Uninspired Productions presents - Nom Nom Monkey! Any feedback is welcome!

Uninspired_Productions

Hi, so just under a week ago our iPhone app Nom Nom Monkey went live on the AppStore.
We had a huge focus or retina display and made sure all our graphics where as crisp as possible and we even included 24 in game unlockable achievements!
The gameplay is very simple, with a clever score mechanic.

The are two game modes in our game (with a third to be released in our next update), there is Frenzy mode.. which put simply is a 60 second frenzy dash to eat as much fruit as possible and keep your combo to get a good score, AHH but wait.. if you manage to eat enough golden fruit you can keep adding +10 seconds to the game and get the ultimate short game score!

Then there is Survival mode.. the name kind of explains itself, your nomming fruit and avoiding the bombs and trying not to get trapped by the spears the pop up out of the ground. AHH but wait.. another twist! :P if you keep your combo at x9 for 15 seconds while dodging the bombs and spears you get a MEGA COMBO BONUS that can really boost your combo multiplier.

A big shout out to Tshirtbooth for his amazing tutorial videos and Firemaplegames for his gamesalad demos that allowed us to integrate some cool features into the game.

Check it out and let us know what you fellow gamesalad devs think of it? What would you have done different (coding,artwork, sound wise) and what did you like about it?

Heres the link thingy..
http://itunes.apple.com/au/app/nom-nom-monkey/id471583184?mt=8

Thanks in advance..
Dan and Taz from Uninspired Productions

David_GryphonsRealm

Hey I noticed your game was over 20 MB. I was gonna grab it but I'm not on wifi. See if u can drop that to under 20 MB. I believe it would help sales because the game really does look good !! Well good luck and ima check it out when I get home then :-)

Ps where does firemaplegames have Gamesalad demos. Just curious :-)

AcaiGames

Digging the graphics man!! Gonna buy once i get payed friday!!

keweworkshop

Definitely not uninspired! Very nice You already have 23 ratings! My app has been out for over 3 months and zippo ratings. I think my rating button is broken, that is what I tell myself

Anyway, well done!!

keweworkshop

tshirtbooth, my app is free, it's been downloaded a bunch. I am sure my button is broken But I will take your advice and do that with the next one since it will be paid.

lildragn

Looks like it could be a fun title, but imho, your screen-shots provided are killing any potential sales. I actually had to go to your site to see what the game-play was about. Unfortunately in this fast-paced-instant-gratification world we live in, it's too much work for your avid causal customer to go through.
Also we're all 'savvy' here when it comes to new age internet lingo such as 'nom nom', but I doubt your avid soccer mom will know what it means, so show them

This of course is my humble opinion, and you can ignore everything I said

Cheers!

~t

Uninspired_Productions

tshirtbooth said:
i love your art a lot man.
You did a great job.
Ill see if i can find some time tomorrow and give it a try.

cheers

Wow tshirtbooth, thats really humbling hearing that from you. It really does mean alot, thankyou. I spent more time than I should have on this game, being our first game I really wanted it to look polished.

P.s. Your actually in the credits of the game as a special thanks for all the help we got from your vids.

David_GryphonsRealm said:
Hey I noticed your game was over 20 MB. I was gonna grab it but I'm not on wifi. See if u can drop that to under 20 MB. I believe it would help sales because the game really does look good !! Well good luck and ima check it out when I get home then :-)

Ps where does firemaplegames have Gamesalad demos. Just curious :-)

We actually messed up there with it being over 20mb.. all along the plan was to have it under 20mb because needing wifi sucks unless it really is an epic game. Im still not sure how you work out the calculation on that as our game was under 16mb inside gamesalad and I figured that would well and truely cruise under the 20mb, but right now we are working on an update to reduce the size of the music files and see if we can strip it down under 20mb. It really is hurting us having it over 20mb, which is reflected in the sales. In the first few days we rocketed up to 32 in paid arcade games in the australian appstore but since then its slowly dropped to nearly outside the top 200.
The firemaple games demos was something I found very early on (about a year ago) with a sliding audio button for volume up and down.. we actually only scrapped that from the pause menu about 2 days before submitting to apple as the volume for the sounds would control perfectly but the volume for the music kept resetting by itself no matter what constrain attributes you used. He has another awesome demo on how to change the number font to images allowing you to customize the look of your score values.. If you want the files let me know and I can email them to you.

AcaiGames said:
Digging the graphics man!! Gonna buy once i get payed friday!!

Thanks AcaiGames! Really appreciate that! Let me know what you think of the score engine and gameplay when you get a chance to play it!

keweworkshop said:
Definitely not uninspired! Very nice You already have 23 ratings! My app has been out for over 3 months and zippo ratings. I think my rating button is broken, that is what I tell myself

Anyway, well done!!

Haha. keweworkshop! We find inspiration through the uninspired! (company moto) :P We had a lot of awesome people that had been waiting for the App to be released and everyone just left a review without even being asked! It was awesome! We havent given out any promo codes other than to 5 people on the Touch Arcade forums to try and get some interest, didnt help much as we only got 1 review and a heap of people complaining that they didnt win a promo code. Thanks for the feedback! I would try giving out some promo codes on toucharcade maybe? they seem to be vultures on there for freebie codes! Good Luck!

lildragn said:
Looks like it could be a fun title, but imho, your screen-shots provided are killing any potential sales. I actually had to go to your site to see what the game-play was about. Unfortunately in this fast-paced-instant-gratification world we live in, it's too much work for your avid causal customer to go through.
Also we're all 'savvy' here when it comes to new age internet lingo such as 'nom nom', but I doubt your avid soccer mom will know what it means, so show them

This of course is my humble opinion, and you can ignore everything I said

Cheers!

~t

Thanks for that info, I had actually had big plans for the screenshots but had some massive issues with the images not doing what I wanted and I just ran out of time, but with the new update due in about 2 weeks we will have new screenshots and I will try to explain more about the actual gameplay rather than just static screenshots! Your humble opinion is spot on, im not digging the screenshots at all and cannot wait to release the update to get rid of the horrid things, all the review sites are using them and it makes me feel dirty. lol.

Thanks everyone, its awesome to be part of such a creative community! Hopefully we can make the game better over the coming months with gamecenter support and compressing the app down under 20mb, if anyone has any info on the exact science of working out the bundle size on the appstore let me know!

Cheers, Dan from U.P. O_o

quantumsheep

Uninspired_Productions said:

We actually messed up there with it being over 20mb.. all along the plan was to have it under 20mb because needing wifi sucks unless it really is an epic game. Im still not sure how you work out the calculation on that as our game was under 16mb inside gamesalad and I figured that would well and truely cruise under the 20mb, but right now we are working on an update to reduce the size of the music files and see if we can strip it down under 20mb. It really is hurting us having it over 20mb, which is reflected in the sales. In the first few days we rocketed up to 32 in paid arcade games in the australian appstore but since then its slowly dropped to nearly outside the top 200.

Yeah, this is an issue I'm having I think with the iPhone version of Sunshine.

There's 500 images in that, and the file I get back from GS HQ comes in at nearly 25MB

Compressed and sent to Apple, it's about 18.5MB.

I've no idea why it should be that big, or if 18.5MB means I'm 'safe'. But we'll see I guess!

QS :O

mithrawept

Looks great UP, excellent graphics.

Kewe - your review button is definately broken. I tried to leave review on iTunes on mac and iPad, neither worked. You need to raise with Apple, or have you tried to resubmit the app to see if that clears the problem?

keweworkshop

mithrawept, thank you so much for trying to review it for me, much appreciated! I was totally goofing, I didn't really think it was broken! I didn't even know that was a real thing. I will look into that. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.

keweworkshop

mirthawept, I asked a friend who has my app if he would be willing to give me a review and he did and it works fine. I am not sure why you had problems

Not trying to hijack this thread! Back to the topic.

Uninspired_Productions

keweworkshop said:
mirthawept, I asked a friend who has my app if he would be willing to give me a review and he did and it works fine. I am not sure why you had problems

Not trying to hijack this thread! Back to the topic.

No, its good to see people helping each other out! I didn't even think to check your link. Sorry!

Well here is some new news people! We got an awesome video review by the @leeroyholmes on twitter and his site http://www.theappreviewer.com 4 out of 5 stars! Here is the video he posted earlier today.. its awesome you can actually here him laughing and humming to the music!