Highway Run for iOS

Hey there,

yesterday my first iOS game "Highway Run" launched on the AppStore:



Highway Run offers fast paced, arcade like racing action mixed up with plenty of unique missions, like protecting and destroying other cars, surviving massive traffic, high-speed pursuits and many more.

Features:
o Smart autonomous traffic and reckless cops
o Various humorous missions with different objectives
o Drive different cars (schoolbus, limousine, convertible etc.)
o Optimized 3D graphics for HD Retina displays
o Easy and intuitive touch controls
o Gas stations, repair shops and rest areas to use
o Highscores and Achievements
o Presented in English and German
o No ads!

Pricing and Availability:
“Highway Run” is available for free in the Apple AppStore’s “Games” category. You can purchase additional missions for $0.99 and an additional racing car for $1.99 in the app.

Device Requirements:
o iPad/iPad2/iPad3, iPhone4S/4/3GS, iPod 3rd and 4th Generation
o Requires iOS 4.1 or later

I thought about writing a post mortem for it after a few days to show how it did on the AppStore.
Till now i saw 2000 people in the leaderboards on the first day (yesterday).

The homepage is: http://vidiludi.com/highwayrun/
iTunes link: http://itunes.apple.com/app/highway-run/id492097046

Any feedback is appreciated!

Thanks
E

 

wow, I'm a little suprised here. Currently, I'm developing a very similar game, (but around 50% complete) Anyway, here are my suggestions.

1- The main menu is too sensitive. With a little swipe you can pass 2 menu parts. (sorry for my english)
2- Our car should be closer to the bottom of the screen. My fingers had hard times to reach the car .
3- Traffic should switch lanes more smoothly. but if it's on purpuse no problem here.

Other than these, the game is awesome.

PS: can you give a little information about the average draw calls and triangles seen on the screen? Thanks. and good luck!

 

Thanks for the feedback testing

To your points:
1. It's not as perfect as Apple's wiping i guess. But i needed to find a way to get to the end of the missions without wiping 2134 times
2. You do not have to touch the car to change lanes, you just do the gesture (wipe to left/righ/bottom) anywhere on the screen!
3. The bouncy looking lanechange was on purpose

Okay some statistics:
- about 30-40 drawcalls per scene
- < 20k triangles (i think you can have many more though)
- no skinned meshes, no animations
- not a single collider was used in the whole scene nor any physics (wrote it on my own)
- The Vehicles.cs script which handles the AI of all cars + the player's has about 1400 lines of code.
- For the resolution "independence" for 480x320/960x640/1024x768 i used some simple scripts i talked about here: http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/131562-resolution-independent-hud-amp-gui-made-easy
- randomized groups of sideobjects
- track is made of stretched meshes which are dynamically mapped, the gas stations and rest areas are planted into the track by predefined distances per mission.

e

 

Thanks for the detailed answer. So with these stats it's able to run on iphone 3gs right? Did you compiled it with Unity 3.5.1?

About the controls.. hm I didn't know we can swipe anywhere on the screen, (and I can't try now because my battery is dead )
But I still think a control schema with 3 buttons will work better. (2 buttons for left-right, 1 button for brake, no swipes)

 

Looks good! Will try it soon.
(nice logo btw.)

 

As far as i know the iPhone4/iPod/iPad1 are the weakest devices, because of their high resolution. The 3GS should do just fine.
Yes i used Unity 3.5.1, but not the newest XCode for the known reasons.

We first had 3 buttons! But we chose the wiping later because we can save display space and drawcalls and it feels better IMO.

Cheers
e

 

How is the nodding of the head done? Also by script?
Very funny!

 

Hey efge,

yea that's actually a really small one.
But those details are the most important i guess!

Some news:
We are top10 in Games/Racing in Germany Venezuela Hooray!

e

 

Looks awesome! BOUGHT!

And thanks for sharing insight with us!

So, which XCode version are you using? I am wondering which XCode I should use to compile for iOS.

 

Thanks a lot Bawss

here are my settings:

XCode 3.2.6
Unity3.5.1
armv7 only
iOS 4.1
fast but no exceptions
.net subset

using Prime31 StoreKit for IAP and Unity3.5's builtin GameCenter integration.

ATM i didn't get one complaint about crashes or incompabilities in 18.000 downloads (there are also 0 crashbugs in itunes connect).

Hope those numbers help a bit

Cheers
e

 

Thanks Ethan! Those are really helpful!

 

You're welcome

Some small updates:
Yesterday was the best day so far with 10k downloads and 41 In-App-Purchases.
That's 0.41% of downloads transformed into an IAP. Not the best ratio ... we need more IAPs, i guess.

We are #3 in Germany's AppStore in Racing and Action and #12 Overall! Woohoo

Unfortunately the three review pages which said they would make a review (1 week ago), didn't get them out, yet.
I hope they don't forget about us.

Does anyone have experiences how long it takes, till you pass their review-queue?

 

Congrats for the downloads Can you share the total number of IAPs? And are you happy with the freemium model? Do you think it would be better to sell the game at 0.99$ instead of free?
I will be happy if you mention some of your marketing experiences (reviews, press release, etc).. Thanks.

 

On the first days we had like 5k downloads and 20 IAPs.
But since we are rising in Germany, we doubled those numbers.
We are now #1 in Germany's Action category and #6 Overall (unbelievable!), so i think the numbers of today will be even better.

I don't have experience with the paid app model so far, since i've read so much about freemium games making more money. I guess that's true if you have a little bit more content (to buy) as my game has.
Personally i am a big fan of the freemium model, too, because you can test the game before you buy more content. That most of those games are like "pay to win" or "buy a heap of ingame cash for $49.99" is sad though.

My marketing experience weren't the best so far. I got a few good responses of very good review pages, but nothing happened, yet. Maybe you have to contact them even earlier ... like 2 weeks before you release your game to get the review out to the right time.

I wrote a rough plan about my marketing efforts on my blog (see signature!).

My next plan is to talk to the guys of Union about porting it to other platforms. Of course i'll think about Android, too.

Cheers
e

 

Hey there!

We now got more than 100,000 downloads in our first few weeks.
That's insane if you keep in mind that still no big review site made a review for it, yet.

To celebrate this success we have released a first content update with more free and paid missions including tanks!
You can also buy the new tank to shoot your way through ALL missions.

Here is a screenshot of the 1.3 update:


Thanks to all you guys who downloaded Highway Run
e

 

4 Months have passed and it became more silent about the game since i had some other things to do (unfortunately).

Some random facts to keep you updated:

o quite no reviews, because the mail i sent to the sites was too boring (i guess) + i wrote them when the game was out and not before *beginner mistake*
o one review of a very big german IT page "chip.de", which wasn't really good - more like "average racing game"
o more than 200,000 downloads
o most downloads per day: 20,000
o current downloads per day: ~350
o current percent of people who buy In App Purchases: ~1.5%
o 4,5 Stars in USA thanks mates
o my second press release was on Gamasutra: here
o I was #1 in India in ALL categories ...
o ... which didn't mean much to downloads nor sales obviously

If you have any questions, just ask right away

Cheers
e

 

Thats really nice to share with us, Ethan.
My game studio will soon release our first mobile game (as a company) and we are getting know-how on marketing, customer strategy and a lot of other things to promote better our game. We will share this too.

Nice game

 

Look cool, nice jobs on the graphics.

 

Thanks for sharing. I really want to know more about marketing. Big sites like TouchArcade will make reviews for free? If so, should we send mails before the game is released? Lastly, if you don't mind, can you give or pm an example e-mail that we can send to review sites? Thanks..

 

I would like to know more about marketing part too. Can you describe the process, I mean what you did after you had finished version on your hands and how do you think it went from 0 to thousands in first day? Do you think it was like viral type of mouth-to-mouth spread or it was thanks to some source (like review or something)

My first game is obviously would never become bestseller (32 sales in first day lol) but I'd really like my second one to jump higher to move from motion graphics to gamedev completely. Oh btw here is free castrated online version of my game if anyone interested:
http://www.space-jump.com/ollyweb/OllyWeb.html

 

Thanks for the kind words

There are some posts about marketing on my blog (see signature)
But to be honest i am not the big PR guy either.

What i learned is:
- Start really early with posting screenshots and updates about your game ... videos, everything you got to catch people's interest (i did that wrong)
- Write to review sites before you release the game - way before! like when you hit beta (did that wrong, too)
- If you create a RTS game, look on google for RTS game reviews and contact the autors of those to talk to people who might be interested in your game (i did that wrong, again)
- If you write reviewsite autors: get to the point, dont attach files, tell them you liked the review he's made which you found on google, give them plenty of media-links (videos, screenshots)
- Write press-releases and put them here: http://www.gamerelease.net (this service got me on Gamasutra!!!)
- Read, read, read, read:
http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RobertFearon/20120811/175803/Indie_PR_on_a_shoestring.php
http://www.pixelprospector.com/the-big-list-of-indie-game-marketing/
- Use Twitter and Facebook
- Integrate both in your App so people can spread the word more easily

Hope that helps you

Cheers
e

 

Wow Thanks.. how much does it cost a PR at gamerelease.net? It says "indie friendly prices", but nothing more. Are there any free services?

And one final thing... How did you capture the video of your game on a macintosh?

 

It's like 120 € sign up fee. After that you can submit one press release a month if i remember right.

The video was captured on Windows with Fraps.

e

 

Ethan thanks for insightful reply! So much to learn ... You know I always though that designing, animating programming is like obvious hardest part of game development process, but it is actually quite easy comparing to finding great idea and selling this idea to the public.

rextr09, Quicktime can screengrab video on Mac but it is not going to be 60 fps, more like 15 or something. Altho quality is good and file size is reasonable. I grabbed this with quicktime on Mac: https://vimeo.com/45183619
I think it is enough for gameplay demonstration.

 

You're welcome!
Marketing PR is a hard thing that's true. Especially for non-emotional/digital-minded programmers (like me) it's hard to come out their cave and shout through the internets and actually talk to hundreds of people.
It's scary ;D

 

can u help me making my game like this... i m stuck in making traffic please any idea

 

Hey wana,

just try to start smaller if the AI is too much in the beginning.

Start with static obstacles your car has to avoid.
If that works, try to move the static obstacles around in one axis.

Good luck

 

Hi,
This is a great game.
I have noticed that your main car doesn't really turn, but it only switches lanes.
How have you implemented that?

Regards

 

Thanks dev!
It's all fake - that's how it's done.
The car is going along one axis, like Z and it's sideway axis X only has 3 valid values. To change lanes the car's position is being lerped (see here) between those 3 values.
Cheers,
E