4. Customer Support

Appy's made a significant investment in customer support, maintaining open channels on our blog, Facebook, and Twitter, and inviting player feedback via email and "Livebar" messaging in our apps.

It is basically my full-time job to interact with our fans and listen to their concerns. So far. I've been able to do it largely on my own, but if the response to SpellCraft is any indication, we may need to build out our customer support program soon.

Every single communication Appy receives is personally answered -- sometimes within hours or minutes, even on weekends and holidays. Personally connecting with players is one of the ways Appy has been able to punch above its weight and compete with substantially larger companies in our space.

For SpellCraft, it's been an immensely positive experience to have a dialogue with players, both because it has helped to shape the development of the game going forward, and because it has helped accelerate our understanding of the new kind of player attracted by SpellCraft.

We've had some crossover from loyal players of Trucks & Skulls and FaceFighter, but for the most part, our SpellCraft players are different than our existing player base, with more women and more casual players coming into our fold for the first time.

These players have different expectations than our pre-existing maniacs who want to punch faces or smash skulls with trucks, and having all those touch points open to our new customer base has helped us quickly get oriented to our strange new world. Our customer support channels would also prove a critical lifeline in sorting out a nasty bug during SpellCraft's launch (about which more shortly).

5. Polishing Time

We made a conscious decision to delay SpellCraft's launch (and possible support from Apple) because we felt the game just wasn't ready for prime time. We were divided internally about the decision to delay, but ultimately decided that we only had one chance to launch, and that we were invested in SpellCraft for the long haul, which meant that we couldn't go to market without additional UI polishing and gameplay balancing.

We swallowed hard, cancelled our marketing spend, informed the sites that had previewed us that we were slipping our release date, and reluctantly told Apple that we just weren't ready, then extended our crunch to kill more bugs and make sure that our "onboarding" process (the tutorial experience and first three hours of gameplay) was nice and shiny. Every project, it seems, can benefit from more time at the end, but in the case of SpellCraft this was an especially difficult inevitability to accept, because of...

What Went Wrong

1. Late Launch

Actually, in the scheme of things, SpellCraft was on time -- we were only two or three weeks late by our own reckoning, and while weeks = months in iOS development, for a project with so many moving parts we pretty much shot directly through the hoop of fire.

The problem was that, owing to the vagaries of App Store approval times and shutdowns, this pushed our release date back from November 17th to December 8th, which both put us square in the Christmas crunch, and also may have cost us an opportunity for an Apple feature at launch (they were engaged with us in the run-up to the 17th, but after that I think they had other priorities). Launching as late as we did meant that our guys were also eager to head off for the holidays immediately after we went live, which was problematic because of our...

2. Reset Bug

We developed the game for five months, tested internally for six weeks, and tested in a live market for a full ten days, but still ended up shipping our game with a nasty bug that erased player progress and purchases if the game crashed during startup. We just missed it.

Actually, we had two reports of this bug during our soft launch, but I dismissed them as user error because they came from kids (one of which was my own scatter-brained son!) Regardless, no sooner had we shipped the game and the team had crawled off to their caves to recover, reports started flooding in of our reset bug.

We launched wide on Thursday, fixed the bug on Saturday, and (thanks to an Apple expedited review) had our update live by Tuesday, but we still disappointed thousands of players, resulting in an avalanche of customer support mail (the answering of which became a full-time job, inhibiting our ability to promote the game at launch).

We reacted as fast as we could, made things right with the people who wrote us, added a 24/7 live bar message informing players of the bug and how to update before purchasing, and answered each and every email, giving replacement gems to all of our affected customers that contacted us. Luckily for us, our players were understanding and didn't let our bug interfere with their affection for the game, giving SpellCraft an average user rating of 4.5 out of 5 stars since launch.

3. Undercooked Pets

Pet meat is stringy if you don't cook it right, and the same could be said of our SpellCraft pets. We knew we wanted pets in the game; we knew what they should do; we spent a lot of money designing and animating the pets; but we didn't bring it all together in the form of a fully-cooked feature for the game's release.

The pieces are all there -- you find pets in the dungeon, feed them and play with them, and they increase your character's defenses -- but there's really no way to understand this from the way pets are presented in the game. We're fixing this in an update, but considering the time and effort required to even under-deliver on pets, we would have been better off introducing those features later and applying that effort to a more polished 1.0 version of the game (and the same could be said of our multiplayer dueling feature).

We've made iOS games for three years, but we do still sometimes misjudge the scope of our projects, and pets definitely fell into this category. At the same time, our players have responded to pets with affection well out of proportion to our implementation of the feature -- pets are fun, and polished, they're just not as fully-featured as we would like, and players are confused about how to use them. We are definitely on to something here, and we wouldn't have such a firm idea of where we need to take the game if he hadn't included pets -- in however imperfect a form -- in our first release.