DaVoid Digital

AstroSerf, the first game under the DaVoid Digital banner, was released on the App Store today.

Well, that’s a relief.  After three months of coding, drawing, composing, and god knows what else, I’ve finally published my first iPhone game.  The response so far has been quite positive, which is a huge relief.  I had started developing AstroSerf back around the end of July, when the App Store had a few success stories in the path drawing genre, but it still seemed like there was room for another provided it mixed up the formula a bit.  As it turns out, I wasn’t the only dev that had this thought, and witnessed something of a flood of new line drawing games even as I was working away on my own.  That’s a bit disheartening, to say the least. 

Even though I was starting small, though, I decided not to rush things and focus on realising the complete design as it had been finalised.  Now that I look at what else is out there on release, I’m glad I did.  As a 1.0 release, I think AstroSerf stands up quite well, and there’s still plenty of room to expand it.  Most importantly to me, it’s fun.  At least I think it’s fun, and I’ve been playing it for a few months now.  By all rights I should be sick of it by now! 

The response from the TouchArcade community has been very postive so far as well, which is very encouraging.  I don’t have any numbers yet, and I’m not sure when Apple’s sales trend reporting will kick in, but I’ll be sure to update on the numbers with some thoughts once I have them.  As it stands now I have three things on my plate for the coming month:

1. Get AstroSerf 1.1 finished and submitted as soon as possible.  I want to demonstrate to players that I’m committed to supporting this thing if they are.  1.1 will include OpenFeint support as the big feature, bug fixes if there are any that crop up from players (because I fixed all the ones I found), and a few other minor tweaks and new features.  The update to follow this one will be my pièce de résistance, wherein I finally get the ball rolling with the ‘story mode’ concept and different game modes. 

2. Finish another project I’m doing on contract for a company here in Dublin.  It must be done.  I need Christmas money. 

3. Finally, continue to lay the groundwork for my next game project.  Just saying that reminds me of Rocky & Bullwinkle.  “And now, watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat… this time for sure!”