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Where are the reports?

If you've been coming here for the monthly reports, I'm sorry for them missing these last two months. The reason is that Jungle Jumper isn't doing all that great any more and it really isn't all that fun to write them when nothing new is happening. For now they will be retired until I release my next game.

What are you wasting your time on?

If anyone is wondering why no reports or blog posts or new games are coming. The answer is simply. I'm trying. I've started a new job. Once again one that doesn't leave me much free time and I've had trouble finding the time and energy to finish any projects while balancing my social life.

What are you going to do about it?

I really want to get another game out. I really want to be able to do this full time, so I will be making a few changes.

Treating development like a full time job. Through 2013 I've only been working on my games a few hours each week, feeling bad if I spent too much time on it because I neglected my girlfriend and my friends. This is simply not getting the job done. So I've made a deal with my girlfriend that I'll have two full time jobs for a while. My office job and my game development job when I get home. Hopefully I will not have to do that for too long.

Onward to greatness!!!

Hopefully that gives you guys a bit of a idea of the status of things and hopefully I'll be able to have some more interesting news to share soon.
Posted by Kasper Frandsen at 3:43 PM No comments: Labels: Lonely Giant Games, My Projects, Working in IT


50.000 Jungle Jumper players Jungle Jumper got past 50.000 downloads on Google Play today.

I don't know how big a percentage of Android games get to 50.000 downloads, but it feels like a pretty big achievement for my first ever game.

Not much more to say other than... This is pretty cool.
Posted by Kasper Frandsen at 11:23 PM No comments: 


June Report

And the June report makes its late entry. Lets get down to business.

Total installations end of June 2013:


The numbers from June were very similar to the ones from May. I implemented Google Play games services in the game and I think that is awesome, but it did not improve my download numbers at all. This is obviously not the $400 which has been my next goal for a while now, but I'm hopeful for several reasons. The reason for the missing numbers is that GetJar's developer console is down. I'll go back and fill in the remaining data when it is back up.

So I think that Jungle Jumper is more or less done, it will keep earning a bit, but I really don't think it will suddenly start downloading and earning like crazy. I will keep improving the game, but I think it's safe to assume that it's glory days are behind it. Jungle Jumper will however be passing it's 50,000 download mark on Google Play very soon which is a bit exciting.

It's all about new games... I've talked about working on other games and one in particular several times, but I still don't have anything to show for it. I can only say that I've had very little time for it and that I have not really hit upon the right recipe for my next game.

But my situation is changing, I should be getting considerably more time to work on my games soon and there are several other things going on that will hopefully make it easier and make my games better.

I'm not going to go into any details because I'll be doing a big status update about it all in a few days.

It looks like July will be a really bad month and that I won't make it past $100 which is quite sad since that will be a first since getting above it. Maybe it's all the nice weather making people go outside and play in real life. But I'll keep my $400 goal just to spite everyone :).
Posted by Kasper Frandsen at 10:58 PM No comments: Labels: Admob, Android, Jungle Jumper, Lonely Giant Games, Monthly Reports, My Projects


Jungle Jumper 1.30 - Google Play games services 


May Report

Total installations end of May 2013: 


Now It's Even More Official! So I set up an official homepage for Lonely Giant Games a while back and have updated it a few times since, but the homepage has been at the domain www.lonelygiantgames.co.nf. Now I finally took the leap and bought www.lonelygiantgames.com. The homepage is live and I'm busy making sure all links are now pointed at the new homepage. I'll leave the old one up for a while as I guess quite a few things have crawled it and they need a bit of time to find the new one.

I've also finally gotten around to printing out the registration form to register as a sole trader and hopefully I'll get it filled out and filed soon. There are quite a few things that need doing when that goes through, like getting a business bank acount and figuring out how to file my taxes when the time comes. I'm thinking that when I get a bit further in the process I'll do a bit more of a practical post on starting your own business.
Posted by Kasper Frandsen at 12:10 AM No comments: Labels: Lonely Giant Games, My Projects, Starting a Business


Iron Man 3 & Star Trek Into Darkness

I mentioned I was going to see Iron Man 3 and that I was very excited, I never got around to giving my opinion on it, since I'm going to see Star Trek Into Darkness tonight I though I could use this opportunity to mention my thoughts on Iron Man 3 and talk about my excitement for Star Trek Into Darkness. I must say that Iron Man 3 was a bit of a disappointment. I heard really good things about the movie before seeing it and it had a really high IMDB score, which it seems was very inflated early on and has dropped quite a bit by now.


So before I go into what I did not like about the movie, let me mention what I liked. I liked what they were trying to do with the Tony Stark character. Having him more or less have post traumatic stress after the events of the Avengers and be thinking of quitting because he is worried for Pepper worked well. Him loosing everything and having to rebuild was a really good choice. Giving him some good buddy moments with his friend Colonel Rhodes was also great.


The movie was a bit of a mess. Now what do I mean about that? Well the new director, Shane Black, seemed to really want to set his own mark on the movie and he did that with a style that really didn't do much for me. The movie starts without any indication that the movie is starting with voice over of Robert Downey Jr. talking directly to the audience. Now this is a big departure from the earlier movies, which is a bit jarring, but I understand the idea of trying to make it more into Tony's story, the problem is that instead of having him serious and intense, which would have immediately caught my attention, and made sense since he is telling his story rather than showing off for other character, but he jibs away and completely undermines the dark style that the movie also tries for.

Enter the Mandarin. The movie gets interrupted early on by a minute long video that the Mandarin is sending out to the whole world, showing them how crazy and powerful he is. This is handled by the entire screen being taken over by this video montage. Rather than it being shown in the movie being displayed all over the world. This was another strange stylistic choice that simply didn't float my boat. It felt like someone was trying to be artsy and impress and failed miserably. This whole thing happened several times through the movie and didn't do anything for me other than throw me out of the story.

Spider-man 3 syndrome. Now I know I might be overly harsh with comparing Iron Man 3 to the train wreck that was Spider-man 3, but I feel that in the same was as Spider-man 3 tried to do way to many things, so did Iron Man 3. I won't go into to much detail about the different story lines, I don't want to spoil it for anyone who haven't seen it yet, but I felt that the main story arch of Tony finding himself, got way too muddled by the many side stories that are supposed to make for interesting opposition for Tony.

And the Ugly

Weak antagonist and weak ending. In the end the antagonist who was built up to be very interesting is just another crazy megalomaniac who gives away his grand scheme in a one liner to one of his henchmen. The ending is horrible as a big surprise at the end completely undermines Tony's entire rebuilding journey.

Iron Man 3 was a fun action movie and Robert Downey Jr. is still a lot of fun as Iron Man, but I think that looking forward I'm going to be more excited about seeing the character in more Avengers movies rather than more Iron Man movies.

Into Darkness I don't have all that much to say about Star Trek. I'm not huge Star Trek fans, but I have seen some movies and one of the newer series. I saw the reboot and thought they did a good job setting up the universe and having a fun action movie as well, so I'm hopeful they can really stretch their legs in the second movie. I'll probably do a post about my thoughts on that to when I have time.
Posted by Kasper Frandsen at 12:18 PM No comments: Labels: Iron Man 3, Star Trek Into Darkness


April Report

Here we have the report for April. Sorry it's a bit late, it's not quite as fun to write the report when you do not reach your goals as when you do :P.

Total installations end of April 2013:


April was a bit of a let down compared to March. Downloads went down, impressions went down, and the big reason for the downturn in revenue, the eCPM went down. My goal for this month was of course $400 so I didn't even hit half of that. I can't control the eCPM of course, but the downloads have gone down rather than up. I'm not completely sure why. GetJar really seems to be loosing a lot of steam and Google Play has lost quite a bit as well. I think part of it was my bad judgement In-App Billing update which is now luckily over and done with.


My long term goal is still $2000 to make a full time living of my games. I'll set next months goal at $400 again. I don't really think I will reach it, I might not even reach $200 as the game still is doing poorly, but things might turn around.

I need to make another update to Jungle Jumper to get rid of the bug that is plaguing it and causing quite a few bug reports, but I'm spending all my programming time on my new game at the moment. And after my two last updates which really haven't added much of value I would like the next update to actually add some content to the game.

That content might come in the form of the infamous high score system that I've never gotten in there. I hear rumours that Google will be announcing a game platform for multi-player and social aspects for Google Play and if they do that I would love to use that system as opposed to a Facebook implementation. We should know more about that soon at Google I/O on May 15.

New game! I'm still not ready to disclose anything on my new project. But it is going really well, it will however not be coming out in May so it won't have any impact on this month.
Posted by Kasper Frandsen at 11:21 PM No comments: 


House Cleaning

This update will be a bit of a housecleaning, so bear with me if it is a bit rambling.

Jungle Jumper 1.23 So I didn't get around to doing a post when I did the 1.23 update a week ago. It wasn't a huge update, I just removed In-App Billing, fixed a texture and set the AdMob banner to only show on the game screen. So I'm really pleased I removed the In-App Billing, it was a mistake to put it in their in the first place and I already sleep better at night. I have wanted to only have the AdMob banner show up on the game screen from the beginning, but I've never really been able to figure out how to do that. It turned out to be very easy and it makes the game seem way more professional that the ad is not blocking the title of the game in the menu.
Jungle Jumper is not doing so great though, it's not being downloaded at all as much as it was a few weeks ago, but hopefully it will go back up again. This means that I won't be meeting my $400 goal this month which is a bit of a shame, but that's fine.

There is a Bug in my Soup So there is a nasty bug in Jungle Jumper that is causing around 10 crash reports a week. The bug seems to have been introduced after update 1.2. But I didn't realise it was their until a few days ago because I had hidden the bug early on as I thought it was a one time issue. The problem is that the stack traces don't really tell me anything other than that it is a rendering issue. I'm guessing that I made a mistake with all the improved graphics. It looks like I'll simply have to go through my renderer class and clean up all the code and hope it makes a difference.


You might have spotted that an extra tab has appeared on my blog. There isn't much in there yet, but I plan to have it bursting with links and images for different projects down the road. So I've been pretty sick the last couple of days and have had to stay home, it seems I've gotten influenza and I'm coughing like a chain smoker. It has however been a bit of a blessing in disguise as I have been able to sit and program a bit, which leads me to my next point...
 I've finally gotten started on my new game. I'll play it close until I'm a bit further along, but I can say that it is going really well and that I now have a really nice alpha version of it, that looks like crap, but has the basic game play elements in it and is already quite fun. Hopefully I'll be able to share some more info about it and possibly some screenshots soon.
 So I warned you I was going to be rambling a bit and I just wanted to mention how excited I am for the next Iron Man movie. I'm planning on going too see it on Friday with my better half if I'm well enough. So far I'm hearing very good things about it, such as people comparing it to The Dark Knight movie.


So I'm beginning to get a decent amount of traffic here on the blog and I'm wondering if I have any regulars out there. If I do please write a comment, I'd love to hear whether anyone finds my ramblings of any interest and whether there is anyone in a similar start up situation who gets any info out of my monthly reports. Any feedback would be very welcome.

Posted by Kasper Frandsen at 6:19 PM No comments: Labels: Admob, Android, Iron Man 3, Java, Jungle Jumper, Lonely Giant Games, My Projects


The Lure of In-App Billing

So since I updated Jungle Jumper with In-App Billing, my download numbers have gone down, my bug reports have gone up, it has become way more difficult to use one code base for several app stores and I have not sold a single "Remove Ads" product in the game. I don't like In-App Billing. When I originally wrote out my values for Lonely Giant Games, one of them was "Make games without hidden costs, e.g. In-App Purchases." I since changed that to "Make games without hidden costs, e.g. pay to win." I did this because I thought it would be nice for people to be able to upgrade Jungle Jumper to an ad free version with an In-App Purchase - and I still do to some extent, but it is a slippery slope.

As soon as I decided on this, I though that I could also make the new world, that I'm planning to build for Jungle Jumper, something you could buy, and maybe you could buy a few extra costumes as well.

So what's the problem with that you might ask? It's not like you can "pay to win" by doing that. No, but you are making your game into something that it is not supposed to be: A shop. Games are suppose to be a place where you go to have fun and you're transported to another place. What you are basically doing is smacking the users in the face with reality, when you are suddenly interrupting them by asking them for money. In the end you are breaking their suspense of disbelief, and that is simply one of the worst things you can do in any form of entertainment.

There is also the fact that Jungle Jumper is a game for kids as well. And I'd like for parents to not have to worry when their kids play my games. I know you can set up parental control stuff to avoid kids buying from the Play Store, but I think a lot of parents still don't know that. "Let not the lure of the dollar signs lead you astray from good game design my children."

We've seen some beloved game series like Diablo and Dead Space flirt with variations of In-App Billing with bad results. I truly hope that this is only a phase while publishers are enamoured with the idea of micro-transactions everywhere. I think it's important to have higher aspirations than to just make a game that earns as much money as possible.

As for myself, I'm going to take In-App Billing back out of Jungle Jumper as soon I have time to make the next update.

In-App Billing is crap, whether you're a gamer or a developer. But it's easy to forget that when you're on the end that will receive the money.
Posted by Kasper Frandsen at 4:42 PM No comments: Labels: In-App Billing, Jungle Jumper, Lonely Giant Games, My Projects


Jungle Jumper 1.22 is out

I put up the new update yesterday here's what's in it:

Improved jungle vine texture: The jungle vine texture has always been a bit crappy and blurry, now it is sharp and crisp :).

Improved spider texture: The spider texture was also a bit poor, I redrew each frame and made it a bit more nasty looking with some fur. I also added an image for when the spider is dead. Before a vertically mirrored image was simply used.

Improved chameleon texture: Much the same as the spider. The lines were not as sharp looking as I wanted so it had a once over and I think it improved quite a bit.

Implemented In-App Billing: There now is a button at the bottom of the screen saying "Remove Ads" and if you press it you are asked to pay a one time $1 to remove ads. We'll see if this works better than my paid version of the game.

Other: I cleaned up a bunch of code, which is always nice.


This update ended up being quite a bit smaller than I had planned. I had a bunch of things I wanted to put in there, but when I have as little time as I do at the moment to program, it very easily becomes difficult to keep track of a lot of different changes that are halfway implemented. I'll try to keep the updates smaller.

I'm not really sure what the next update will be, there are lots of things that I want in the game. The music, a new world for Jorvis to explore and maybe some silly extra costumes that you can buy through the In-App Billing. Not to mention the elephant in the room. The Facebook implementation to get a high-score system.

At the same time I also really want to get another game out. So much to do and so little time ;).
Posted by Kasper Frandsen at 11:33 AM No comments: 


March Report

Here we have the report for March.

Total installations end of March 2013:


March was an incredible month. I did not think it likely that I would reach my $200 goal, but I far exceeded it. I didn't do any updates. The only thing I really did was to update the description on Google Play, which seems to have really had an effect.


My long time goal is still $2000 so I can make a full time living of it. Next month's goal will be $400 dollars. Which seems pretty possible, if the game keeps doing this well and possibly improves a bit when I update it. Which I hope to do very soon. What I really need is more games, but that seems very far away at the moment. I'm simply not getting enough work done. I have way too little time for it, being back in a full time position at work. I'm hoping that I can maybe take a week of work and work full time on the games and get my next game into shape.

I still have not managed to get the Facebook implementation to work, so I have taken it out for the moment, hopefully it will return for the next update. The big features in the new update, will be a few improved textures and an In-App Billing button to remove the ads for 1$.

I also found out that the game no longer works on Android 1.5 and 1.6. This was because of Google Analytics. I have remedied this issue, which is why I want this update out soon so It works correctly again.
Posted by Kasper Frandsen at 3:27 PM No comments: 



Just a little update of how it's going with Jungle Jumper.

I haven't gotten any work done on the update recently, what little free time I've had recently I've been spending with my girlfriend and on playing games a bit - something I haven't really done in about a year (the game playing part, not the spending time with my girlfriend - she's patient, but not that patient).

I did however spend a bit of time updating Jungle Jumper's description on Google Play. I read up on how to make Apps more searchable on Google Play. They mentioned repeating search words and making sure that popular words were in the description.

I really didn't want to put in a line of comma separated search tags as I have seen some people do. That seems amateurish and everyone is just putting in the names of all the popular games.

Instead I made sure that the title of the game was repeated a few more times in the text and then I included quotes about what people had said about the game. Especially DroidAppOfTheDay.com had a long nice description of how the game was similar to Temple Run and Agent Dash.

This was apparently a very good idea ... My daily download numbers from Google Play have gone from around 100 per day to around 600 per day. This has also meant that the game has gotten a bunch more +1s and reviews on Google Play and that I'm earning quite a bit more money every day. At the moment I'm earning $5-10 per day and yesterday I earned $12.22.

The game also came past 10,000 downloads on Google Play a few days ago and is now on 13,730. It looks like I might make my $200 goal for this month, but we will see in ten days time.
Posted by Kasper Frandsen at 5:35 PM No comments: Labels: Android, Games, Jungle Jumper, Lonely Giant Games, My Projects


Debug Scmebug So I finally got some programming done this weekend. I created a debug for Jungle Jumper. It probably took around an hour and ever since I made it I've been kicking myself for not doing it earlier. So it's quite simple as you can see. Simply three buttons. One for unlocking everything, one for resetting the settings and one for making the feedback screen appear. All this appears and works and the AdMob ads go over to the test ones when I change my debug setting to true in the code. This is really nice. Earlier I would be changing all the settings in the code to test different things; having things I had commented out that I could bring in. This is way better and I definitely recommend to anyone making games to take the time to build a little debug.

As you can also see in the screenshot I now have a string saying "Remove Ads" in the bottom of the screen. When you press it, you are presented with an In-App Purchase to permanently remove the ads. The In-App Billing stuff was a bit of a mess to implement, but it went way more painless than I had thought. It seems to work, but I haven't run all the tests on it yet.

I'm almost done with this update now, I think I'm pushing the music and better sounds for the next update. The only thing really missing now for this version is the Facebook implementation. I'm having some issues with the Facebook SDK. When I run Facebook's own test apps, they do not seem to connect correctly with Facebook, I don't know if this is an issue with the sample apps being deprecated or maybe it's simply an issue with my test device and account.

I hope to get this update out soon, but I probably won't have any time to work on it again until the weekend.
Posted by Kasper Frandsen at 10:18 PM No comments: Labels: Admob, Android, Debug, In-App Billing, Java, Jungle Jumper, Lonely Giant Games, My Projects


February Report

Here we have the February report and it is awesome :).

Total installations end of February 2013:


This was a very good month. I reached my goal of $100, which I really thought was unrealistic, especially taking the short month into account. Early in the month I did the update that asks people to review the game. It really hasn't done much in the form of reviews though. But it seems like more people a plus one-ing the game, which is great as well.


The long term goal is still to get to around $2000 a month which should enable me to do this full time. The goal for March is $200 which I think will be quite difficult to reach unless something big happens this month. I really have not gotten much work done on Jungle Jumper or my new game this past month. Mainly because I'm back at working a full time job, but also because I have had quite a bit of computer trouble so that USB debugging would not work.

I've gotten started a bit again now and I hope to release an update to Jungle Jumper this month, with quite a few improvements. I've taken down the paid version of Jungle Jumper, since no one bought it and I plan to instead have a button saying "Remove Ads" at the bottoms of the game that allows you to pay $1 to remove the ads permanently. I have not tried setting up In-App Purchases before though so it will take a bit of research. I'm also working to implement the Facebook SDK. I really wish I didn't have to, but it seems that is the only way to get sharing to Facebook working. Hopefully I'll be able to set it up as a Facebook app where you can compete on a leader board, which would finally realise my dream of a universal highscore list. Other than that, I've improved the jungle vine texture, the chameleon texture and the spider texture. I'm also thinking about brightening the whole game a bit as it is a bit dark. The final big thing is music. I have a version working with music, but I'm still working on my little composition trying to make it resemble something with a decent melody.

My other game is still a bit in limbo, I actually don't think it will take all that long to make it when I get really into it, but I've mostly been setting things up and doing tests and drawing different graphics for it so far.
Posted by Kasper Frandsen at 10:31 AM No comments: 


PlayStation 4 Announcement 



I'm past $100 in Admob! 


Jungle Jumper hits 5,000 Well not quite yet, but soon. 


January Report

Total installations end of January 2013: 


Jungle Jumper Status, Improved Homepage and a Gameplay Video 


Jungle Jumper 1.2 is done 

Lets look at another screenshot. 

Here is a look on the improved mouse: 

Posted by Kasper Frandsen at 9:58 AM No comments: