Puzzle Dungeon Post Mortem: A week Since Release

Puzzle Dungeon was released last week on iPhone. There's been 7 days of sales and 1 bug fixing patch, and it's been quite eventful.

Rewind to last week. The day before the game is due for release. Apple gives me last minute notice that the app has been approved for sale on the day I wanted. Initially I was ecstatic. The day I wanted was a significant date for me, A Family Anniversary, I was so glad I made it. Then the horror of cramming PR hit me. I had 24 hours to send Codes, press releases and try and get the game out there for people to see.

With help from a friend and long term industry insider who helped massively, I got codes and PR out to 27 outlets. Out of those, 1 ran a review, and 1 ran an article almost copy pasting the press release. The Review scored 3/5 which i considered fine for my first venture into the iOS game market. that's 65% on metacritic (jokes!).

Then came the launch. Without any live sales data, I resorted to checking the in game leaderboards to see who was playing and tracking the progress of players. I was happy people were buying and playing.

Then on day 2, I saw some rough sales figures, and was shocked! Nearly triple the amount of people i had imagined (based on leaderboards) had purchased. That says that 2/3 of people who purchased my game don't use GameCenter to log in.

Unfortunately, Official sales figures and the like are under NDA, but I can say that I'm more than happy with how my first game on iOS, and 3rd public game release under my name, sold in the first week.

So, what went right? The vision of the game matched the market. A simple Puzzle game that is intuitive, and people recognise the mechanics right off the bat. It appealed to several demographics and was created using the skills I am confident in.

What went wrong? I wasn't prepared for marketing. A developer should work hard to get their work noticed..

Also, the day 1 bug, didn't help. despite working fine on every iOS device I tested on, the Puzzle Dungeon app store download had a bug preventing people from viewing the tutorial or DLC page. A patch has since been issued, but people could have seen this, and instantly dismissed the game.

To conclude, I was quite happy with the sales and end product. Now I look forward to the community competition, the Christmas DLC and working on a new project.