Yuckfu Dev Diary #12 – Let's Try That Again

Yuckfu has been in the App Store for almost two month now and I got some good feedback from numerous people. The sales numbers however have been disappointing to say the least. The main problem was the lack of exposure.

When Yuckfu went live in the App Store, its release date was still set to the upload date a few days prior. Therefore the game appeared on page 6 of the "new Apps" in the AppStore – the chances of someone stumbling over the game without explicitly searching for it were pretty much zero. I also came to the sad conclusion that a price of $2.99 is much too high for a simple arcade game. I don't like this at all and I don't think this is a healthy state for the App Store to be in, but for now this is just how things work.

Getting my game reviewed was another challenge. Most bigger sites didn't respond to my emails, others required at least 3 promo codes to even consider reviewing. Some reviews were positive, while others failed to understand the concept of inertia - and I can't even blame them. Controlling a rocket powered robot isn't supposed to be easy. Learning to control the robot is the game, it's part of the challenge. It just takes some time to learn - time which most review sites simply don't have.

In the meantime I worked on the first update for Yuckfu, which has some minor UI improvements, but most importantly added the completely new Challenge Mode. This is something I thought of from the beginning – having pre-designed “container mazes” and spawn points. I also created some new animated backgrounds to have some more eye candy. One more advantage of the Challenge Mode is that the game now has a more shallow learning curve. The new version of Yuckfu (iTunes Link) is now available for only $0.99!

So, to gain some more exposure, I also decided to built a free “Lite” version of the game, which just cuts some of the levels from the Challenge Mode and the Highscore upload functionality. Let's see how this works out. Yuckfu Lite (iTunes Link) also made it's way to the App Store.

For some screenshots and more info head over to yuckfu.net.