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So it's been over a year since I did an update about books and movies and a lot has happened since, so lets get caught up. Well Harry Dresden returned in Cold Days, this was yet another great read. I think this series is still going as strong as ever, though I really feel more and more that you get the story in too small chunks, I wouldn't mind waiting two years for the next installment and getting twice as big a book. The Wheel of Time came to an end with A Memory of Light. I can't say enough good things of Brandon Sanderson's work finishing this series. It's almost impossible to end a big series like this without letting people down. It's very difficult not to have very high expectations, but I think that they managed to go out with a bang. I think it's impossible to tie everything up into a need bow that satisfies everyone and still surprises with something like this. I think it's much more realistic to deliver a huge dose of what people have loved about the series with a twist and I think that is what A Memory of Light did.
I have probably also gotten better at not having too high expectations. I remember being very disappointed with the last Harry Potter book, the last Codex Alera book and even the last The Sword of Truth book, though my expectations for that weren't all that high to begin with. With regards to TV-Series Game of Thrones is still running strong and it will be exciting to see the third season soon.
A couple of other new series started up that I though would be interesting; Arrow, was a bit interesting, but it didn't take many episodes to realise that, that was a waste of time. Revolution seemed promising, but the characters were thoroughly uninteresting. Last Resort had an awesome pilot, but should probably just have been a movie. Alcatraz was a huge disappointment as well.
Fringe has ended, but I haven't watched the last episodes yet. Fringe has been the best supernatural show on TV for years in my opinion and has generally kept a very high standard, so I look forward to seeing the conclusion when I find the time. With regards to movies there have been so many since I wrote last. I think I'll keep it to the really big things I enjoyed. The Avengers. I've been a huge fan of Josh Whedon ever since I saw Firefly and seeing what he was able to do with the Marvel universe was awe inspiring. The Dark Knight Rises. Great movie and managed to tie up the trilogy nicely, it was however not quite as good as the second one, and it did seem a bit rushed and half baked in a few places which was suprising. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. As you might imagine I have read the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings and I've watched the movie adaptions of the latter countless times. I was very dissapointed the first time I saw the Fellowship of the Ring. I thought it strayed away from the book way too much and the book was very clear in my mind. I was also younger and in general had way too high expectations. This time around I had way more realistic expectations and on purpose I did not reread the Hobbit before seing the movie. And I thoroughly enjoyed it. I just had fun with it, and the things that are in the movie that are not in the book was actually very interesting too, as it is things taken from the Lord of the Ring apendencies. It's great to see good fantasy on the big screen again and it's awesome to have the next two movies to look forward to.

Well that's it for catching up, I think I'll end the post here, before it get's any longer. I'll probably do a post about what to look forward to in 2013 soon.
Posted by Kasper Frandsen at 1:13 PM No comments: Labels: Cold Days, Dresden Files, Game of Thrones, The Avengers, The Dark Knight Rises, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

 So the PlayStation 4 was announced and though it might not have much to do with my business as a game developer at the moment, as a gamer and tech geek it really got my juices flowing.

I'm not gonna go over all the things they announced as it has been done lots of times by people more eloquent than me, but I did want to mention a couple of things that made me excited as a developer.

The system will be based on PC architecture.
This will probably mean that it will be very similar to writing an openGL game in C and C++ to PC hardware, probably with some kind of Linux architecture in between. This is of course great as it is way more simple and close to standard PC development than the proprietary Cell architecture the PlayStation 3 used.

More downloadable games with different payment options.
It seems Sony has smelled the roses with Apple and Android markets and the upcoming Ouya console. Free games and games with in-app purchases will be something they support. It sounds like we will have a much lower bar to entry, giving a lot more developers a chance to play around with this platform.

Hopefully all this will mean that independent game developers will soon have more great options for making and distributing games.
Posted by Kasper Frandsen at 2:44 PM No comments: Labels: Games, PlayStation 4




So hopefully soon I'll get the first money transferred  $100 is not much when you consider how much time I've put into this by now, and that I've also spent $25 on getting a Google Play developer account, but its a big thing for me and hopefully it's only the beginning.
Posted by Kasper Frandsen at 8:00 PM No comments: Labels: Admob, Lonely Giant Games, My Projects

 
Jungle Jumper finally got past 5,000 downloads on Google Play. It also had the most downloads on a single day from Google Play ever with 333 downloads.

The game has done even better on GetJar, though it has slowed down a bit lately, it is very near to 10,000.

The game seems to slowly be climbing and since the 1.2 update I am seeing that people are not uninstalling as much either. Since none of these downloads are based on ads or the game being on the new list, I see no reason it should slow down, I expect and hope that it will keep going up at an accelerated rate.

It will be exciting to see how long it takes to get to 10,000 on Google Play.

I'm still working on my second game and I also have a version of Jungle Jumper with music and a few other improvements, that I'm playing around with which will probably come out pretty soon. But I'm back at having a full time job now so I don't have all that much time to work on the games. Another big milestone will be coming up very soon as the Admob earnings have almost surpassed $100 which will mean my first paycheck from the game. I've only been talking about my games for a long time here on my blog, but this is the place where I like to talk about all the things that interest me and all the stuff I'm working on, so I'll probably be doing a few posts about books, movies, TV-Series and maybe some other little projects I have cooking.
Posted by Kasper Frandsen at 9:53 AM No comments: Labels: Admob, Android, Dragon Ball, Jungle Jumper, Lonely Giant Games, Monty Python, My Projects



So as discussed in an earlier update I'm gonna start doing monthly reports on downloads and Admob stats.

A few caveats about the numbers. I was hoping to get good numbers of my entire install base from Google Analytics, but the numbers I'm getting are not making much sense, so I'll write the total number of downloads from Google Play, Amazon, Handster and GetJar. I have by far the most downloads on Getjar, about twice as many as Google Play. I'll also display the Active device installs from Google Play as that is the only number I really have on active installs.



This is of course my first report so I can't really compare to earlier reports. But this has been a very good month. Almost all the GetJar downloads are from this month. And in the three months before the game earned $14.87. The big two things that have changed is that I published the game on GetJar and released the big 1.2 update.


The long term goal is to reach around $2,000 a month as that would really allow me to make a full time living off of my games. But my next month goal will be $100, hopefully the game will continue to do better and better on it's own, I'm also doing a small update that will ask people to rate the game when they've played it for a bit. More ratings will hopefully help with the games listing in Google Play. It also shouldn't be too long until the game get's past 5,000 downloads in Google Play which will hopefully help too.
I'm also working hard on my next game, but I doubt that will be out before the next report.
Posted by Kasper Frandsen at 2:46 PM No comments: Labels: Admob, Android, Games, Jungle Jumper, Lonely Giant Games, Monthly Reports, My Projects
