Show HN: I made 22 apps and games this year mostly by myself – here they are

http://davesapien.com/DaveSapien/2013DaveSapien.html

by DaveSapien • 13 years ago

131 80 13 years ago

ktrgardiner2• 13 years ago

Good for you for accomplishing and creating so much. Congrats on that. But good god, the background of your site is an eyesore. It literally hurt my eyes as I read through your list. You're going to deter a lot of people with such a bright background. Beyond that you're detracting so much attention away from your content. Feel free to completely ignore this, but I would change the background to something subtler or at least monotone if I were you. It will bring the focus back to where it belongs, your content, and it will give a far better first impression to new visitors.

DaveSapien29• 13 years ago

Thanks!! Yeah wasn't sure myself, changed it to something more blue sky. Thanks again for the feedback!

ktrgardiner2• 13 years ago

That's much better. You're welcome.

tlarkworthy4• 13 years ago

Hey Dave, are you in Edinburgh? You should enter make-a-game-month (#makgammon) [1] next year. Its hosted at Edinburgh Hacklab. I think you would really fit in

http://edinburghhacklab.com/2013/12/make-a-game-month-result...

DaveSapien29• 13 years ago

Hey, yes I am. Sadly I'll be moving on in January though. When is the next #makgammon? I may drop in and see you lot before I leave!

tlarkworthy4• 13 years ago

Urgh, #makgammon is every November :(

The lab has a public open night every Tue and Thurs though. General hacking then. The game things is a once a year special event. (check out the Doodle app for this year)

Join the mailing list, or just email me if you want to visit.

Oh there are bitcoin talks on the 3rd of Jan I think. (check the mailing list)

thenomad• 13 years ago

Also in Edinburgh. Interesting - thanks for the link!

For anyone in/near Edinburgh, the Hacklab is fantastic in general - if you haven't checked it out, you should. It opened my eyes to the potential of laser cutters amongst other tech last year.

Malcx• 13 years ago

That's a good output but a little disingenuous to say 22 when several are just various themes on the same engine. (E.g. 4 paint apps)

Depending on your aim with these, next year would be a great year to focus less on dev and more on marketing. Many of these have zero reviews on the play store but are on par with other more established apps.

DaveSapien29• 13 years ago

Yeah, I totally agree. Many failures in marketing this year. Weird thing is, PooBarr the pooping bear has some great reviews out there but it dosen't seem to catch peoples attention. Disingenuous maybe, but the painting apps have changed dramatically through each release, my tech is now 5 times faster than at the beginning of the year. As I've been pushing ahead with new products I've been keeping the updates going with my older ones. Also I don't think 20+ illustrations for each one is a meaningless effort. But yes, I really need to come up with a better marketing strategy for my paint! ta!

joshowens2• 13 years ago

I would love to see more on how you do marketing, for sure.

bksenior• 13 years ago

Dave, love your productivity. I'd love to give you a few free pointers on the marketing front. Shoot me a tweet @bksenior and lets talk.

velcro4• 13 years ago

Very nice work Dave - one thing thats probably a more interesting question - can you make a living on that? Making many small apps?

Have also been toying with an idea to start doing apps for a while now and rather than do a major idea, instead do many small apps. Like for example if 1 app brings 100$ per month - then making 20 could make 2000$ and so on - but does 1 app make 100$ on average at all?

shuaib• 13 years ago

Agreed. Dave, can you please share your income statistics if any. That would be interesting insight.

DaveSapien29• 13 years ago

I average two sales ($.99) a day, minus a few spikes here and there. So as the say in Sunny Scotland 'pish'.

DaveSapien29• 13 years ago

In a word, no. All that these apps have been doing (finically) is to pay for over heads. The most important thing for me is getting back on my creative horse this year, You'd need to produce 3x that amount to bring in a small living unless one is some kind of hit. The more you do the more likely you'll have that hit, and thats really down to experience and your community knowing who you are. Thanks for taking a look!!

nsxwolf• 13 years ago

Curious what you define as overheads. App Store membership fee? Paying yourself a minimum wage? Depreciation on your development Mac? Thanks for your insights!

joshowens2• 13 years ago

What kind of marketing efforts do you put into each app? I've been working on an iOS landing page generator and I would be curious to get your thoughts on it @DaveSapien: http://bit.ly/carp-hn.

tseabrooks2• 13 years ago

There is a question of what constitutes a "small" app. For my purposes I'll assume small is - "can be made in a month @ half time". I know someone making a decent salary on about 8-10 of these types of apps. they vary in technical difficulty and a couple required coming out of pocket a small amount of money for rudimentary design work. But it's definitely doable.

velcro4• 13 years ago

Yeah, its definitely a weird calculation I know. Was just curious if an average "small" app makes anything at all or not...

My definition of small is even stricter than yours :) I'd say something that you'd be able to make in 2 weekends - like lottery/weather apps (of course both of these have been done to death - but in that general direction). I'm not expecting those to make anyone rich - just curious if something like that could make nothing, 10$ per month, 100$, etc...

Like just from appstore exposure and no marketing... but lets assume that all the apps would be decent looking and programmed to work nicely - just with a limited feature set... and maybe a mix of appstores if I develop them in something thats able to do cross-platform compiles...

ido5• 13 years ago

Don't take this the wrong way, but please don't contribute to the flood of low quality apps in the app store(s) that serves to drown even the better apps out there.

I know of a person (via one of the local game dev groups I was part of in a previous city I lived in) that would just crap out a "new" app every couple of days by making a super simple game (like infinite runner) and then get some artist in Romania to reskin it 4-5 different ways for $10/hour, then SEO the title for popular keywords (names like "Runner Game for boys and girls with cute bunny! Christmas edition!").

If you have an idea for a genuinely useful app or good game, something you would enjoy working on and can imagine others enjoy using, then go for it. But don't do shotgun-dev of shit app. We have enough of those already.

tsunamifury• 13 years ago

This is a kind of naïveté. Experimenting at scale to sell apps and find what might be a viable business is pretty much all the AppStore offers developers. The lack of custom storefronts or advertising/marketing options makes this the only viable way to try to make money.

Just waiting til you've made the perfect app and only launching that would mean you were one of the most brilliant people in tech, having complete knowledge of your target market even before release.

And relative to your comment about not releasing 'low quality apps', you might as well tell people not to release their blogs on wordpress because all these 'low quality' websites are just re skinned versions of the same blog engine.

velcro4• 13 years ago

I'll try not taking it the wrong way even though you're assuming that I'd be making low quality apps :) even though you don't really know my level of experience.

I was talking about doing specific niche apps by limiting their feature-set, not their quality.

DaveSapien29• 13 years ago

emm, have you even tried my apps/games? These are not "low quality apps", in fact some have been 5 star apps for months (now settling at 4 stars and above). The ones that have no rating simply have not got the exposure needed to be rated. I understand the reaction to shovelware, and totally agree with you, but I'd like to think my work isn't that.

AfroDiva• 13 years ago

Beautiful and inspiring, great work Dave, keep it up.

DaveSapien29• 13 years ago

Thank you very much for taking a look!

macarthy12• 13 years ago

can you tell us some technical details of the painting "engine"?

DaveSapien29• 13 years ago

Its a bit of a secret sauce kinda thing (feel shitty saying that). Basically I'm doing a pigment/light equation and a heck of a lot of cheating to get it run fast.

nanoscopic2• 13 years ago

This is not item #4 hacker news worthy.

stupejr• 13 years ago

every news site needs it's "feel good" item of the week ;)

nanoscopic2• 13 years ago

What you mean to say is that all the hacker news bronies need their fill.

neovive• 13 years ago

Very nice porfolio. Do you build all your games in Unity?

DaveSapien29• 13 years ago

Some of them, mostly I use Unity on the Me and the Giants(my kids games studio) games. I build my own engines to power my more quirky projects. My paint tech is leading to a few games next year for example. (opengl Objective C/C)

presty• 13 years ago

404?

DaveSapien29• 13 years ago

Damn, My server has been overloaded! Sorry guys, sorting it now.

iantaylorq• 13 years ago

http://www.davesapien.com/ seems to be 404'ing

DaveSapien29• 13 years ago

Yeah, sorry about that. try this link for now: http://pastebin.com/gxJyGKhG

ErikRogneby• 13 years ago

Has the URL changed? I am just getting a 404.

DaveSapien29• 13 years ago

No, my site has went down. never had this happen before. cant even access my ftp.

DaveSapien29• 13 years ago

Edit, here is a pastebin link until my site is back online. Sorry about that guys. http://pastebin.com/gxJyGKhG

Ryoku• 13 years ago

Congratulations Dave, very nice work. I've been toying with the idea of starting to develop many small mobile and web apps during the course of next year, not really looking for revenue but for the sake of creating tools and games that might be useful for someone while helping me not to get creatively stuck.

DaveSapien29• 13 years ago

Thanks a lot! I totally recommend it, a confidence builder if nothing else. My site is down at the moment so here is a mirror on pastebin http://pastebin.com/gxJyGKhG

fharper1961• 13 years ago

Congrats you've been very productive this year.

Concerning making money, I think you need to explore other ways of revenue streams than just paid apps. For example freemium or ad based. I'm currently making $0.07/download, with 20,000 downloads/month on Android using an in app purchase freemium model. I'll be adding more IAPs, so revenue should be going up in 2014.

DaveSapien29• 13 years ago

Thanks! Thats brilliant, I'm very wary of freemium myself and have tried it in the past. I just don't think its for me. Though I'm going to give it a go next year with one or two apps next year.

DamagedProperty• 13 years ago

Awesome job! Keep it up. Keep firing!

DaveSapien29• 13 years ago

Thanks! Slowing down next year, but with much bigger projects!

eponymous• 13 years ago

Congrats. I hope I can be this productive with my personal projects in 2014.

DaveSapien29• 13 years ago

Thanks a lot! It takes a lot of sacrifice, cant say I recommend this volume of work though.

krapp• 13 years ago

I'm starting to teach myself Android development after a semester of Java - can you recommend any tutorials or tools?

DaveSapien29• 13 years ago

Jayway is really good. http://www.jayway.com/2013/05/09/opengl-es-2-0-tutorial-for-... But apart from that, the usual suspects, www.stackoverflow.com and www.gamasutra.com are ace.

notastartup2• 13 years ago

what was your total profit from releasing apps to this date?

DaveSapien29• 13 years ago

Ever? I couldn't say off hand, but its not much.

notastartup2• 13 years ago

I hear so many developers jumping in on the mobile platforms but this seems to be the norm....

Show HN: I made 22 apps and games this year mostly by myself – here they are

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