Show HN: We just launched our first original interactive storybook.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/jubitron-girl-robot-lovely/id601534162?mt=8

by curiousphil • 13 years ago

2 1 13 years ago

itunes.apple.com

Hey guys, not asking anyone to purchase this by any means. Just really proud of what my team has done and want to show it off. I'd love to give out some promo codes to any hacker parents that need something to keep their young kids busy.

curiousphil• 13 years ago

I would also love to discuss any of the technical's of the app and or the marketing campaign that anyone might be interested in knowing. Its a pretty low budget grass roots campaign... I am not the developer on the project, but I can easily pull the lead developer into the conversation as soon as anything goes above my head. We built it in Unity 3D using the 2D Toolkit. All of our animation was done in Flash and then output to sprite sheets. We also created a pretty awesome method to output individual components of some of the characters and elements that can then be tweened via XML which significantly cuts down the amount of full sprites that we needed to include in the app as well as made the animations super smooth.

We were fortunate to get featured in the New and Noteworthy sections of two categories: Books & Education. We are first in the New and Noteworthy section in Books and 4th in Education and thirteenth on the featured landing page of the iPad app store. We are currently running about #32 in top paid apps in the Books category.

We will be releasing on the Nook and Kindle stores in the next week or so as well as the Google Play store. It will be interesting to see and compare how this type of app does in each of those segments. I will be tracking it closely and hope to share my findings in a few months.

So far the only hiccup is that the app doesn't perform well on iPad 1 or iPhones before the 4s. We have just about addressed the problem and plan to release an update next week. In our first release the app only included retina size graphics and each device sizes them on the fly. Unfortunately the older generation devices don't hold up too well in this process, so we have downsized all the graphics to a non-retina alternative that those devices will have access to. Unfortunately it added to our already heavy file size, but it will make the app run smooth on a lot more devices, so it's probably worthwhile.

I'd love to get any questions, comments/thoughts and/or advice from anyone that has successfully marketed an app. I am handling all the marketing, so I have a vested interest!

Show HN: We just launched our first original interactive storybook.

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