Having checked JForce’s posted sales figures quite often, I figure it’s only fair that I copy their move and publish mine as well.  I’ll try to keep this updated…

A few days ago, I came across a cool little set of DLLs that let you convert XNA games to Silverlight easily.  So far, SilverSprite seems to do exactly what it claims: let you run SpriteBatch based games as a Silverlight app without needing to change your code.

Of course, Avatar Dash is 3D rather than 2D, so I’m having to rewrite things a bit, but it seems useful enough for promo material to be worth doing.  So far, I’ve spent a few hours on it today, and have a moderately complete version of the game going.

Still to come:  deoderant sticks and sweat meter, bonus points, and animation for the character.

You can check out what I’ve done so far at www.AvatarDash.com or by clicking that big avatar dash image on the left there.

Of course, given I probably have almost zero traffic currently, anyone who actually accesses it through this link will probably be doing so after I’ve already finished it…

It all started with a clock.

I was chatting on IRC with some other XNA devs, one weekend, and a couple people started lamenting the then recent spate of apps showing up on there, and how little time people were spending on some of the stuff released.  End result: I made a stupidly small (something like 30kb) app in about an hour as a joke.  Ping Time was just a clock, that kept time by using the score of that old game everyone has heard of.  No interactivity beyond toggling between 12 and 24 hour clocks.  Oh, and just to take the joke further, it ran in 1080p.  So, I tossed it up for sale on Xbox Live Indie Games, and it sold. Really Well.

At the time, 240 points was the minimum price allowed, so I was making around $2 per copy sold.  All told, I’ve sold over 1100 copies since its release in April 2009, the bulk of which occured during the first few weeks after releasing, pushing it up onto the top 10 most popular games list at the time.  It still averages around 1 sale/day (now at 80 points).  So, first bullet point for a resume: I’ve made over $1700/hour.  Granted it was for just a single hour, but still…

A few months later, I tossed Jounce together in about a week for the iPhone, just sorta trying out some gameplay mechanics that I ended up liking.  Jounce is kinda in between puzzle game and music toy.  Balls fall from a spawner at the top, and you tap and drag on the screen to place bouncers and direct the falling balls to the goal.  You get one point per bounce a ball makes along its path until it reaches the goal.  A lot of the charm in Jounce comes from the sounds: theres no actual music in Jounce, but rather a few octaves worth of chimes.  When you place a spawner, each one gets assigned a sound effect that plays when it bounces a ball, so you end up with kinda a free form generative music sounding effect that often works surprisingly well.  The art in it is actually mostly just my original prototype art; it grew on me, and worked well for the style for the game.  Jounce wasn’t a huge success (only made a few hundred bucks from it) but it did pay for a new mac mini, so that was good enough I suppose.

Pumpkin Chop has been my most successful release so far. Its technically another Xbox App, but far more polished than most in my opinion.  As its name kinda suggests, its a 3D Pumpkin Carving simulator.  The tools are freehand rather than cookie cutter style, so users can carve pretty much anything they can imagine.  After they’re done, they can switch to the showoff mode, which drops their pumpkin into either a cornfield on top of a scarecrow, or the porch of a haunted house.  The camera then kinda goes into screensaver mode, and starts flying around on its own showing off the design from various angles.

I was a bit later releasing Pumpkin Chop than I’d intended, so I only had about 2 weeks of sales before Halloween. Sometime the week before though, Microsoft added it to their Shocktober promotion, giving my sales a big boost, peaking at a bit over 500 sales in a single day on Halloween Eve.  In its first quarter, selling at 80 points (about $1), I made around $2600 off Pumpkin Chop, and sold something like 3800 copies, more than paying for the two weeks or so of work I put into it.  Whats surprised me the most, though, is that its still selling around 15-20 copies per month.

And that brings us to the present, with Avatar Dash.  Microsoft runs a (so far yearly) contest called Dream Build Play for XNA games with some fairly hefty cash prizes for the top games.  This year, Old Spice joined in as a sponser, with the grand prize for the winning Old Spice themed game being 60k.  The top 5 chosen by the judges will also be featured on the dash for about 3 weeks for the player voting, during which time they’ll be for sale.  That alone should be good for a nice sized chunk of change for the finalists.  Anyway, back to Avatar Dash.  Avatar Dash is a fairly straightforward game, similar in most respects to other “run as far as you can” games that have proven popular in the past.  You play as your Avatar (or a random one if you arnt logged into an Xbox live account), trying to run as far as you can before you go splat. Its played with just a single button to jump, making it fairly easy to figure out by most everyone.  Besides the usual jumping over gaps and hazards, as part of the Old Spice themeing, you sweat, a lot.  To counter this massive sweating, and continue running, you have to grab, what else, Old Spice deodorant along the way.  To further challenge those who like more difficult games, if you land right on the edge of the next platform, you’ll get a 50 point bonus.  Due to the short time available between when I started, and the Dream Build Play submission deadline, I chose to leave networking alone, however I did stick in a Split Screen mode, so you can challenge your local friends to see who can dash the best.

So, thats everything I’ve released or will be releasing shortly (in the case of Avatar Dash).  Not 100% positive what my next project will be, but currently, I’m leaning towards a Street Fighter style fighting game with Avatars.  I made a base set of animations for it the other day, but haven’t had time yet to try implementing things just yet.  Hopefully I’ll something worth talking about there in the near(ish) future.

I’ve been saying for at least 5 years now, that I really should get some sort of site setup.  Now that I’ve got a couple games released, with more on the way shortly, I figured it was high time to follow through.  So, welcome, and all that…I have no idea yet just how often I’ll update things, so feel free to check back tomorrow or next year.