AdamAtomic

Just a reminder, lots of things in that article are simplified quite a bit for the sake of putting together a coherent argument. The app store, in our experience, has an AWFULLY long tail. But our games have also been pretty successful - I would say the more complete statement is that you will do 50% of your lifetime revenue in the first 2 months, but it will take at least a year or so to earn the other half. That's not insubstantial by any means, but it also means that that revenue isn't terribly useful for building your next project (this is again a simplification, as the situation changes when you have more than one app bringing in that stream, etc etc).

So yea, I didn't mean for it to sound quite so dramatic, like the app store doesn't have any tail at all, because that's not really true. But for getting a read on your product's success and earning some useful revenue for the next project, those first 2 months in my experience are key.

we didn't do any ads with anybody

can't yet, but I will have good news about that stuff soon i hope!

one instance per particle seems inefficient but most computers can handle it, especially if they don't collide, and it gives you a ton of fun flexibility (using an emitter to spawn a flock of enemies, for example, or emitting particles that then emit more particles, etc).

Tiles however are NOT a collection of unique instances, they are blitted relatively efficiently. They do use a single instance of an empty collider to do the actual collision check, but otherwise they're pretty fast.

BUT that's not to say that flixel is not a work-in-progress with a fair number of broken or unoptimized elements :) I have a list of...oh I guess i'm down to about 20 things that have to be fixed or revised before the next big public whatever!

My friend Danny made the music but otherwise all programming, artwork and original sound engineering/foley was done by me in basically two serious weekends ( one in matthew's office). But that's why I made flixel! I made space invaders in two hours this afternoon :)

It's worth noting that the normal piracy rate for iPhon games is similar to normal software from what I've heard anyways 90%+), and I definitely don't view our lower rate as havig anything to do with our sales!

This was a homebrewed port of my flixel framework, from what I've heard from fellow flash devs the CS5 beta is having trouble getting anything better than 1 or 2 fps. Canabalt runs at 30+ even on the original iPhone :)

hey hackers, matthew pointed me here and I thought I'd share some stats (more about the Flash version than the iPhone version but yea)

  Days spent making Canabalt: 5 (long ones)
  Hits on my server: ~2 million
  Hits on other major portals: ~2 million
  Estimated hits on crappy portals: ~4 million+?
  Hits on my server from twitter: 50k+
  Best Referrer: Stumbleupon
  Money from donations: ~$500
  iPhone sales: can't say but good enough!
  Top App Store Ranking: 37
  Bandwidth Bills: $1000+
  Top legit score I've ever seen: ~30km
  My top score: ~8km
  Resolution: 480px x 160px
  Initial Piracy Rate: 12%
  Current Piracy Rate: 25%

Trivia: I never finished drawing the space ship that flies by since it is barely on-screen for more than a few minutes. Sadly, multiple screenshots have captured it in all its under-realized sloppiness.