App Developer’s Corner: Bryan Duke of Acceleroto

Today’s App Developer’s Corner features independent developer Bryan Duke, the driving force behind Acceleroto. His unique background coming into iPhone app development coupled with his love for gaming has produced a few of the App Store’s earliest casual gaming hits. Here is what he had to say about developing and doing business on the App Store platform:

I’m Bryan Duke, owner of Acceleroto.  My first game, Air Hockey, hit the #1 paid game spot in the App Store last September.  My second game, Occurro! just hit the App Store.

How did your interest in mobile apps, specifically gaming apps, come about?

What experience did you have coming into iPhone app development?

My background’s probably a bit different than most.  I’ve been programming in one form or another for almost 30 years.  My first program was on a TRS-80.  From there, I dabbled with Logo on the Apple II, then BASIC in grade school, and learned FORTRAN & ADA in college at Texas A&M.  I taught myself HTML 1.0 while in college & built my first web page in 1993.

After college, I was an Aerospace Engineer for NASA at Edwards AFB.  At the time, FORTRAN was the primary language used for engineering work, so I did quite a bit of coding with it.  I messed around with MATRIXx and MATLAB, including working on the the team that flew the first auto-coded flight control laws on a fly-by-wire airplane.  That program, the F-15 ACTIVE, was an amazing experience for me.  The people at NASA and McDonnell Douglas (now Boeing) literally had knowledge dripping off them.  It was an amazing team.

I left NASA in 1999 to join the military.  I’ve dabbled in hobby projects when I’ve had spare time including making my own jet engine, modifying and racing my own airplanes, developing an EFIS (electronic flight instrumentation system, aka “glass cockpit”), writing some astrophotography software and building fly2lunch.com.

When the iPhone SDK was announced, I applied to be a developer & brainstormed what I could bring to the iPhone.  Once I had a plan for my first game, I bought an iMac, taught myself Objective-C and started work on Air Hockey.

What made you think of creating the Air Hockey app as a starting point?

I sat down and listed all of the unique and important features of the iPhone.  After narrowing down the features that I thought people would be most interested in and my guess at the typical usage pattern for iPhone owners, I brainstormed apps that would fit the bill.  I decided to create a game that would be intuitive to learn, fun to play, and engaging enough that people would want to keep coming back to it.

The multitouch capability of the iPhone was something I really wanted to highlight.  I thought that bringing two people together to play a game on the same mobile device would be new & interesting.  People are often stuck in line or on the bus with their mobile device & only looking for a few minutes of game time, so a good single player mode was a requirement too.  Air Hockey seemed like the perfect fit for the iPhone.

For my next game I wanted a similar engaging feel, but in a different genre.  With over 40,000,000 iPhones and iPod touches out there, app opportunities are everywhere.  For my next game, I wanted to take the space shooter genre & make it work for a mobile device.  I took some of the same ideas that made Air Hockey popular and applied them to a shooter.  Occurro! was the product of that work – an easy to pick up, but engaging, challenging, and replayable space shooter.

How did you go about building a company around your idea?

Since I went at it alone for Air Hockey, my #1 priority was getting the game done.  I had the luck to work with a wonderful graphic artist with an eye for fun, but besides that all the game design, coding and business development work was my responsibility.

When I finished the first version of the game, the App Store wasn’t open & only a few thousand developers had been told they were approved to sell apps.  The day the App Store opened, my developer application was approved.  The first version of Air Hockey was in the store a couple weeks later.

Once the game was done, I put on another hat.  Building a business is something developers might not think much about.  It requires all kinds of non-programming kinds of things.  An iPhone app business isn’t necessarily that different than any other kind of business.  Having a solid plan, solid products, and great responsive customer support are good first steps.  Of course, even with the business hat on, continuing development on the software was still critical.  As an independent developer, balancing all aspects of the business is tough – getting good at the balancing act is a must.

What has been the most successful strategy/avenue for promoting and increasing visibility of your apps and your company?

By far the biggest impact on sales that I saw with Air Hockey was getting featured by Apple.  Air Hockey had a good following and was climbing in the charts on its own.  After getting featured in “What we’re playing” and then several other categories on the App Store, Air Hockey became almost a fixture at the top.

Besides developing the software, I really had no direct impact in getting the game featured.  I don’t have a contact at Apple and the process by which apps get featured is completely unclear.

It’s not all smoke & mirrors though.  Getting reviews from popular web sites can also really help sales.  Participating online helps – including forums, your own web site, and the piles of social media sites out there.

How has Pinch helped with app development, promotion, and marketing?

There are thousands of apps that incorporate Pinch Analytics.  The data Pinch Analytics provides can guide you in what works & what doesn’t work.  You can watch near real time sales results, so developers don’t have to wait for the Apple reports.

One great feature of Pinch Analytics that can really help game designers is sub-beacons.  Pinch’s sub-beacons can give the developer the great ability to flag when critical events happen.  For example, if you want to know what the most common options players use you can set up sub beacons for each option.  Using that data, you could set the defaults of your app to match the most common usage.

Do you have any other advice you’ve learned that you’d like to share?

Polish, polish, polish.  People expect – and deserve – apps that look great and work well.  Make sure your products are wonderful.

Bryan’s experience highlights how creative thinking can map almost any genre of game onto a mobile app platform. And the work isn’t over once an app goes live in the AppStore, as Bryan makes clear.

- Katherine Pan