Hey everyone,

About 6 months ago I quit my job, to take an extended holiday and spend some more time with my wife and two kids. This has been great! :)

Although I focused mostly on spending time with my family, I’ve also had a bit of extra spare time to work on Class 3 Outbreak. So since I started working on C3O again in December last year, the updates have come a bit faster than they used to.

However, it is time for my holiday to come to an end. Tomorrow I’m starting some consulting work, where I’ll be working full time again.

This is good news for me because it means I’ll be able to afford to eat :) But it’s bad news for C3O because it means the updates will come a bit slower from now on.

cya!
Saxon

Hi everyone,

I’ve just released an update to Class 3 Outbreak to add the ‘rescue a person’ objective. This is a third option in addition to the default objective of killing all the zombies, or the ‘get to a building’ objective.

To choose the ‘rescue a person’ objective for your map, click the Objective button at the top right of the editor:

Then, switch to the ‘rescue a person’ objective:

The person to rescue will be locked in a building at the start of the game. Click the Choose Building button to select the building:

Then close the dialog, and save and publish your map.

For now the person who you need to rescue will be randomly selected from the named civs. When you start playing the map, the last sentence of the intro text says who you need to rescue:

The building which the person is locked inside is shown with a red X on the minimap. When you get close enough to clear the fog of war you’ll also be able to see the person inside the building:

The doors of the building will initially be locked, so the person to rescue can’t wander out, and zombies can’t get in. The locked doors are drawn a lighter blue than normal doors, and they act like windows (ie, you can shoot through them, and zombies will be able to see inside). As soon as one of your survivors walks close to one of the locked doors, all of the building’s doors will be unlocked and behave like normal doors again.

To rescue the person you need to recruit them like any regular named civ – so just walk up close to them with one of your survivors. If the person to be rescued dies or turns into a zombie, then you lose the game.

Besides the main feature of the ‘rescue a person’ objective, in this update I made a few other changes which were requested in the forums:

• The fat guy’s accuracy has increased from 30% to 45%, to offset his slower walking speed.
• When you start the game all three of your survivors are automatically selected. So if you wanted to move all of them together, you can just click once to move them instead of having to ctrl+click them all to group them together first. If you only wanted to move one of them, then just click that person to select only them, so it’s the same number of clicks as before.
• Brought back double-click-to-run, from the original Class 3 Outbreak. So if you click to move your survivors, they will walk to the destination. If they see a zombie along the way, they will stop and shoot at it, then continue towards their destination. If you double-click to move your survivors, they will run towards the destination, and not stop for anything. The walk speed is now a bit slower than it used to be, but the run speed is a bit faster than the walk speed was.

The next update I have planned for C3O is to allow the map author to create a chain of multiple objectives – so rescue person A, then rescue person B, then get to building C, etc. However since I have been alternating between web and mobile, before that I will be doing some more work on bringing Google Maps back to Zombie Outbreak Simulator for iOS.

cya!
Saxon

Way back in April 2011, Jay and I were lucky enough to be accepted into the Perth 2011 X|Media|Lab with Class 3 Outbreak. XML is an awesome conference / workshop, where the organizers bring in 16 digital media / cross-media / transmedia experts from around the world. On the Friday there is a conference open to the public, where each of the mentors speak on their area of expertise. Then over the weekend XML runs a workshop with 16 selected projects – we were selected for the Perth XML out of around 90 applicants. During the workshop you get to have one-on-one sessions with twelve of the mentors, for about 45 minutes each. It was an awesome experience – we got to meet some really great people, and do a lot of thinking about Class 3 Outbreak.

During one of the sessions with one of the mentors, we were brainstorming ways to promote C3O a bit, by coming up with some novelty games which players might find amusing – like making maps of famous locations, and/or putting in famous people. I had the idea of making a map of the Royal Wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton, which was coming up soon and was all over the news at the time.

There were only 12 days between XML and the wedding, but Jay and I figured we could hack something together in time. So right after XML Jay got to work editing a map of Westminster Abbey where the wedding would be taking place, and I got to work hacking in some special named civs, a crowd of onlookers, and a few other bits and pieces.

While Jay and I were working on this we thought it was pretty amusing, and so we thought there was a chance that it might “go viral”, like the original Zombie Outbreak Simulator did when we released it in November 2009.

We had ads on the website, but typical ad rates are about $1 per 1000 visitors, so even if the map became wildly popular with a million hits, we’d earn about $1000. Nothing to sneeze at, but not enough to make a huge difference to C3O. Up until that point we had worked on C3O in our spare time, and so we wanted to try to get enough funds to support us to work full-time on the game, and grow Binary Space into a serious business.

After some discussion Jay and I decided to launch a crowdfunding campaign. We announced a number of features that we were planning to build, along with our plans to make C3O into a freemium game. The crowdfunding would therefore give players a chance to pre-order the premium features and future virtual currency at a discount. Our thinking was that if the royal wedding map was hugely popular, some (small) percentage of those visitors might decide to pre-order, and so we’d make a better return than from ads alone.

A couple of days after XML, when we’d just started working on the wedding map, we received word that we’d been awarded a grant of approx $10k from South Australia’s Creative Industries Program. This was mostly for covering development equipment, as well as hosting costs, legal advice, music, software, advertising, etc.

We had also been awarded a grant of $50k from the South Australian Film Corporation back in December of 2010. However we hadn’t announced that publicly, because we were still negotiating terms with SAFC.

By the time of XML it seemed like we were close to arranging a deal with SAFC. The plan for their funding was to hire a couple of third-party consultants, and the rest would be spent on salaries for Jay and myself. I had booked about two months time off from my day job, starting from mid-June. So we were planning to ramp up development on C3O in a big way.

So the angle we went for with our crowdfunding campaign was to announce that we’d received $60k in funding, which would last us a certain amount of time. The purpose of the crowdfunding was to extend that time as much as possible. There was no specific target amount that we needed to raise – the more we raised, the longer we’d be able to work full-time, and the closer we’d get to turning C3O and Binary Space into a sustainable business.

We chose IndieGoGo as our crowdfunding platform, because we’re in Australia and Kickstarter required a US bank account. On Kickstarter the project only receives the funding if the target amount is reached, but IndieGoGo used a flexible model where the project would receive all funds regardless of whether the target was reached. (Back then this was IndieGoGo’s only option – now IndieGoGo also offer a fixed funding option like Kickstarter). So we chose an arbitrary funding target of $50k. IndieGoGo’s fees are higher if you don’t reach your target – so there’s an incentive to have a lower, more realistic target. However we didn’t want to be in the situation where the campaign was crazily successful but people stopped pledging because we’d reached some arbitrary target amount.

On the 27th of April – two days before the royal wedding – we launched the crowdfunding campaign, along with releasing the royal wedding map.

The royal wedding map was mildly successful. It built a small amount of buzz, seeing about 40,000 hits over the next week (spiking on the day of the wedding). It got featured on Gizmodo (and Kotaku) and even the Wall Street Journal! However it wasn’t the runaway success that we had thought it might be. Although, it is still the most played map in C3O – having been played a total of 70,000 times, compared with about 20,000 times for the next closest map.

It’s impossible to tell, but it didn’t seem like the wedding map had any obvious effect on the crowdfunding campaign. We received some pledges during that time, but there was no obvious spike. It didn’t seem to draw any new players to the game – the number of visitors to the website was roughly the same before and after the wedding. In hindsight there was probably no point in trying to rush out our crowdfunding campaign along with the wedding map.

We ran the crowdfunding campaign for about 2 months, up to the beginning of July. In total we raised $1,325 from 44 people – including 6 people who put in $100 each! This seems like not much compared with the $50k target we’d set, but that had been an arbitrary number. We were actually really pleased with the amount we’d raised – it proved that there were people out there who really liked our game, and were even willing to pay for it! :)

By mid-June 2011, everything seemed to be going great. We had started working full-time on C3O, and Jay and I decided to pitch in some of our own money to hire a couple of extra developers. But then everything fell apart when the funding from SAFC fell through. We had to let the extra developers go to keep costs down.

Of the $1,325 pledged in the crowdfunding campaign, after IndieGoGo’s fees, PayPal fees, and currency conversion fees, we received $1,006. This helped keep us afloat – we used it to pay our developer Luke, who had developed some cool features in his short time with us – like building barricades, the show buildings button, and improving the map moderation system. But Jay and I also had to put in quite a bit of our own cash, to cover the rest of Luke’s salary, to pay our other developer David, and to cover boring business expenses like accounting. Plus I had to dip into my mortgage to cover the salary I’d lost from taking time off my day job.

At this point C3O wasn’t earning anything, but we still had the $10k grant. However the bulk of that grant had been to cover the cost of hardware so we could produce a mobile version of the game (Macs, iPhones, iPads, etc). We had hired the second developer David to work on porting the game to iOS, while I worked on C3O with Luke. So after we had to let David go, I took over development of the iOS port. This is why in September 2011 we announced that we were putting the web version of C3O on hold for a while, to focus on bringing Zombie Outbreak Simulator to iOS.

At this stage I felt guilty for taking people’s money to develop C3O, and then shelving the project while we worked on ZOS. But we hoped that we’d be able to earn a decent income from ZOS, to be able to afford to get back onto development of C3O after ZOS was released.

Finally in April 2012 we released Zombie Outbreak Simulator for iOS!

During the first week on the App Store we made a profit of $3,900. On the one hand this was awesome – it was more profit than we’d made in 2.5 years of developing the web versions of C3O and ZOS. But on the other hand it wasn’t much – sales were already heading down after their peak on the second day, it didn’t cover the debts Jay and I had gotten into, and it wasn’t enough to jump back into development of C3O. As well as that, Google had announced that in September 2014 they would close down their Flash Maps API (which C3O uses), and so we would need to rewrite the whole game in JavaScript. So later in April 2012 we announced that we were going to keep working on ZOS, keeping the web version of C3O on hold more-or-less indefinitely.

Once again I felt bad for not delivering on the promises from our crowdfunding campaign. I wondered if we should offer people a refund – but we couldn’t really afford it. Plus we still hoped that one day we’d be able to get back onto the web version of C3O.

After a few updates to ZOS on iOS we went quiet for a while. Then in December last year I announced that Jay and I had decided to part ways – Jay had left Binary Space, and so I had taken over. I will be gradually buying out Jay’s share of Binary Space over the next several years.

My current strategy is to keep developing both the web version of C3O and the iOS version of ZOS in parallel. So far I’ve released about 4 updates to C3O, released an iPhone 5 update for iZOS, and I’m about halfway there on bringing Google Maps back to iZOS. I’m making progress, but it’s quite slow as there is only one of me, and I’m only able to work on it part-time. The general area I’ve been focusing on for C3O so far is giving map authors more ability to choose how their maps are played (such as infection settings, start position, objectives, etc).

Anyway, to finally get to the point of this blog post :), I’ve now decided to offer a refund to everyone who supported us during the crowdfunding campaign.

When we launched the campaign we thought we’d be able to deliver many of the planned features within a few months, with the funding from SAFC. The remainder would be covered by the crowdfunding funds, and then we’d finish up the rest in our spare time. However it’s now been nearly two years since we ran the campaign, and virtually none of those features have been developed. At this stage I don’t know if or when any of them will ever be developed. Although I am working on C3O again, the direction it takes may change based on player feedback over time. Plus there’s the looming deadline of September 2014, which raises two issues – will I be able to rewrite the game in time, and even if I do, how much longer will that take.

Due to all of the above, I don’t think it’s fair for me to keep holding onto your money. I’m very thankful for the support you showed us, and it really helped us through a tough time. I would have liked to offer you a refund back when we put C3O on hold those couple of times, but we couldn’t afford it then. I would have offered this refund when I took over Binary Space in December, but it was still underwater. In January of this year Binary Space finally broke even. So after receiving another payment from Apple for sales of ZOS in February, I can now finally afford to offer you a refund!

After I publish this blog post I’ll send an email to everyone who made a pledge to the crowdfunding campaign, to ask if you’d like a refund. If you don’t receive an email (maybe you’ve changed your email address since then), get in contact with me and we’ll work out a way to prove that you are who you say you are.

If you’re in Australia I’ll be able to send your refund directly to your bank account. Otherwise I can send you a refund via PayPal – which you can then use to buy stuff on other sites (or maybe withdraw to your bank account).

As an alternative option if you’d prefer, I can make a donation to the World Wildlife Fund (the Australian branch) “in your honour”, for the amount you pledged.

Finally, if you’d still like to support Binary Space, then you are of course very welcome to just make your pledge a general donation. The class3outbreak.com website has a donate link hidden away at the bottom of every page, and over the years we’ve received a few small donations. If you’d like to do this, just let me know and I will make sure I spend the money on something worthwhile to keep Binary Space going. And I’ll be eternally grateful to you as well! :)

Of the 44 people who pledged to our campaign, six of them pledged $100. These six people are the only ones to have received some of the promised perks from the campaign. They are listed on the credits page of C3O, and also in the credits screen of ZOS for iOS, as well as appearing as named civs which you can recruit within the game. If you are one of these six people, even if you ask for a refund or donation to WWF, I won’t remove you from the credits or the named survivors. So you don’t have to worry about losing out on anything, or anybody else knowing that you asked for a refund.

Also, for everybody who pledged, if or when I do ever add some kind of premium features to C3O in the future, I will try to give you some kind of free perk if I can. This will be given to you regardless of whether you ask for a refund or donation to WWF now, as a way of saying thanks for the support you gave us during the campaign :)

Now, back to developing the next update for C3O – the ‘rescue a person’ objective!

cya,
Saxon

Hey everyone,

Since getting back into development of Class 3 Outbreak and Zombie Outbreak Simulator a few months ago, my goal has been to alternate my time between C3O on the web and ZOS on iOS. So after releasing the ‘get to a building’ objective for C3O a couple of weeks ago, I’ve been working on ZOS for iOS.

In my last dev post for ZOS for iOS a couple of months ago I had just tried out the new Google Maps SDK for iOS. Although I was able to get the zombies/civs to draw over the map okay, I couldn’t get them to synchronize properly. While panning/zooming, the map would lag behind the people, and so it would look like the people were sliding around on the ground.

Well, after trying numerous approaches I have now figured out a way to get the people and the map to synchronize properly! Here’s a quick video showing it in action:

This Google Maps version of iZOS is currently a bit of a hack, so there’s still a bit of work involved in getting this ready to release. But now that I’ve gotten it to work, bringing Google Maps back to iZOS is just a matter of when not if! :)

My plan for the next update of iZOS is to offer a choice of 15 maps – the 5 offline maps which are in the current version, plus the 10 Google Maps which were in there before iOS 6 was released. Then in the next update after that, I’ll expand the Google Maps further to support all 2000+ maps available on www.class3outbreak.com.

Unfortunately the Google Maps SDK for iOS doesn’t support iOS version 4.x. So in the next update I’ll have to change the minimum supported iOS version to 5.0 (iZOS currently supports back to 4.0). According to my Flurry analytics, around 6% of ZOS players in the last month were running iOS 4.x:

The stats for ZOS Free are similar: most players are using iOS 6.x or 5.x, with only about 2.5% of players in the last month using iOS 4.x. So if you’re one of these people who are still running 4.x, you’ll need to upgrade if you want to download the next version of ZOS. However if you don’t want to upgrade your version of iOS you should still be able to play the old version of ZOS. The App Store app on the device should ignore the update, although the app may get deleted if you sync with iTunes.

Also, it looks like I probably won’t be able to get Google Maps to work on the original iPad 1. Although the Google Maps SDK for iOS does work on an iPad 1, and although ZOS itself uses as little memory as possible, when they are combined it’s still too much – and so ZOS crashes too often. According to the Flurry analytics, around 4% of ZOS players in the last month were using an iPad 1.

And similarly, around 3% of ZOS Free players in the last month were using an iPad 1.

The reason we originally removed Google Maps from ZOS was because Apple replaced Google Maps with their own Apple Maps in iOS 6. However, the iPad 1 doesn’t support iOS 6 – the highest version of iOS available on an iPad 1 is iOS 5.1.1. Therefore in theory it might be possible for me to bring Google Maps back to the iPad 1 by using the method ZOS originally used – avoiding the use of the new Google Maps SDK for iOS. In practise though, supporting multiple different methods of displaying maps may just be too complicated. However, I’ll keep it in mind as I’m finishing up the Google Maps update for ZOS. So if you have an iPad 1, I might be able to bring back Google Maps in the future – but only if you’re not still running iOS 4.x!

Now that I’ve reached this milestone with ZOS for iOS, I’m going to swap back to developing the web version of C3O. The feature I’ll be working on for C3O is to add a new objective type which map authors can choose. This objective type will require the player to rescue a named civ who starts the game locked in a building chosen by the map author. After that update, I’ll come back and finish off the Google Maps update for ZOS on iOS.

cya,
Saxon

Hey everyone,

I’ve just released an update to Class 3 Outbreak to add support for the ‘get to a building’ objective!

So the map author can now choose from two possible objectives for their map:

1. The player has to kill all the zombies (the default), or
2. The player has to get all of their survivors into a building chosen by the map author.

To change your map to the new objective type, load the map in the editor, and then click the Objective button at the top:

You can then switch from the default objective to the ‘get to a building’ objective:

Then click the Choose Building button to select the building which the player must get their survivors into:

Once you’ve selected a building, you can close down the Objective dialog. Then you’ll need to save and re-publish your map.

When playing a map with the ‘get to a building’ objective, the message displayed at the beginning of the game is a bit different (mostly just the last paragraph):

The building that you need to get to is marked with a red X on the minimap and on the main map:

When buildings are next to each other it can sometimes be difficult to tell where the boundary is between buildings. And if the map author has created rooms inside the buildings, it is usually impossible to tell where the walls are between rooms, unless you turn on the Show Buildings button. So to make it clear exactly where the building is which you need to get your survivors into, the building is also highlighted in brown.

To win the ‘get to a building’ objective, the basic requirement is to get all of the remaining survivors (the named civs controlled by the player) into the building. However, it kind of defeats the purpose if the survivors are infected, so the game won’t end if there are any infected survivors. In that case you can wait until the infected survivor turns. Or perhaps you can sacrifice that survivor by running them out into the horde…

The goal of getting to the building is to be ‘safe’ – so it’s not much use if there are zombies roaming around inside the building! Therefore even once you have all of your infection-free survivors inside the building, you also need to clear the building of zombies before the game will end.

To make it easier to keep track of how you’re going with all of the above conditions, if at least one of your survivors is in the target building then the stats at the top-left are updated to display your progress.

In this update I’ve also modified the fog of war a bit. Now at the start of the game you can see the entire map as if you’d already visited everywhere. So now the fog just hides the zombies/civs outside of your field of view. I made this change so that you could see the building that you’re supposed to get to!

Now that this objective is done, I’ll be moving on to adding the third objective – which is to rescue a person who starts the game inside a locked building.

Let me know what you think of the new ‘get to a building’ objective! :)

cya,
Saxon

Hi everyone,

Since releasing the default objective a couple of weeks ago (to kill all the zombies), I’ve been working on adding support to choose a different objective. The first one I’m adding is the ‘get to a building’ objective – so the player has to get all of their survivors into a building which the map’s author has chosen in the editor.

I’m part-way through implementing this – I’ve just finished updating the editor so that the map author can change the objective, and then choose a building. So I thought I’d post a couple of work-in-progress screenshots:

Now I just need to update the game itself to support this new objective!

cya,
Saxon

As an indie game developer, I find it very helpful reading articles by other indie game developers about what did and didn’t work for them. This is a great source of ideas for things to try, and helps to get a feeling for the kind of results to expect. For example this great post by The Game Bakers summarizes their experience as well as the experiences of a number of other indie developers.

So in the spirit of ‘giving back’, I thought I’d write up a post on how sales have gone for Zombie Outbreak Simulator on iOS.

Jay and I started Binary Space way back in February 2009. In November 2009 we released the original Zombie Outbreak Simulator for the web, and then in April 2010 we released the original Class 3 Outbreak. In April 2011 we went into open beta of the new Class 3 Outbreak, which is based around editing your own maps.  All up these web versions of our games have been played over 3.8 million times.

Up until that point we’d been developing everything in our spare time. In mid 2011 we started to ramp up development as we’d been awarded funding from SA Film Corp, but then everything went downhill when the funding fell through. We decided to put the web version of C3O on hold for a while, and in September 2011 announced that we were going to focus on porting Zombie Outbreak Simulator to iOS. We chose to port ZOS first as it was the simplest thing possible, and we figured we would see how it went and then go from there.

After about 7 months of development we started beta testing in March 2012. During this time we asked a number of reviewers if they’d be interested in reviewing a beta via TestFlight, but we got virtually no response – most said to get back to them with a promo code when it was ready to release. I suspect most reviewers are busy enough, that they’re not very interested in reviewing beta apps which may never get released. We did however get a nice ‘coming soon’ writeup from 148apps.com.

After a couple of weeks fixing issues reported by our beta testers (thanks testers!), we submitted the app to Apple for them to review. There were a few hiccups with the review process, but finally it was approved for sale on the 4th of April 2012.

We set the release date for the app to the 11th of April, to give us a bit of time to try to send some promo codes to reviewers. We sent off a bunch of promo codes, but again we didn’t get a huge response – although we managed to get some good writeups from 148apps.com and pockettactics.com.

On the 11th of April 2012 we went live on the App Store!

We decided to initially release with a price of $1.99. Although it was a pretty simple app and there wasn’t a lot to do besides tweaking some parameters, we had put a lot of effort into it over the years so figured it was worth pricing it above the minimum of $0.99. Also starting at $1.99 gave us some room to put it on sale if we wanted to.

We got a few more reviews, such as on PocketGamer, although some weren’t very favourable, such as App Advice “absolutely overpriced at $1.99” or TekShot5 “Please, whatever you do, stay far away from this app”. Oh well, I guess it wasn’t for everyone!

The following is our daily revenue (in $US) and rankings (in the US app store), for the first 5 and a bit weeks.

On day 2 our profit peaked at $870. We had been used to receiving a few dollars a day back when we had ads all over our web games, so this was huge! On that day our US rankings also peaked at #11 in the iPad Simulation Games category.

As expected after the initial peak our revenue steadily declined over the following couple of weeks. By the 23rd of April it settled at about $150 a day.

Then suddenly our revenue jumped up to about $400. For the first couple of days we didn’t know why. Then we discovered that we’d been featured by Apple in their Staff Favorites section, in the all-important US as well as in Canada, Brazil, Mexico, Spain and 14 other countries! Woohoo!! Thanks Apple Staff!

We decided to capitalize on the feature by dropping our price from $1.99 to $0.99. We figured that while we were visible this would help push us further up the rankings, hopefully increasing our visibility and ultimately resulting in more sales.

The experiment worked – our revenue rose up towards $500 per day, and our rankings kept going up too. We peaked at a ranking of #3 in the iPad Strategy Games category. We got up to #34 in iPad games, and #131 in all games. We even made a run at the Top Overall rankings, reaching #301.

My crazed refreshing of iTunes during this time didn’t quite manage to catch our peak of 3rd place; here’s a screenshot of when we were 4th. I had signed up to appFigures to keep watch on our rankings – their stats say we made it to 3rd that day… To be ranking up with games like Plants vs Zombies and Flight Control was amazing!

Our goal with iZOS was to release the simplest thing possible, see how it went, and then go from there. So the first release of iZOS contained only a single map in the Netherlands, much like the original web version of ZOS only had a single map in Washington DC.

One of the common complaints from players of iZOS was that it only supported one location, so we decided to keep the web version of C3O on hold and develop an update to iZOS to expand the number of maps to 10. We submitted this to Apple right before we noticed the Staff Favorite feature. After noticing the feature we thought it would be great if people seeing the feature could get the updated version with more maps, so we put in a request for an expedited review. Apple granted our request (thanks Apple!), and our new version went live before the feature ended.

After a week we were removed from the Staff Favorites section, and our sales and rankings promptly dropped.

We had a bit of a bump around May 10th when we momentarily jumped up to 1st place for iPad Simulation Games in Japan, even ahead of Minecraft and Sim City!

By the 5 week mark our revenue had dropped to about $80 to $100 per day. Up until that point we’d made a total of around $11,500 – a good result, but not enough to make a living from. We were inspired by a great series of posts describing the sales of Flower Garden (post one, two, three), where the developer described how he turned an app with a typical sales chart like ours (initial peak, falling off to not much) into a decent income. So we decided to try experimenting with some things, to see what we could do.

The first thing we tried was setting the app to free for the weekend of the 19th to 20th of May. We’d heard that dropping an app to free would result in a large number of downloads, due to all of the automated sites which watch for price drops. With luck the people who got the app for free would tell some of their friends, and we’d see sales pick up after we went back to paid. We gave away about 37,000 free copies of the app that weekend. But it had exactly zero effect on our declining revenues and rankings.

Other than a momentary spike in early June (no idea what caused that!), we were heading down to around $25 a day.

One of the techniques which Flower Garden had used to great effect was to add some in-app purchases – with IAPs resulting in around 80% of monthly revenue. So we thought we’d try adding some IAPs too. We had a few ideas for IAPs, but the first one we decided to try was to add bombs. The player could bomb the zombie hordes from above, and keep track of zombies killed – and the collateral damage of unfortunate civs. Given that ZOS is just a sandbox app with no objective, the bombs didn’t really achieve anything, they were just for laughs.

We had two types of bombs (Mk81 and Mk82), and we decided to give the player 100 Mk81 bombs for free each day (via a nightly supply drop). Mk82 bombs could be purchased, and extra Mk81 bombs could be purchased if the player ran out. For both types of bombs we had four price points, offering a discount per bomb for the higher price points.

We released the update with bombs on the 22nd of June 2012. Here’s the effect it had on our combined revenues:

On the second day after release our revenue spiked up over $200! But clearly the novelty soon wore off, and it started to drop again. During July and August the revenue for sales of the app itself stayed fairly constant around the $20 to $25 per day mark. The bomb IAPs managed to double the revenue to around $50 a day through July. During August IAP sales dropped further, to the point where our total revenue was closer to the $30 to $40 range – still better than without IAPs, but only marginally. Moving into September, both the app itself and the IAPs began heading down to new lows.

With IAPs in place, we thought it might be worth trying switching the app to free again. In theory we’d get another burst of downloads, and with luck some of those people would want to buy some bombs. This time we switched the price to free for a whole week, from the 6th to the 12th of July, during which we gave away 27,000 free copies of the app. IAP sales volume did increase, but only approximately double – so roughly enough to cover the normal sales of the app itself that we were no longer making. We therefore switched back to paid when the number of downloads dropped (from approx 8000 on the first day, to approx 1000 on the last day).

It’s interesting that the second free promo gave away less free copies than the first, even over a longer time frame (27,000 copies in seven days versus 37,000 copies in two days). Maybe apps don’t get picked up by as many sites when they drop to free more than once. Maybe a lot of the people who like free apps already got it the first time. Maybe we were less visible because our rankings had dropped by then. Maybe people are wary of free apps with IAPs in them. Who knows!

Another idea we had to potentially increase revenue from ZOS on iOS was to release a free version with limited content, with an in-app purchase to upgrade to the full version. The theory was that a free version would be downloaded by more people, with some small percentage of them purchasing the upgrade. If the volume was high enough, we might make a decent return.

We released Zombie Outbreak Simulator Free on May 24th 2012. By default a single map was enabled, with limited infected options. There was a single IAP for $0.99 to upgrade to the full version, enabling all 10 maps and all of the options.

On the first day downloads peaked at about 500, then gradually dropped, settling at around 100 per day by July and August. We also added the bomb IAPs to iZOS Free, releasing them on the 5th of July (delayed a bit from the release of bombs in the paid version of iZOS, due to the iZOS Free update being rejected by Apple the first time). However, sales of both the upgrade and bomb IAPs from iZOS Free were consistently low, averaging around $5 to $10 per day.

In June 2012 Apple announced iOS 6 – including the announcement that they were removing Google Maps and replacing them with Apple’s own maps.

I downloaded the beta version of iOS 6 to try out the new maps, but they weren’t good enough for iZOS. So we decided to remove the Google Maps, and replace them with some embedded aerial photos. Due to the size of the embedded photos we had to reduce the total number of maps to five.

We released the update on the 13th of September, just after the iPhone 5 was officially announced, about a week before iOS 6 was due to be released. Here’s the combined revenue of iZOS and iZOS Free (including all IAPs) for the next three months:

After releasing the embedded maps update, sales went up to about $50 per day (from about $25 per day before hand). Sales from iZOS went up around 50% (from about $20 per day before to about $30 per day after). Most of the growth has come from iZOS Free, where sales were about $5 to $10 per day before but jumped up to about $20 per day after.

What’s interesting is that for a game which was meant to be about “zombies on Google maps”, it seems to be more popular without Google maps! Maybe people appreciated that it no longer required an internet connection (especially people with iPods who can only use WiFi). Maybe people noticed that there was an update and so were reminded to play the game again. In the update we also changed the supply drops of free bombs from every day to every hour – maybe people liked having more bombs to play with. Maybe lots of people with a shiny new iPhone 5 were looking for an app to buy. Who knows!

Finally, here are the combined sales for the rest of December 2012, through to now:

So, still mostly around the $50 per day mark. There was a nice boost at Christmas from all those shiny new iDevices and iTunes gift cards, but nothing earth-shattering. When developing an app it always seems like it would be a good idea to get it out by Christmas. We started ZOS for iOS around July/August 2011, and without any real idea of how long it would take I had been thinking “it would be good if it was out by Christmas”. The reality was it took longer – we weren’t ready until March the next year. But the blip in sales from Christmas suggests that targeting Christmas may not be worth it – especially when taking into account the increased competition from all of the other apps being released at that time of year.

On the 3rd of January I released an update to add support for the iPhone 5 to both iZOS and iZOS Free. This doesn’t seem to have had any obvious effect, although it’s early days to see any longer-term impact.

Here’s a summary of sales to date:

Zombie Outbreak Simulator

• 84,000 downloads (20,000 paid for and 64,000 in free promos)
• $17,500 in sales of the app itself
• $3,800 in sales of bomb in-app purchases
  • 18% of total sales
  • 46% of sales since bombs were added

Zombie Outbreak Simulator Free

• 45,000 downloads
• 2,900 upgrades to the full version for sales of about $2,000
  • a conversion rate of about 6%, which is probably roughly typical
• $1,300 in sales of bomb in-app purchases
  • 39% of total sales
  • 45% of sales since bombs were added

Total

• 129,000 downloads
• $19,500 in sales of the app or full version upgrade
• $5,100 in sales of bomb in-app purchases

So all up, Zombie Outbreak Simulator on iOS has earned about $24,600. Not exactly “let’s quit our jobs and be full-time game developers”, but still a decent result.

It’s also still bringing in around $350 per week, and still hovers around the low end of the rankings (currently #226 for strategy games in the US, woo!). So I think this is a good base to build from, and I plan to keep releasing updates and see what happens. The update I’d like to release next is to bring back support for Google Maps, somehow. So players could choose from the 5 offline maps which are there now, or the 10 Google maps which used to be available in the older version. And then eventually expand the Google maps to offer the 2000+ maps which are available in the web version of Class 3 Outbreak. It will be interesting to see what effect (if any) this has, since removing Google Maps in September seemed to improve sales. Only one way to find out!

So, while $24,600 is not exactly enough to make a living, that’s real money, right? You could buy a (smallish) new car with that, couldn’t you?

Well for starters, Jay and I live over 2500 km away from each other, so we can’t exactly share a car! So maybe we could each buy a somewhat older, used car?

Still, not quite. iZOS has earned around $24,600 according to appFigures, but we’ve only received about $21,000 from Apple in Binary Space’s bank account. The main reason for this difference is that Apple take about 2 months to pay (after the end of each month they total up the payment for the previous month, and then pay it about a month later). We’re probably also losing a bit in currency conversion and bank charges.

But revenue is only one half of the picture – the other half is costs! Most of the big costs of developing iZOS (like buying Macs, iPhones, iPads, etc) were actually covered by the approx $10,000 grant we received from South Australia’s Creative Industries Program in April 2011. We owe huge thankyous to Creative SA, as their grant was what enabled us to build ZOS for iOS in the first place!

However by the time we received our first payment from Apple in June 2012, Binary Space was heavily in the red – owing Jay and I about $8,000 dollars in total. This was mostly due to us over-spending on development of Class 3 Outbreak, back in mid-2011 when our funding fell through. With that first payment from Apple we were finally able to pay ourselves back!

After a few more payments from Apple, Binary Space was even able to pay us a bit of profit! We drew out about $8,000 in September 2012.

That leaves about $5,000 – where did that go? When Jay left Binary Space at the beginning of December, the agreement we had was that I would gradually buy out his share of the company by giving him a share of the revenue for the next several years. We have a complicated formula for working that out, but so far Binary Space has paid him about $2,000. Since we started receiving revenue from Apple we’ve had about $2,000 in further expenses. This has included worthwhile things like buying aerial photos for the iZOS update, and important things like hosting the websites for class3outbreak.com and binaryspacegames.com, but the bulk of it has been on boring things like accounting.

So that now leaves Binary Space with about $1,000 in the bank. I’ll have to pay about half of that to Jay at the end of the quarter, and I’m expecting about $400 in expenses this month. So, Binary Space is not exactly swimming in free cash at the moment. Bring on next month’s payment from Apple!

Still, Binary Space paid Jay and me $8,000 in profit in September last year, and so I got about half of that. I guess I could buy a really old used car, maybe?

Well, no. Although iZOS has made some profit, Binary Space’s history goes back further than that. With the original ZOS from 2009 and original C3O from 2010, Jay and I tried to make a bit of money by plastering ads all over them. All up they earned about $5,700, against costs of about $2,200. So we made a profit of about $3,500, of which I got about half. So far it’s looking like I could afford a slightly better car…

But then mid 2011 comes back to haunt me again. Although Binary Space paid Jay and I back for our fixed costs, I had also taken about 2 months time off from my job as a software developer, in order to work on the game with the funding we were expecting to receive. When the funding fell through I ended up having to dip into my mortgage to cover what I would have received in my usual salary, which worked out to a huge loss.

Adding up everything I’ve spent on Binary Space over the last four years, and everything Binary Space has paid me, works out to a grand total profit of $120. Woo! Here’s the awesome car I could buy with that:

Actually, I think I would rather buy the Lego car and take the bus, than buy that ’93 Corolla :)

Back when Jay and I first started work on Binary Space in February 2009, I thought it’d be interesting to keep track of how many hours I put into developing our games. So far across all our games I’ve spent over 2,400 hours. So the $120 I’ve made works out to an average of 5 cents per hour…!

Despite seeming like not much of a result for 4 years of effort, I’m actually really happy that Binary Space has now roughly broken even. During late 2011 / early 2012 when it was running at a huge loss I was quite demotivated by the whole project, so it feels good to be back in (slightly) positive territory.

Maybe one day Binary Space will actually make some money, or maybe it won’t. The whole project started out as a fun hobby, and if it only ever remains as a fun hobby, with the bonus of paying for itself, then I think that’s cool. I’m looking forward to it!

cya!
Saxon

Hi everyone,

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, the next feature I’m working on for the web version of Class 3 Outbreak is adding the ability for the map author to choose an objective for their map. As I said in my post on the forum, based on everyone’s feedback I decided to start with the following:

• Default objective is to kill all the zombies (and infected).
• Get to a location, which is a building selected by the map author, requiring all currently controlled civs to be inside the building, and none of them to be infected.
• Rescue a person from a building chosen by the map author, with the doors locked until the first controlled civ walks through a door. The person to rescue will be randomly selected from the named civs, and they are rescued when they become controlled (ie another controlled civ walks close enough to them).

I’ve just released a minor update which adds the first of these, ie the default objective.

So now if you manage to kill all of the zombies, instead of nothing happening, you’ll see a win screen!

You might recognize this image as some of Jay’s artwork from the original Class 3 Outbreak, where it was used as the end screen in survival mode.

With the default objective it’s not enough to just kill all of the zombies. If any civs are infected (either living or dead), you need to wait for them to turn into zombies so you can kill those as well. To make it easier to track how you’re going, I’ve added the number of infected to the stats displayed at the top-left of the screen.

As well as being able to win the map, it’s now also possible to lose. Before the game would just fade out and nothing would happen, but I’ve now added a screen when you lose.

As an added bonus, if you’re not in the mood to play again after losing, you can just watch your zombified corpse roaming the map for a while if you’d prefer :)

Also in this update I tweaked the text at the beginning of the game to hint at the default objective of killing all the zombies.

I figure on most maps (especially the 2000+ which are already on the world map, most of which probably still have the default infection settings) the default objective of killing all of the zombies will be close to impossible. It will probably be primarily future maps where the map author has intentionally chosen this objective from the available options (and possibly made a smaller more manageable outbreak) that killing all the zombies will be an achievable objective. So I figured the starting text should just hint at the goal of killing all the zombies, rather than demand the impossible :)

Finally, as an added bonus in this update I added a random map button to the top-right of the world map:

The random map button will take you to a map randomly selected from the maps featured on the world map. This feature was recently suggested in the forum, and it received some support from others and also it seemed like it would be pretty simple to add, so I figured I might as well.

If you notice any bad maps while you’re browsing maps randomly, let me know via the contact page or in the forum, and I’ll remove them from the world map. Thanks!

Next up I will be adding the first real objective to choose from, ie getting all survivors into a building. The default objective took much longer than I’d expected, mostly because I haven’t had a lot of time recently as I’ve been busy with a bunch of personal stuff. Hopefully the next update will be a bit faster! Also, I’m going to continue to tinker with Zombie Outbreak Simulator on iOS, to see if I can find a way to bring back Google Maps.

cya,
Saxon

Hey everyone,

Ever since we added the ability to control the civs to the new version of Class 3 Outbreak (way back in May 2011!), there’s been no actual goal to the game. All you could really do was try to hold out as long as possible, or make up your own goal. Even if you killed all of the zombies, nothing would happen. And when you died, the screen would just fade out, without even as much as an “oops you’re dead” :)

The last two updates for Class 3 Outbreak (editable infection settings and map start position) have been about how the game begins. Now that they are done, I’d like to start focusing on what you actually do in the game.

So as I’ve mentioned a few times, the next update I’m planning for Class 3 Outbreak is to allow the map’s author to choose an objective for their map.

This is a very open-ended task, as there are lots of possibilities for a map’s objectives. So I’m planning to implement this gradually – I’ll start with a few simple objectives, and then add more over time. After a while I may take a break to work on some other features, then come back to adding additional objectives later.

So before I start on this I’d like to know: What kind of objectives would you like to see? What would you like to add to your own maps, or like to play in other people’s maps? Of those, which ones would you like the most? This will allow me to work out which objectives I should work on first – based on a combination of how popular they are, and how quickly I can implement them.

Some possible ideas to start with:

• Kill all the zombies
• Stay alive for X minutes
• Get to location X
• Find person X
• …?

Initially I will make it so that each map has a single objective, but in the future I’d like to make it possible to chain together objectives, like get to location X, then location Y, then location Z, or find person X and then get to location Y.

Also, do you have any specific thoughts on how you’d like these objectives to work?

For example does “stay alive for X minutes” mean you need to keep all three of your initial survivors alive, or just you, or any named civ under your control?

Does “get to location X” mean get to a selected building, or get to within N pixels of a selected point, and does your whole group need to get there, or just one?

To “find person X”, should person X be at a random location on the map, or in a predefined location, should they be stuck to the ground so they can’t walk away, should they be in a building, should the building’s doors be locked, what happens if they’re already a zombie by the time you find them?

To “kill all the zombies” do you need to wait for all of the infected to turn, as well?

Finally, do you think the default objective (if the map author doesn’t choose one) should be “kill all the zombies”, or something else?

Let me know your thoughts on the forum, or in the comments below!

Thanks :)

cya,
Saxon

Hey everyone,

I’ve just released a new update to Class 3 Outbreak, which lets the map author set the map’s start position (where the initial group of survivors starts at the beginning of the game). Previously this was always just the centre of the map.

To set your map’s start position, load the map in the editor and then click the Start Position button at the top.

You can then move the map to the desired location.

While you move the map, the editor shows the position of the three starting survivors. Usually this is in a standard pattern, but they will be moved to the nearest allowed location if there’s something in the way like a wall.

Once you’ve chosen the position you want, click Done, then save and re-publish your map. Then you’re ready to play!

A minor change in this update is that you can now also pan the map outside of the map’s playing area. This is so that you can see your starting survivors if the map’s start position is set to near the edge of the map. This also solves the problem of being able to see or control people under the minimap / weapons / build / search UI at the bottom of the screen.

Let me know what you think :)

In a case of inconvenient timing, the servers which C3O run on are doing some maintenance tomorrow. This will start at 1:00 am on Friday the 4th of January UTC (5:00 pm Thursday the 3rd of January PST, see here for your timezone), and run for about 2 hours.

During this time the website will be in read-only mode. So you’ll be able to play existing maps, but the editor will be disabled – and so you’ll be unable to set the start position of your map :( If you see a message about the editor being unavailable, just try again a bit later.

The next feature I’ll be working on for C3O will be adding objectives which the map author can choose – such as kill all the zombies, or survive for X minutes, or get to location Y, etc. And on the mobile side, I’ll be trying a few more ideas to get Google Maps back on Zombie Outbreak Simulator for iOS.

cya,
Saxon