, one month later. My initial sales goal for Meteorfall was $20000, and if I dared to dream — $50000. The sales are well on track to hit even that optimistic goal within the next couple months. This gives me a lot more confidence to invest more into future projects, in an effort to step up the quality to the next level.
I mentioned before, but what really makes the project exciting to work on is all the energy and enthusiasm of the players. I’ve gotten so many great ideas and comments from players that are clearly much better at my own game than I am, and it feels great. I’ve had real-life discussions about strategies and balance ideas which is something I’ve never experienced for any of my previous games. I can’t wait to finish up the Necrodude update and see how players react to getting the whole new character and a bunch of new cards.
