Japanese fool

The dishes in our house have always been clean. Because after the meal, we played the Japanese fool. Dad, mom, brothers, children sat at the table (or rather did not get up from him) and played until the last pan was washed.

The game is very simple, fast and exciting. One on one. A deck of 36 cards. Played 18 bribes. Whoever took the smaller number of bribes - that washed the dishes. For example, I won 11 bribes, the rival - 7. The loser went to wash 11 - 7 = 4 dishes. It was advantageous to play the first distribution, in the presence of slightly soiled forks, teaspoons and glasses. In the end, the poor fellows were only fat pans and very heavy pots.
')
Unfortunately, time passed, and I began to live away from my home. He missed his parents, the game and clean dishes.
Yes, yes, once I got bored bored, and I wrote Japanese Fool for the iPhone and Japanese Fool for the iPad .

What was interesting when creating card games, read in my humble opus.

Motivation

With the advent of Xcode 6.4, I became so lazy that I released games that didn't take more than 48 hours of dirty time to develop. I have long matured to create a Japanese fool. I thought, tossing and turning before bedtime. An unexpected surge in the popularity of card games for iOS served as a start for the start.

Judge for yourself, my free card games (King and Diablo) brought in the last 3 years to 1 dollar per day. And suddenly. The last six months, advertising in the above-mentioned applications has begun to bring in much more money. For example, Admob ad revenue rose to $ 2- $ 10 per day. Without any manipulation on my part.


Fig. 1 Chartboost Income For Last Sunday From Card Games

There was another reason to create this game, but the reason is sad. Oh, eh ...

Monetization

In Japanese fool, I put a display of advertising. But not just like that, but with interest. If a player scores the required number of wins, the Admob ad is disabled. I turned off advertising on my iPod for 8 hours of continuous play.
What used advertising space? Anything fashionable?
Despite the fascinating report about the second price auction , read by golubevpavel on Mobile White Nights , in order to save time I left the old bunch of advertising sites.

During the game, a banner from AdMob is shown below (I’m so used to it that I feel discomfort without a strip of ads), and after a lost round I’m showing video ads from Chartboost.
There was a funny episode during debugging. AdMob began to show me an advertisement about lengthening hmm, hmm, - male readers understood this.
To turn off the vulgar banner, I spent more effort than on the implementation of the game algorithm for an opponent.

Development

I did everything on Obj-C, I am wary of Swift, and I read the documentation.

Design

If we take the logical screen width of 320 pixels, then the optimal size of the playing card is 66 by 96 pixels. In this case, the map is described as a UIView, containing 4 UIImageView.


Fig.2 Sample playing cards

The figure shows that the UIImageView is divided into 1) the central background, the suit and dignity of the playing card, located in the upper left corner and 2) the large picture shifted to the lower right corner. All other elements are redundant. Duplication of pictures of real card decks is, in my opinion, absurd for a small screen of a smartphone.

In turn, large facial images of playing cards are composite - the head of the hero, hairstyle (8 options), eyes (7 options), mouth (6 options) and shirt (4 options). I use the same elements to select an opponent - 8 * 7 * 6 * 4 = 1200 unique characters with different behaviors appeared.

To display personally the owner of the iPhone, as the main character, I use the avatar from the Game Center. Since the algorithm for pulling out a personal photo from GC was not found by me, I would venture to suggest my own version. Criticism is welcome.

-(void)authenticateLocalPlayer{ GKLocalPlayer *localPlayer = [GKLocalPlayer localPlayer]; localPlayer.authenticateHandler = ^(UIViewController *viewController, NSError *error){ if (viewController != nil) { //   [self presentViewController:viewController animated:YES completion:nil]; } else { // !!   if ([GKLocalPlayer localPlayer].authenticated) { // Get the default leaderboard identifier. [[GKLocalPlayer localPlayer] loadDefaultLeaderboardIdentifierWithCompletionHandler:^(NSString *leaderboardIdentifier, NSError *error) { if (error != nil) { NSLog(@"%@", [error localizedDescription]); } }]; //        [[GKLocalPlayer localPlayer] loadPhotoForSize:GKPhotoSizeSmall withCompletionHandler:^(UIImage *photo, NSError *error) { if (photo != nil) { //     View,          [scoreView storePhoto: photo]; } if (error != nil) { NSLog(@"%@", [error localizedDescription]); } }]; } } }; } ... IBOutlet UIImageView *myPhoto; ... -(void) storePhoto: (UIImage*) photo { myPhoto.image = photo; } 

All sorts of tricks

I do not promote games. This case is absolutely for professionals or idlers. Paid games without promotion do not bring downloads at all. And you did not know? 1000+ games (thousand, Karl !!) appear on the Apple store every day, and nobody sees the paid ones. Free also nobody sees, if nobody tells about them.

I use a simple trick - the game seems to be worth $ 1, but once every half month it is declared free for 2 days. These terms are checked by me on 50+ copyright games and they can be trusted. Sometimes the sale can be done and 3 days. The best time for sales = is Sunday + Monday. With this kind of trick, some games get up to 500 races. And it happens 20. Here the name, description, pictures, video are already important.

Video for the game is done in a QuickTime bundle (pulls off a 30 second movie from the pinned iPhone screen) and HandBreak to edit the video in the correct format of 30 frames per second.

An example video is available in the store.

Another trick

I always release two applications - separately for the iPhone and separately for the iPad. Although they are universal. What for? Two absolutely identical applications - a great testing ground for an experiment with advertising, keywords, an icon and other attributes. What increases loading, and what - brakes. What to use for interstitial - Google or Chartbust (ChartBust is the right answer). Perhaps there are some advantages from dualism. I did not notice the minuses. Men will understand me, we have a lot of what is duplicated in the body. And no one considers it superfluous.

Rules of the game

I hope it was not boring.

PS By inertia from the creation of the Japanese idiot, I developed Moscow Deberts and already play it. This is the favorite game of graduates of the 80s Moscow State University. If you want (and know the rules) to get the game on your iPhone at the testing stage - send me your Apple ID.