Super Crate Box dev offers tips on how to succeed with iOS

Super Crate Box‘s launch last week went over pretty big, thanks in large part to the fact that the game is excellent. It also didn’t hurt that a lot of very big websites provided some very high-profile coverage. It’s probably safe to say that Super Crate Box is a definite success story for developer Vlambeer, and the studio’s business and development guru Rami Ismail took a little time to talk with indiegames.com about how his company managed to score an iOS home run. iOS developers, you may want to take some notes.

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Super Crate Box‘s launch last week went over pretty big, thanks in large part to the fact that the game is excellent. It also didn’t hurt that a lot of very big websites provided some very high-profile coverage. It’s probably safe to say that Super Crate Box is a definite success story for developer Vlambeer, and the studio’s business and development guru Rami Ismail took a little time to talk with indiegames.com about how his company managed to score an iOS home run. iOS developers, you may want to take some notes.

Super Crate Box already had a lot of fans thanks to the fact that it was released for free on both PC and Mac back in 2010, winning several prestigious awards along the way. The iOS port is equally polished, taking about two months to make and another four to tweak and adjust.

But what happens when you’ve got a great game on your hands? How do you get it into the public eye? Ismail has the following tips:

  • Once you’ve gotten the basic story out to the people you want, use services like Twitter, Google and Promoter to see who else picks up on it; reach out to those groups and see if anyone else would like a look at your title.
  • Don’t use lengthy introductions when you reach out to the press. Keep things short and sweet, and don’t be afraid to be personal when you contact them (since “you can connect to the media personally, without a PR department between you and the people writing about your game and studio”).
  • Don’t send anything but plain text and links, since many journalists don’t have inboxes cable of working with massive attachments. Instead, make sure you have links to media assets in your email.

If you’re working for an iOS developer, especially if you’re small and looking for your big break, then you really should give Ismail’s advice a look. It offers some solid perspective about other topics too, like providing people with preview/review copies, why supporting both Game Center and OpenFeint is a good idea, and what you should be sure to do when you’re porting a keyboard-based game to touch controls.

And if you are an iOS developer who wants to get their game known, don’t be afraid to let us know about it, too!

[via indiegames.com]

Mike Thompson has worked each side of the video game industry, both reporting on and creating narrative content for games. In his free time, he gorges on pizza, referees for roller derby, and uploads ridiculous cat photos to the internet.