Friday is an automated journal for Android meant to augment human memory. Users can ask the app questions about events in their lives and Friday will provide accurate results.
Friday brings in a new dimension to your smartphone,a new purpose, Friday brings Self Discovery. You carry your phone with you almost all the time, but it merely acts as your jukebox, camera or a playstation apart from being a communication device. We realized that we could turn the smartphone into a bitbucket of your life. It takes every bit of information you can give and builds a personality, a journal, an oracle that knows you and could give you answers from your own life. Friday helps you discover yourself, what you do, where you go, whom you talk to and much more.
This is just the "what?" part of it. But more is interesting is "how?". Friday Alpha is the outcome over 16 months of effort from our dedicated team of engineers, architects and designers. We have done over 10 iterations of the product before getting it to the current form. From the user interface to the artwork to the engine, we have put a lot of original designs which would make friday a great experience.
http://friday-app.com/?referred_by=14463
Disclaimer: I am in no way associated with the developers of this application. I think it is a cool idea and would like to share that with everyone. There is a referral link below which will boost my place in line for the invite, if you would rather not use it go here:
Code:
http://friday-app.com
Mashable Article where is discovered this app: http://mashable.com/2011/05/25/dexetra/
What it is: Kicktrade is a free virtual multiplayer stock market, where you take on the role of an investor who buys and sells shares of the football teams currently participating in the Euro Cup event. Imagine the teams being like the companies on a real market and you compete against other players trying to make the most virtual money out of their development during the competition. Think of it like betting, but in a different way... although be aware that you neither pay or win any real money!
What's the idea behind it: The game is targeted to be casual with simple user interaction (you should be able to start playing immediately even without registering anywhere) but developing a high addiction factor, which can lead to micro management and wanting to understand the mechanics behind the system - but this is not required to play. The development of the prices should in the end reflect the expectations of the players in their teams and their real performance during the matches.
How the market works: The "companies" that you can trade start into the market with a price reflecting their FIFA ranking. You can take their development on the market or the matches into account to make a decision to buy and sell their stock. There is a bank that constantly buys and sells shares from and to you. The prices to buy and sell start above their current value to buy and below their current value to sell. However, those bank offers are adjusted in periods, so you will have to make a decision to buy or sell before someone else does - but also not too quickly because you then might waste money. Once a transaction has been made, the price of the company is adjusted to the transaction price (taking the trade volume into account) and the new buy and sell prices are calculated (and the cycle begins again).
Installation: I attached the game to this post (as the forum does not allow me to post any links yet). Since you are all privacy aware: You will have to accept 3 permissions to be able to play the game:
INTERNET : obviously to connect to the game server to fetch game data and send your actions.
WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE : to store cache data on your SD card. For example the icons of the teams in the market. All data can be wiped in the preference menu.
READ_PHONE_STATE : to read the IMEI of your phone for authentication with the game server. No other information will be taken from your phone. This is required to prevent players from creating multiple accounts.
The development: This project has been implemented by one person alone (me) during free time as a learning project and is still in a testing phase. It is to my knowledge now bug free so I decided to enter the phase where more testers create more dynamics. This will allow me to tweak the game mechanics under more realistic circumstances. It is my first Android project, so any suggestions or comments are very welcome! (For example, if the required permissions prevent you from considering installing it and why)
The future of Kicktrade: The idea is to make more versions of the game to run during the longer running competition of several leagues in different countries. The Euro Cup is a perfect testing ground before release on leagues as it is a lot shorter with matches nearly every day. Until the end of the event I would like to have perfected the game mechanics and only afterwards I would like improve the UI and the code.
Keep up to date: You can follow the news on twitter @kicktradegame as well as on Facebook, or you can google for 'kicktrade' to find my blog called NeoZenCortexis among the first results. When there is a new version of the client available, you will see an update button on the main menu of the game. It is not always required to update but highly recommended (if you see an access denied message it could mean you should consider updating). At some point in the future, the game will also be uploaded to Google Play and get its own website but my free time is limited at the moment, so I will take it step by step.
How can you help: Most importantly, try the game yourself and/or invite your friends to play. I especially require feedback on the game mechanics at this stage of development and this requires a more dynamic market - although any other suggestion or comment is very appreciated as well. I have tested the game so far on Samsung Galaxy S, Galaxy S II, Google Nexus and a couple of HTC devices but none of them has hardware keyboards, so I expect some trouble there. Feel free to comment if you encounter any strange behavior with those. Also other than hi-res displays have not been tested.
Thanks: I would like thank all the people at XDA Developers and StackOverflow for the many hints I researched while learning how to work with android phones and ultimately even make my own app! Keep it up!!
I would be very happy if you help me test my game! For any questions or suggestions, contact me on twitter @kicktradegame, facebook or my blog (search for 'kicktrade'). Thank you very much in advance!!
Nice. .Vl try it out. ..
<3 I love football <3
Cool! Let me know if you need any help or advice... I really appreciate all feedback and I hope you enjoy!!
I had to slow down price development during the night (CET) until we have some more players from outside of europe... otherwise some of the teams dropped too far.
Sent from my GT-I9100 using XDA
Kicktrade v0.25 released
Let's experiment a little. There was one thing in the game mechanics I was not very happy with: If you buy a share that not many people hold and nobody else is going to buy, your profit should be very small. But if your trade starts a trend on the market - let's say you buy and several other investors follow your example, you should get the best prices in average. Same thing with selling: if a lot of people hold a stock and you are the first to sell, you should get better prices than those who decide to sell last. I hope to bring more fluctuation on the market and make your decision depending on the trend you expect to see in the future. Of course this will most likely work best with more players, but let's give it a try now anyway, shall we?
One side effect of this will also be that teams which already went out of the competition and not many people are likely to be interested in are a great risk to buy, because the sell price will only increase if players follow your example. Otherwise the price might even go down, as the buy price is considerably lower now.
Further modifications in this version:
Fixed a bug: when you sell your complete depot of a share, you were still counted as an investor. This will be adjusted with the next trade on each team (only then, because those numbers are only calculated when trading).
Number of investors are now displayed (this information is important to you so you can make a decision with the changes above)
Switched position of the tabs "Depot" and "History", which increased performance (the history loads slower than the depot because it contains more entries and will now only be pre-loaded once you switch one tab to the depot).
The history now shows the last 100 trade entries when entering the tab. You can load more (if available) by scrolling all the way down.
The history graph shows the same amount of items that are in the list. Which means it will show up to 100 past trades now (before it was 20). If you scroll down the list of items before and more items are loaded, the graph will display them as well.
Performance has been increased on all list views.
Please comment on the changes, no matter if you feel they make the game better, worse or not very different at all... Thanks and let's see how the market develops now with so many teams out of the competition.
I’ll try to keep this short with the focus on the numbers and what they mean.
On April 26th I launched a new game, Quantum Bouncy Bits which follows the “pay what you want” model, without any other means of monetization. The game is free, it has no ads, and the users have the option of playing the entire game without paying anything.
Before developing the game I did some research and all numbers pointed to the fact that only about 2% of people donate. The rest of 98% will choose not to pay anything.
So, from the start I knew that the game won’t generate any real money and most definitely won’t generate as much as ads would, but I still wanted to test the numbers out and create this experiment for myself and for my own curiosity.
The “experiment” turned out to be more insightful than I originally anticipated and gave me a good glimpse into the behaviour of mobile users which I will share below, full transparency.
**Number of downloads and ratings:**
* The game was featured on the front page of XDA-Developers. For those not familiar with the site, it’s the go-to portal for android developers with a very large userbase and audience. Despite the large audience the game only received about 500 downloads in the 6 hours it remained on their front page.
* The game was also featured on /r/android hot section with 140 upvotes. Reddit’s community proved to be an amazing source for feedback and discussions while not so much in terms of downloads. Considering /r/android has 500k subscribers and a constant ~2k active users at any given moment, the game received only 400 downloads. However, the feedback I received was invaluable and a lot of the improvements they suggested and bug fixes were fixed in my next update.
* The “spotlight” was gone the next day and the number of downloads dropped dramatically, as expected. Even with this push, the game was nowhere to be found on the Play Store organically. It was on spot 158 on the “top new games” and nowhere on the “Trending” list. I found this very odd because there were other games with far less downloads and far less ratings that were on the top of the “Trending” category.
* Since then, the game has received 3k downloads with a steady decline of downloads/day until now where it sits at around 50 downloads/day and continuing downward.
Because of the nature of the way the game asks for donations brought a very big number of ratings which brings me to my next point:
**The structure of the model:**
* When the player reaches level 20, they are prompted with a 2 messages explaining that there are a lot more levels to complete and that they can pay what they want for the game.
* A final message appears where they are asked to pay one of the 4 tiers ($1, $2, $5, $10) and a button that says “I don’t want to pay”.
* When the users pay any sum, they receive a “thank you” message and then they continue the game.
* When the users choose “I don’t want to pay” they receive a message asking them to rate the game on Google Play or to “Continue without rating”.
**Statistics and percentages:**
* The game now has 3.2k downloads.
* 1.3% donated.
* Out of those that donated, 30% chose the 2nd donation tier ($2).
* Only 1 person donated $5 and nobody donated $10.
* Despite **American players being 42% of the total userbase they made 85% of total donations.**
* All other countries combined make for the rest of 15%, despite accounting for 58% of downloads.
* On May 1st I introduced 10 new levels and added a “skip level” button for $0.99. I expected this to cause some controversy, but it didn’t at all (except for 1 guy). The game could still be completed without using the “skip level” feature and it still has no ads.
* 7% of of players paid for the “skip level”.
**Conclusion and final thoughts**
It appears that US players are more inclined to donate than any other country, for which I am very grateful and I have the utmost respect for the people that donated.
People are much more inclined to pay for something that benefits them, even in a very small manner, which is expected. I initially didn’t think the “skip level” button would be used but I was very wrong. Even with this small benefit the percentages are much higher than donations and I can only imagine that IAPs in games where the player actually receives something generate a much higher number of payments.
This has been, and continues to be, a very interesting experiment and a good glimpse into this pay model. I will continue to calculate these numbers and if there’s interest in the conclusions I will be making another post in a month and see how the stats hold up.
I want to publicly thank all the people that donated, they give me the motivation and drive to keep on making games, and the feedback I received was truly amazing, so thank you as well to all the people that rated the game. You’re awesome!
If you want to try out the game for yourself, you can Get Bouncy Bits on Google Play, and as always, I’m listening to any feedback you may have. If you have other questions please feel free, I will be watching this thread and answering all questions.
OP notes: This is from a reddit thread but I thought it was a good place to discuss it here.
Can you post the Reddit thread here?
Hi everyone! I’d like to tell you the story about the creation and release of our first game. I will tell you a little about our company’s background and the difficulties that we encountered during the development. I hope our story might be useful to you too.
It all started a few years ago when my brother built up a team of like-minded people who were eager to create, and this was then expressed in the creation of animation and computer graphics for various projects. The team eventually grew, as well as the number of orders from clients. Then there was a point when we decided to create our own game project. Thus, we began a long preparation process. Unfortunately, our existing knowledge base was not enough to start the project. New volunteers joined the team, the learning process started, and the project began to acquire its first outlines. The result was a prototype of Crocks Hunter, a 2D platformer.
The plot of the game was as follows: Crocodile-aliens arrive on Earth to steal the Moon from earthmen. The main characters of the game (a boy or a girl, depending on player’s choice) must go through six different locations (desert, jungle, lava, water world, ice jungle, and fairy forest), and catch — not kill, the game is absolutely violence-free and child-friendly — all the Crocodiles into boxes which are used sometimes for some puzzles, and then defeat the final boss. One of the graphics features of the game is that 3D character models were rendered into 2D to make more complex, natural and fancy animations and to keep the high quality of the overall picture, along with a light-weight installation file.
Initially, the project was planned to be released for mobile platforms, but as the development progressed, it was decided to release it for PC, and then for Nintendo Switch. This was due to several reasons. Firstly, mobile game publishers are into the free2play game model, for which platform games are not quite suitable, although we figured out how to monetize the game, and to draw the player’s interest to micro-transactions. Secondly, in order to enhance the visuals of the game with various effects, we would have to sacrifice the performance. Therefore, it was more interesting to release the game on PC and consoles but at a set price. One of the publishers suggested that we release an update with six levels and two bosses once a month. Thus, it would be possible to retain the player for a long time, but so far we have not tried this model. Although, who knows, maybe you will?
We temporarily froze the Crocks Hunter project but did not abandon it. We are writing new documentation, and designing new levels. We are open to cooperation with investors and publishers to make a global bestseller together.
Currently, we are working without an office, so the whole team works remotely. In order to complete the project and make it at a high level, we would need to gather all the team members in one place, and this requires funding. So we started looking for investors. Many publishers appreciated the great potential of the game but would invest in the project after it being fully fledged and ready for release. As it turned out, Russian investors are afraid of the gaming industry, and they are completely unready to invest in it. Perhaps, this is due to their not understanding the potential and the specifics of the industry. Many foreign investors simply don’t work with Russia. At some point in our search for investors, we were stumped. The team could no longer work on pure enthusiasm. Some team members quit. Some began to slow down the main process, saying that they’d prefer to take orders as before than “work for the fairies and unicorns”. But some determined team members still believed in the project and continued to create it. So this is how the PUSHINGAMES company was created.
Unfortunately, there is no “book for dummies” on how to achieve success from the beginning to end in video games industry. The information you may find on the Internet is very superficial. Therefore, look for according courses, literature, or even better, find some competent mentor who will guide you. Our mentor was a game designer Konstantin Savochkin
One evening, when we were discussing some details, we decided to create a little something to distract ourselves, and came up with the “Quick Week” project. The main goal of which was to create and release one mini-game within a week. It took a couple of days to write game design documents and calculate P & L. Meanwhile, our artists already made the first sketches and prototypes.
We really like the examples of the Nintendo and Marvel universes when the story of one character is woven into the story of another, thereby creating fascinating endless worlds. Maintaining the heritage of the “Crocks Hunter”, we chose the main character to be a crocodile. The result was Jumping Crock: Jellyfish Attack, an arcade retro jumper for mobile platforms, designed in the style of space comic books of the 80’s .
Download link on GooglePlay: Jumping Crock Jellyfish Attack
In total, we spent around $600 to create the game, excluding licenses and developer accounts. We spent most of the budget on localizing the game and its description in 12 languages, including Russian.
To do the translation job, we chose a small but very responsible team — Locnloader a pool of freelance video game translators with 8 years of experience and voice over actors collected in one place. They specialize in indie-games and such small teams as ours, and that affects the price in a good way. For a reasonable price, they did us translations within 2 days. Moreover, they helped us with the ASO description text and edited it to sound a little more adequate, which is sometimes hard when it comes to repeating many same keywords in one small text. What I personally liked is that their team manager had some understanding in game design (and even took a course in it), and a little in ASO. That’s what I call speaking the same language!
We are very proud of the music in our arcade in particular. We love rock! There is 8-bit Space Rock music in the game. It was written by a wonderful musician, composer, and our cousin Yevgeny Protopopov. The music takes you back to the past, especially if you played Battle Toads and Tanks as a child.
Since we created the project with our own money, the payment to our specialists for the work done was extremely symbolic and incommensurable with the level of their professionalism. Therefore we are immensely grateful to our team and believe that without them we wouldn’t succeed.
In order for the project to be successful, it is very important for the team to have a Team Lead, who could drive this train, per aspera ad astra. In our team, that would be my brother Nikita.
Many companies could have achieved well-deserved success, but they never reached it, stopping halfway through. The history of the company with the fruit on the logo is the lodestar for us on how to do things.
Of course, you always want to do something unique and ambitious like Crash Bandicoot. You might want to make the game more complex by adding many different features and mechanics, but it’s better not to do so. Make it easy! The process of creativity absorbs you. You always want to add something else, when almost everything is ready. It’s best to concentrate on the main idea and actually bring it to life, and after the release, just make an update. By making game updates after the release, you maintain players’ interest and make your app appear at the top of the search results in application stores. In the long-term development of your project, it’s very important to take a detached view. Do beta and alpha testing. Of course, this is a bit like parent-teacher nights at school, when they scold your beloved child, and it can be painful, but it will be good for you.
We made our game free-to-play. We were looking for ads SDK for a long time, and we stopped at the companies:
● Appodeal
● AdMod
As the saying goes, “Creativity is great, but sometimes hunger takes over”. The most important thing is to remember who we are doing this for. We believe that a player should stay immersed in the game as long as possible, without being disturbed by ads in the heat of the moment. And of course, you can’t go without them at all. Use all available services of GooglePlay and AppStore, in-app ads, Achievements, and Leaderboards.
After we published our game in stores, the hardest part began — promotion. Promoting the project itself is also very important. You can create a masterpiece, but in order for it to become a bestseller, you got to try your best. How can you do it when there is no budget? To accumulate link mass, you can write articles in the media and various forums. But as practice has shown, there is nothing better than word of mouth. Bloggers, YouTube and streamers are such goodwill ambassadors. Each of them makes game reviews in their particular style. Find the one you like and persuade them to do a review for free. However, you are unlikely to have luck on this one (we haven’t). Russian bloggers ask for two to three times more money than their foreign counterparts, by the way.
Before releasing your game, create your info channels and use cross-references between them. It works! We use:
● Facebook
● Twitter
● Youtube
● Instagram
● Yunoia
● Bridget Loker
● Telegram channels and chats.
Now let’s get to the final part — working with app stores and how we published our game.
Google — everything is quick and easy. The main thing is to make an agreement with your conscience and not to sign Coppa.
AppStore —an application is being checked for a long time. It feels like an eternity. But in fact, it takes a week for them to check it, despite them saying 24 to 48 hours.
Amazon — quick and easy.
AppScater — as soon as you publish on the main stores, you can start invading Greater China. Appscater is there to help you.
So it goes.
P.S.
Once again I want to say thank you to my team. And please, don’t forget to try and play our game
The author of this article and chief marketing officer, one of the brothers, Artem Pushin.
Love your journey from starting to till today. Thanks for your post. :good:
Сongratulations on the release! I would like to read about promotion steps, if you did any, except social networks cross-references..
Love it!
SeniorMatch invented the online meetup community for older people over 50 for seeking friendship, companionship, love or even marriage in later life since 2001. Now the SeniorMatch community goes to app.
Free download SeniorMatch app @ play store: Search "SeniorMatch dating" on play store, you'll find it.
Features:
Create a profile
It only allows baby boomers who are 45 or older to join. Easy and low-quality profiles will be blocked in a few hours. Please be mature and serious in the community.;
Moments: Show off your senior life
Loving travelling? Looking for retirement activities? Finding senior friendship? Or just meeting new people to end single life? You always find thousands of people at your age are looking for the same as you. Enjoy a better senior life, you're not alone here
Chat with the like-minded ones
If you like anyone, you can send a private message. It all happens with an initiate conversation.