The Rocket 5 team saw quite a bit of media attention Friday and Saturday. Kris and I were interviewed for podcasts, youtube channels and I think a cable television show. (We were too busy to ask who they were lol;) On top of that, Bojanna and Sarah talked to a writer from the Washington post who seemed to like the app.  (He was kinda more into Sar and Boj though) For such a small booth we attracted a lot of attention!!

I think our last day turned out to the best day though. Shortly after we did our 4th interview of the weekend, Kris was able to casually chat with some of the guys from The Electric Playground TV show!   We’re happy to say that Fubar (co-hosts of EP) bought the app and gave it his personal approval!! Shaun (co-host of EP) also really dug the app … what a great guy!

Also, It looks like EVERYONE wants iSpoof Arnold!!! EVERYONE just loved when Kris busted out the Arnold impression!  EVERYONE (and i mean everyone… kids, babys, old people, geeks, girls) seems to just love Schwarzenegger!

While all this app stuff was going on …. Rich (Artist and iSpoof Walken Colourist) and Kris were also pimping their new comic-book ‘Spy Guy’! If you like action, comedy, adult situations and mature themes get a copy of this comic … it’s 66 pages of awesomeness for only $5!! We’d also like to thanks for letting us have a section of his already product filled booth. (The man’s a saint)

In the end I think we got a lot of positive feedback from fans, exhibitors, media, artists and other game designers. We can’t wait for our next con!!! (E3???? Comic Con????)

Becka and Melanie will be handing them out on the floor and Kris Johnson, our Christopher Walken impersonator, will be giving them out at his booth where he’ll be showing off iSpoof Walken and also pimping a 66 page “Spy Guy” Graphic Novel. The booth is located in Artist’s Alley on an end cap right across from the DC Comics and Stylin’ t-shirt booth.

If you stop by the Spy Guy booth, be sure to show Kris your iSpoof Walken app on your iPhone, Touch or iPad and he’ll do a free voicemail impersonation on your phone for you!

I didn’t count all the buttons but I figure we made about 800 buttons in all! Special thanks to Ray, Melanie, Becka, Max, Renee and Cathy for cutting out all the images and making the buttons! We couldn’t have done it without you guys! Thank you thank you thank you!

Even more great news — Giant Moto Lite is Featured in New & Noteworthy Racing games on the App Store! This is the 5th time one of our games has been Featured in New & Noteworthy!

Giant Moto Lite Features:
– Fast & fun arcade style motocross action!
– 4 challenging tracks
– 4 cycle/rider colors to choose from
– Challenging AI opponents with 3 difficulty settings
– Realistic physics engine, killer graphics & realistic motocross sounds

The Full Version of Giant Moto Features
– All of the above plus…
– 10 challenging tracks
– 7 Racing Series events
– OpenFeint Leaderboards & Achievements!

Download Giant Moto Lite today and give it a try for free, then upgrade to the full version of Giant Moto for just 99 cents to get more tracks, series events and OpenFeint Leaderboards and Achievements!

Kickstarter project link: http://kck.st/cCFVCO

About Get Well Gamers:
The Get-Well Gamers Foundation was founded in 2001 with the goal of bringing video game systems and games to children’s hospitals. Video games are an effective and proven pain management tool and provide needed entertainment during long hospital stays.

You can read more about Get Well Gamers and find out more ways to help at their website, get-well-gamers.org

Next I’ll dig into an individual Category like “Racing” if I’m looking to see where Giant Moto, Giant Moto Lite, or Holeshot are currently ranked. I know I could use any of the websites that show your actual Rank in a given country, but I like to view the store like an actual customer – how visible is my game on the App Store (Note I only check the US store since that’s where I sell the most)? For Giant Moto, it’s usually pretty visible – its been in the top 100 Racing games for most of its short life, but has slipped off once or twice (it might be off now even). But for my other games, they’re usually much much deeper, way way out of sight and therefore not getting many sales.

What’s Wrong With The App Store:
For 99% of apps, visibility is a serious issue on the app store. This is somewhat understandable as keeping over 200,000 apps visible at any given time is surely an impossible task.

When I browse the store, mostly what I see are feature categories like “Featured, “What We’re Playing”, “What’s “Hot”, “Staff Favorites”, etc.. as well as the Top Grossing apps and games within each Category (the iPhone version only lets you see the top 100 paid apps in any given category). So when looking at individual categories, It’s easy to see the top 25 or 50 etc depending on how deep you click.

Anything that’s not within the above mentioned “featured” areas or already in the Top 100, is completely out of sight; buried deep (or perhaps just under the surface) of the store.

For every other app in the store, if you don’t already know what you’re looking for (keyword search), then it’s likely that you might never find it. Of course there are “accidental” finds and stuff that you hear about on external websites. But really for the majority of the apps out there, there’s no good/easy way to find them.

I have been fortunate in that I’ve had 3 of my apps Featured on the App Store, typically in New & Noteworthy. While these apps were featured, I had very good sales – For example, Giant Moto was downloaded 800 times per day while New & Noteworthy. But after the Feature ended, my sales quickly dropped off as the game slowly moved further down the Top 100 list until it stabilized at around 30 downloads per day.

This tells me that the problem is not that people don’t want my game – it’s that they can’t see my game. Of course it’s not Apple’s responsibility to make sure people can find my game, after all there are dozen’s of great new apps coming out every day ready to replace the previous features. But still I think there’s more Apple could do to help make more games & apps visible.

But Apple is making progress in this area – recently they added new categories like Best Undiscovered, Five-Minute Fixes, Best Racing Games (Giant Moto made that list too) which is a great step towards getting more games visible. But the first time I looked in Best Undiscovered, I saw it full of games which I had seen many times on the app store in different Featured lists or in the top sellers. For example “The Impossible Game” is in Best Undiscovered but that game was previously an App Of The Week! In fact, nearly all of the games in Best Undiscovered are already major hits on the store. “Best Undiscovered” to me would mean games/apps on the store that are truly awesome but never saw the light of day because they were immediately buried – games that sold less that 1000 units when initially released for example.

Then there’s the issue of duplication. I see a lot of duplication between Features. If you look in Best Undiscovered and Five Minute Fixes right now, you see many of the same games in both categories! Jet Car Stunts, Squareball, Pix’n Love Rush, Cannabalt and more! And this kind of duplication is all over the app store between featured and top 25 lists. Basically anything that’s featured is probably in the Top 100 lists too making it even harder to find something different.

There are actually 3 different versions of the App Store apps, each with their own ways of displaying what’s on the store. There’s the iTunes (desktop) version which is probably the easiest to navigate, the iPhone version which is a somewhat limited view of the apps, and the iPad version which is the hardest to navigate of them all – you can’t even view top 100 lists in each category like in the iPhone version – you can only view by either Featured or Release Date in any given Category.

Finally there’s a huge amount of shovelware on the store that’s only helping to bury the good stuff. It’s quite distressing to go look in the New Releases the day your app ships only to find it already pushed off the page by a dozen “games” that just give you “Points” that you redeem in an actual game. Why does Apple even allow these things as actual apps/games?

How Would You Improve The App Store?
It’s easy enough to rant about the problems, but how do you fix the issues? Two hundred thousand apps and counting. How do you make them visible?

As I mentioned above, Apple is making progress by adding new featured categories like “Best Racing Games”, “Five-Minute Fixes”, “Best Sim Sports Games” and “Best Doodle Games” which are all visible on both the desktop iTunes store and the iPhone App Store (though not all of those groupings are featured at one time). I think they should add even more of them – the interface in both stores certainly supports these groupings. And why not add even more games within each featured category? Are there really only 18 Best Sim Sports Games on the store right now or only 38 Five-Minute Fixes?

But what we’re really talking about here is helping people to find all of the great apps that are hopelessly buried in the store. More featured categories can still only show so many apps.

Some other ways to discover hidden apps: Create a “random” category that displays 25 random games/apps. And add a Refresh button so you can get 25 new results. This would probably end up showing a lot of shovelware, so perhaps limit it to the top 1,000 or top 10,000 apps. There are Top 100 lists for each Category, how about adding a Bottom 100 List? Or a Middle 100 List?

Reduce (or eliminate!) duplicates across featured categories. Since there are only so many Features and only so many slots within those Features, it’s sad when you see the same game listed in 2 or 3 different features at the same time. Besides hogging up precious slots, it makes browsing the App Store feel like you’re seeing many of the same things on every page: you see some of the same apps in each featured list, then of course those same apps are showing up on the top 25 lists. For the casual browser who’s just scrolling through the lists, this makes it even harder to find something new.

Ok I’ll admit that this last idea is a bit self-serving, but there’s the indie guys like me who don’t have the budget to do external marketing. Apple could put together an entire area of the store (or at least a Category) for independent apps and games – games that don’t have any kind of external publishing muscle behind them. I know there are lot of indie games making it onto the mainstream featured lists (some of mine included) so for sure Apple is helping out the little guys, but still there are so many of us and so many of us who could use a leg up, that creating an indie area on the store would be a huge help and probably would be a super popular addition to the store – sort of like the indie section in a video store.

What do you think? Feel free to discuss in the comments section.

Here’s a cropped image of how it appears in the App Store:

iSpoof Walken is our first Universal app (it runs on iPhone & iPad) so I didn’t realize until now that Apple will Feature Universal apps on either of the stores (or probably both in some cases). So while it’s not featured on the iPhone store, it is on the iPad store. Cool.

This is the 3rd game/app in a row from Rocket 5 Studios that has been Featured by Apple on the App Store – Giant Moto was Featured in April, Small Space XL was featured in June and now iSpoof Walken! This is a pretty good sign that we’re doing something right here at Rocket 5 Studios.

When it comes to online high score services, there are several choices and OpenFeint appears to be the front runner (they claim to have something like 20 million users). I used Agon Online in the past for Holeshot Drag Racing, but I haven’t really heard much from Agon over the last few months so I figure they must be falling behind in the leaderboard race. Crystal and Plus+ are both options as well, but they seem to be a bit more exclusive (I think you have to make a formal request before they’ll add you as a developer, who has time for that?).

Then soon after Giant Moto shipped (without any online support), Apple announced Game Center. And I thought “whew! I’m glad I didn’t go with a 3rd party yet because for sure Game Center will crush all of them”. But iOS4 is here and Game Center still isn’t live. OpenFeint quickly promised to fully support Game Center when it goes live, I assume they have some deal with Apple (I hope). So given all of the information I have, OpenFeint came up as the clear winner!

But I didn’t just want to add OpenFeint to the existing game structure. So I also added new Series Race Events where you race a set of tracks and compete for high scores and achievements across those events. Plus you still compete for high scores on individual tracks whether you’re racing in Arcade Mode or Series Mode. All together there are 17 individual Leaderboards and 66 Achievements! And it’s now iOS4 compatible.

Giant Moto v1.2 has only been live since midnight last night, and in that time there are already about 700 “best times” posted on the Leaderboards.

Download Giant Moto from the iTunes App Store.

The original idea behind iSpoof Walken was that we wanted to make an awesome original soundboard app, but we didn’t want to do the usual screen-full-of-buttons like you’ll find in most soundboards. So we came up with the idea of presenting it in a scene like you’d find in an old-school Adventure Game – you can literally click on anything in the room and Mr. Walken will tell you 3 or 4 different crazy and hilarious stories about each object. There are 25 different interactive objects and over 150 unique lines. There’s even a magic 8-ball: touch it, ask a question and shake the iPhone/iPad to hear Walken’s response.

iSpoof Walken features an impressive impersonation of Christopher Walken by Kris Johnson, a very talented comedian who I’m sure you’ll be hearing a lot more about in the near future! Joining Kris on the writing side is the equally brilliant Kevin Feraday who also did the art and audio recording.

iSpoof Walken is a Universal app which means it’ll run on iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad. You can download it from the App Store for the incredibly low low price of only 99 cents! Yes for less than the price of a cup of coffee, you can enjoy this hilarious time waster. Tell your friends!