Spring Bonus is out for mobile!
Yay, Spring Bonus is finally out for mobile, and just in time for Easter!
Grey Alien Games partnered with Hot Head Games to publish it on multiple mobile devices as follows:
Please tell your friends and family. Thanks!
March 29th, 2012 at 6:16 pm
You should check with your artist if she works with pixels or vectors. In case of latter: regenerating the art at 2048×1536 ipad retina would be so awesome. This eyecandy deserves the retina treatment.
March 29th, 2012 at 6:29 pm
Hi Bram, yes that would be awesome but unfortunately all the art is pixel based so no extra iPad3 eye candy.
March 30th, 2012 at 11:07 am
A full year passed since I’ve translated this game to German? Time flies…
@jake What technology do you use for all these platforms? Some cross-platform tool or native programs with later conversions?
March 30th, 2012 at 5:38 pm
@hermitC Indeed time does fly! The game was Ported to Unity by Damien Sturdy for the iOS/Android versions and James Mintram ported to XNA last year for WP7.
March 30th, 2012 at 6:53 pm
Interesting. Thanks for the info.
March 30th, 2012 at 7:24 pm
Great work, Jake! I am sure it will perform well. Btw. until now how did Spring Bonus play out for you? Did it live up to your expectations?
Good Luck!
March 30th, 2012 at 7:27 pm
Hi Leo, Spring Bonus for PC/Mac has done pretty well thanks. It’s earned the most money in the shortest period of time of all my own games (excluding the ones I made for BFG).
March 31st, 2012 at 6:32 pm
That’s awesome Jake. I hate to be nosey but does this sort of game make enough for a living? Or do you need to have more games or other income sources to make it work?
March 31st, 2012 at 9:35 pm
Good question. The PC/Mac version of Spring Bonus is certainly enough to make a living from (it has made $35K so far) if you were an indie leaving in cheap accommodation but I have a family of 4 + cat so our living costs are much higher. So I’d need to make maybe 3 Spring Bonuses per year to live comfortably (which is entirely possible as the game took 2 intense months). However, I am receiving revenue continually from my older games which could maybe be enough to live from (various from month to month but is currently several thousand dollars a month due to recent promotions + localising of 5-year-old IP), so this means that I probably wouldn’t really need to make 3 casual games in a year due to my back catalogue of games.
So far mobile versions have not made me any decent money at all and have been a “waste” of time, although certainly a useful experience that I hopefully can capitalise on in the future.
So you may say, how come I didn’t make 3x match-3s last year? Well apart form some family problems that slowed me down, I have been working on Eets Munchies with Klei Entertainment which is a big project that should hopefully pay off well when it launches this summer.
April 1st, 2012 at 9:38 am
Thanks for that statement. It’s good to know that it is really possible to make a living making independent casual games. And I guess the more games you have out there it better it gets so I am sure the pressure will decrease with each and every new game you get out there so it will become easier and easier. Maybe someday you even reach a point where you can live from all the games you made without releasing a new one every year.
One more question though. Since you said that the mobile versions were a waste of time.You directly put them onto the appstores yourself right? without using a distributor (like bigfishgames) that would also advertise your game to all of its customers?
I remember some time ago you said you would distribute your mobile games via bigfishgames so why didn’t you do it then?
April 1st, 2012 at 9:57 am
I really do hope I can live for a wile without making new games at some point. It’s a dream anyway. Depends on how the markets change etc.
Yes previous mobile games were self-published. I tried to get BFG to publish Spring Bonus on mobile but they kind of let me down despite me giving them lots of advance warning. Shame. So now Hot Head Games has published Spring Bonus on mobile instead and got it featured by Apple and now it’s in the top 100 in Canada and US + some other places. We’ll see how that does.
May 7th, 2012 at 11:32 am
You can play games on a Kindle? My grandmother will be pleased to hear this.
May 7th, 2012 at 10:33 pm
Yes it’s out for the Kindle Fire! Check it out. Thanks 🙂