We would like to introduce you to the main character of our new game – he doesn’t have a name yet but currently we are calling him Gippy. This is the final sketch I just completed of him, he’s been through a few drafts so I’m sure he is relieved to finally be done. The sketches are below:

Gippy is a struggling young adult wondering what his purpose is in life, currently he is working as an agent for the transportation security agency. This will be incorporated into our new 3D game, which involves physics, Gippy’s agility, and full body scanners.

For this game I will be using Blender 3D software and integrating the graphics with the scene created in Unity on Justin’s side. We are enjoying working on this game so far and have the basic environment set up but Gippy is yet to come to life (I should have him modeled and rigged this week). Throughout the game development process we will be posting as a team about the updates and eventually the date of it’s release. We hope for this new game to be a quicker production than War Evolved, and for those passionate about War Evolved you may see some evidence of it still in the new game. Gippy’s primitive side still needs to be accounted for.

Join us in welcoming Gippy, who hopefully will have a new name soon, and our new 3D game in production!

After a month and a half of some sleepless nights and me getting to know Blender really well, the new unit graphics for War Evolved has been completed! The update was submitted this past Thursday, and should be available within the next week or two.

All 31 units were completely remade from scratch. Each unit has four animations associated with them – run, attack, idle, and die. There is an average of about 5 frames exported for each animation. This comes out to about 600 new frames for this update – wow! It should almost have been War Evolved 2 The 14 turrets were also completely remade.

I also plan on remaking the bases and backgrounds. Unfortunately, they didn’t make it in this update. These will be switched out in version 1.5.1, which we are planning on submitted at the end of December.  It is with this version that we will release the iPad version of War Evolved. In addition to the new graphics, the iPad version will contain a few extra really cool features. Justin will blog about that later this month.

Here is a picture comparing the screen shots of version 1.2 to the new version, 1.5.

I hope everyone enjoys this update and continue to look for new stuff coming out in the next month or two!

Sarah

Last Wednesday (the 17th) we submitted a new version of War Evolved. This version includes two major features: Game Center support and an end of game statistics screen.

Game Center Support
We enabled Game Center in this version, which means that you will be able to start to earn achievements for playing War Evolved. This version includes 7 achievements for a total of 475 points. I’ve included the list of achievements below.

In addition to achievements, Game Center allows us to have a separate leader board. War Evolved has included a leader board since version 1.0, and it isn’t going away. You will now have your score submitted in two places. The Game Center leader board is a bit more robust than the one that we created, which makes it a good addition.

End of Game Statistics
After end game, you will have the option to view the statistics from your previous game. It is here where you will be able to find how many enemies you killed or the number of shake for quakes that you used. We plan on expanding this area in future versions, but it is a good first step.

War Evolved Version 1.5
The new graphics for the next War Evolved version are coming along very well. Sarah will write a more detailed blog post on the progress, but here is a little teaser of the new cavemen level:

Until next time,
Justin

Version 1.3.2 for War Evolved was approved today and is available in the App Store! The main feature in this update is something we have heard from several reviews, a fast forward button. Now you can play War Evolved quicker, and challenge yourself to keep up with the AI. Hope everyone enjoys this update!

We have more good news than just a fast forward button, however. To celebrate the first anniversary of War Evolved, another new release will be coming out this winter. As hinted by our tweet we will be including Game Center in War Evolved to allow you to keep up with friends and win achievements within the game. Another part of this release will be completely new graphics, of which is being completed in Blender 3D and rendered in 2D. The funny thing is that I am basically redoing everything I did in nine months for the original War Evolved, in a month and a half. I know it’s crazy!

We were inspired to redo graphics in War Evolved because we wanted to do something special for it’s anniversary, November 25th. As an added bonus, this update is helping me learn 3D modeling for our new game. Our new game will be completely 3-D, and since War Evolved was the first game I ever did graphics for, practice is definitely appreciated.

If you are a graphic designer, you most likely have heard of Blender 3D, but if not you should check it out. It is a really nice software package that is extremely user friendly with an incredible blender artists forum for users. I have been reading tutorials/books/forums since early June of this year, and already feel pretty comfortable with several of the main areas of design. I do not know anywhere close to everything Blender can do, but having a basic understanding and practicing has been fun and interesting. A few sneak peaks are below, we would love your feedback, enjoy

Caveman Dinosaur:

Egyptian Archer:

Egyptian Camel:

Future Vehicle with awesome flames:

These are still a work in progress, but it is coming along well. I will making all units, bases and turrets in Blender 3D, with the backgrounds in Adobe Illustrator. By the way, all of these new graphics means that War Evolved can be on the iPad… look for that in early 2011

I will post a follow-up soon on the specifics of how I designed these new graphics for War Evolved, with specific mentions of the tutorials and books that have helped a lot along the way. Any comments or suggestions are greatly appreciated.

Thank you for your support and we hope you enjoy both of these updates!

Hi All – I haven’t actually posted on Opsive.com yet so I thought I would introduce myself. I was the graphics designer for War Evolved, and helped co-develop the game. I am currently the graphics designer for Opsive’s next game which is in development now. In this blog I will give an update of War Evolved sales, as well as some interesting stats (being a statistics major I have to include this).

Similar to our last blog post, War Evolved continues to remain steady in terms of sales. There has been a decreasing trend ever since a few weeks after Free App A Day. However, sales have stayed consistent around where they used to be before the FAAD campaign. Over the past week we have noticed a change in our rankings, in that we aren’t in the top 100 of strategy as often as before, but we are still thrilled at how well it has done. Below is a graph of this trend:

The low dip in the graph represents when War Evolved was free for the FAAD campaign, and the spike is the effects of switching it back to paid. Over it’s lifetime, the average amount War Evolved makes per day is a little over $100.

Another way to look at the data is the average amount per day of the week. Just by looking at sales figures every week we have noticed Tuesdays tend to be our lowest sales day, while Sunday is always the best. A graph of this is shown below:

Up until right now writing this blog post, there have been a total of 163,204 scores posted in versions 1.3 and 1.2.5 (which came out only 2 months ago). The average score is 8,956, with a max score of 179,585. Also about 65% played on easy mode, with only about 12% being brave on expert mode.

These statistics do not include games that enabled cheat mode, just to get a better picture of the game by itself.

Overall War Evolved continues to do really well, and we hope that you continue to enjoy playing it! Look out for more updates to come soon.

Sales of War Evolved have been pretty steady since it was released on November 25, 2009. On a weekday, we are usually ranked in the lower 100′s, while on the weekend we normally get into the top 100. The graph below from App Annie shows this trend.

In general, we were making $500 a week after Apple’s 30%, which we were really happy with. A few months ago, I got an email from the founder of the website Free App A Day (FAAD). His marketing pitch was simple: expose your app to hundreds of thousands of people for free, and then when it switches back to paid word of mouth will keep the app selling well. I was skeptical at first. I did not think that by giving something away for free, you could actually increase sales in the long run.

The Prep
In the months following, I did extensive research to determine if FAAD would actually help War Evolved. I took about two months worth of apps that were on FAAD to see if the campaign ended up increasing their sales. For some apps, FAAD was a complete waste of money – they were off the charts before, got to the top of the charts with FAAD, and then as soon as the promotion was over they dropped right back down off the charts. Alternatively – when an app was already high on the charts, after FAAD they continued to sell just as well as they did before. The general trend that I found was that if your app was ranked between 70-150, then FAAD helped. This was perfect for War Evolved.

In mid-April I sent over the payment to have War Evolved be featured on FAAD on the first Friday in June. The cost to have your app listed on a weekday is $1200. In addition to featuring War Evolved, we decided to cross promote our newest app, Tune Finder. If you got War Evolved for free, an alert box would pop up advertising Tune Finder.

In the time between April and June, I was busy getting War Evolved prepped for the cross promotion. War Evolved 1.2.4 introduced the new code for the cross promotion. War Evolved uses Opsive.com for the back end of the scoring system, and I knew that my current hosting plan for opsive.com would not be able to handle the traffic. I upgraded opsive.com to use a virtual machine instead of a shared server account. Everything was set, we just needed to wait for June 4th to get here.

The Day Of
I flipped the switch to free around 6PM PST on June 3rd, so that everything would be propagated by the time June 4th arrived. During those 6 hours of being free on June 3rd, War Evolved got about 1,700 downloads – and it wasn’t even listed on FAAD yet!

On June 4th, War Evolved got 73,654 downloads. It shot up to the number one game in free strategy, and number 21 overall. June 5th was even better – 168,325 downloads and a ranking of number 4 overall.

FAAD said they would get a lot of downloads, and they definitely did. I was surprised how quickly War Evolved shot up the rankings.

Opsive.com
I was right to think that the shared hosting account for opsive.com wouldn’t be able to handle all of the traffic. The virtual machine account couldn’t even handle it. At about 8AM EST on June 5th Opsive.com was taken down and I didn’t notice until I got up around 9:30AM. Opsive.com was hosted on the cheapest virtual machine hosting plan, so around 11AM we tried switching it to a more powerful virtual machine. That still couldn’t handle the traffic. I had to switch to a dedicated server account, a switch that was painful and caused War Evolved to crash a lot more than it should have. I exchanged 54 emails with my hosting provider that day. Some of them were just server status emails, but the majority weren’t. I would like to thank Acenet for doing such a great job, their support was top-notch and they helped me every step of the way. The new dedicated server completely switched over around 5PM, and it is still running great.

War Evolved’s Free Rank
The chart below shows the number of downloads we got while it was free. In total, we got over 670,000 downloads in 6 days!

Tune Finder’s Cross Promotion
Tune Finder is a new app that is hard to search for so it really hasn’t done too much. The cross promotion for Tune Finder dramatically changed that, at least for those six days during FAAD. The graph below shows the number of clicks Tune Finder was getting. All of these clicks were from people saying “OK” to the alert box shown at the start of this post.

Yes, that is 1,337 clicks in just one hour. At one point I saw it get up to 1,600 in one hour. All of these clicks had a dramatic effect on Tune Finder’s ranking: it shot up to number 14 on the music charts. Now that the promotion is over, it is off the charts again. However, we just made Tune Finder free so hopefully that will have a positive impact.

The Results
So was FAAD worth it? I can pretty much say yes. War Evolved is currently ranked #37 in strategy games, the highest I’ve ever seen it. The amount that we are making on a day to day basis is also dramatically larger. On Thursday we brought in $354 – that’s the most we’ve ever made in a single day. It should be exciting to see what the weekend brings in. The graph below shows a history of War Evolved’s income, after Apples 30% cut.

If you are a developer and are wondering if you should do FAAD (or something similar), I would advise you to do your research first. For War Evolved, it looks like it paid off. But that doesn’t mean it will for every game out there. In the end I am glad we did it, but it was definitely a risk from the beginning.

In collaboration with www.FreeAppADay.com, War Evolved is now free! I switched the free switch last night, and since then there have been about 4,000 downloads. War Evolved is currently ranked number 11 in top free strategy games.

We are using this promotion to cross promote Tune Finder, it’ll be interesting to see what happens. As soon as this promotion is over and War Evolved goes back to paid, I’ll post a detailed update about how War Evolved did and whether or not it was really worth doing FreeAppADay.

Update: The move was a success, and Opsive.com is ready to take on the War Evolved promotion.

Opsive.com will be unavailable in the early morning on Tuesday, June 1st. We are switching to a more powerful server.

During this time, scores for War Evolved will be unavailable – no submitting global high scores, and no viewing them either. Facebook scores will also be unavailable. The actual game will still work.

Everything should be switched over a few hours after the switch is made, so most people shouldn’t notice any problems.

We have just launched the new and improved Opsive.com! It took way too long, but in the past five months we have started and finished Tune Finder in addition to gearing up for the next game. First, the obligatory old/new screen shot:

The top page pictured is the Opsive.com home page, and the bottom one is the War Evolved page. The content is pretty much the same throughout the site, it is just prettier. I would like to thank Sarah (@sarahhwatsonn) for all of the work she did on the design of the web page. We went through many revisions, and I feel that the current design is a nice clean way to display our content.

Causalities of the new site

When I was developing the new site, I put the new blog at /wordpress. When I changed things over to the new site, I stupidly deleted all of the contents under /blog and replaced it with what was at /wordpress. It was only later that I realized that all of the images were still stored under /blog. This means that I lost all of the images from the previous posts. Oh well, there weren’t too many. I’ll get a new graph posted shortly of how War Evolved is doing, and that will have a lot more data than what the previous posts had.

Tune Finder

I have been on a blogging hiatus, and did not get a chance to announce our newest app, Tune Finder. I will do that in a post next week.

War Evolved

Sales for War Evolved have been going surprisingly well, and we are glad people are enjoying it. War Evolved still appears in the top 100 strategy games on most weekends, and we think that is awesome especially considering it was released in November. We have one major promotion coming up for it in a couple of weeks, more details to follow. We will also post updated sales numbers.

The next game

Development has started for the next game, and I plan on being as open as I can with this project. I will post about the game, the challenges, and some behind-the-scenes details. We are still in the planning stage, so I don’t want to reveal anything yet, but it shouldn’t be too long. In related news, Opsive has brought on another member to its team, Donald Parsons (@donaldparsons). Don will be working on the Facebook side of things for this next game (yes, it is an iPhone game.. more details later). Sarah will still be doing the graphics. I’ll try to get both of them to post when they have enough interesting material.

It’s good to be back and I look forward to explaining how we make a game and the behind-the-scenes of Opsive!

Justin

If you’ve been following my Twitter page, you already know that version 1.2 of War Evolved has been submitted. In this post, I want to do a quick walk through of some of the changes.

When you download the update, the following will be listed as added/changed:

• Save game feature
• Air units on EVERY level
• Air turrets on EVERY level
• Cheat mode – enter your name as CHEATER
• Facebook Integration
• AI/Unit Tweaks
• Performance enhancements
• Minor bug fixes

This release was packed with improvements, and I was really surprised with everything that was in there as I was writing it out.

You will be able to continue any single or local two player game. For obvious reasons, networked games cannot be saved. For a bit of a warning, the restored game will not be exactly as it was exited at. Each unit contains a lot of data about its state, and we didn’t have enough time to test all of the various scenarios. So instead what we did was just save the variables that deal with the game, such as amount of money and what level each player is at. When you exit, the game will automatically refund you for the money that you spent on units that will not be restored.

The second major addition are air units! Each level now has at least one air unit, and it really does make things more fun. On the cavemen era we have a pterodactyl, Egyptian era has a phoenix, medieval has dragon, and cowboy has a rudimentary flying machine. I won’t ruin the surprise of what the air units look like in this blog, you’ll just have to play the game to find out

In addition to you being able to cheat, the AI can also cheat in single player. This should add some extra challenge for those who are really good at the game. To get to the cheat menu, enter your name as CHEATER on the main screen. Obviously, when in cheat mode, your score will not be recorded on the global scoreboard.

Other changes include Facebook integration, AI/unit tweaks, some performance enhancements, and bug fixes. All in all, this was a really solid release and I hope it adds a lot of play time to War Evolved.

What’s next for Opsive?

Glad you asked. We are first planning on redoing some of Opsive.com. I know the layout is terrible and you can hardly read this blog, so that is number one priority. We are also in the design stage for our next game, which will be on the iPhone and hopefully one or two other platforms. In addition, we are about to start a small non-game app that personally I’ve been wanting for awhile. This app should not take long at all to complete, and I’ll have more news when the time comes. Finally, we also have a block of time set off to do more War Evolved updates. For anything that you’d like to see in the next game, reply to this post or send an email to support@opsive.com and we’ll try our hardest to get it in.

Until next time,
Justin