Bullfrog 1.2.2 has been released. This fixes several issues with high score submissions.

Download directly or use Check for Updates.

Release Notes

• Fixed: High score submission is now done in the background for better performance over slow connections.
• Fixed: Fixed bug in high score submission that could allow fake high scores.
• Fixed: Scores of zero points are no longer accepted as high scores.
• Fixed: Minor user interface improvements for the high score submissions sheet.
• Fixed: Help Menu item displays in-game help screen.

As per request, the LicenseKeeper release notes / change logs are now publicly available.

Second, I’ve added some new filters to the Bullfrog high scores page. You can now view the Top 50 scores for All Time, The Month, The Week, and The Day.

Enjoy.

Bullfrog 1.2.1 is available. This update fixes a crash on Leopard and improves the sound quality of some of the sound effects.

Use “Check for Updates” or download the new version directly.

I’ve also added a new screen cast of the Bullfrog game play to the Bullfrog product page.

Release Notes

• New: Higher quality ambient swamp sounds.
• New: Higher quality timer sound.
• New: Higher quality chomp sound.
• Fixed: Crash on Leopard when timer sound starts playing.
• Fixed: Memory leaks.

It’s an honor to have Bullfrog included with such an elite group of great Mac games.

This certainly sets the bar pretty high for Bullfrog 2! Oh the pressure — I better get back to work.

Watching as the high scores have gotten higher and higher over time and reading all the extremely positive feedback has been feeding the game developer monster inside of me.

Finally, I can’t resist any longer. I’ve decided to begin development on the sequel to my little arcade game. But, this time the plan is a little different.

Take Two

The first time around I didn’t know any Objective-C or Cocoa, had a budget of almost zero, and developed the entire game from scratch.

Bullfrog 2 will benefit from all the experience I earned the first time through, an existing code base, a larger media budget, an existing user-base, and a new development partner.

Marcus Zarra and I thought it would be fun to team up and develop Bullfrog 2 together as a joint venture between Outer Level and Zarra Studios.

Sharing the Journey

Neither of us are real “game developers”, so we’ll be working through some interesting challenges on the way to releasing Bullfrog 2.

With this in mind, we’ve decided that sharing the design and development process on our blogs would be fun and hopefully interesting to gamers and fellow indie developers.

Bullfrog 2 is still very early in the design stage, but we already know some of the challenges we’ll be facing.

The first Bullfrog engine was built entirely in Objective-C and Cocoa and had some “interesting” performance challenges. One of the early design decisions I made was to avoid using OpenGL so I would not have to learn two entirely new frameworks to get the project completed.

This time around, one of the big goals is to migrate the rendering engine to OpenGL. We hope that this decision will lead to some huge performance benefits that will allow us to add new fun game-play features.

So we’ll probably have much to say on the OpenGL switch along with other technical hurdles we’ll likely face.

Stay Tuned

If you are interested at all about game development on the Mac, look for articles coming down the pipe about all things Bullfrog 2: design, development, brainstorming, and marketing.

Pretty Cool!

Back on August 15 I promised an article showing the traffic and download numbers resulting from submitting Bullfrog to various shareware download sites.

This sounded much easier than it turned out to be. I originally wanted to submit Bullfrog to each site one at a time. Measure the effectiveness of each submission and put together a nice chart of the results. The one thing I didn’t consider is that once you submit your application to one site, all the rest see the listing and automatically add the listing to their sites as well.

While this “service” hurt my measurement plans, it was a fascinating exercise to watch as Bullfrog organically found its way on to various shareware download sites. Due to this magical spread of download sources, it is impossible to give exact numbers as to which “submissions” where the most effective, but I was certainly able to glean overall trends.

Granted my sample size is only over the last two months, I think it is enough to get the gist of what is happening.

Traffic Trend

This first graph shows the overall web traffic to the domain outerlevel.com. This includes this blog, my company website, and all downloads.

This graph shows the overall traffic trend with the huge jump in numbers in August when Bullfrog was first submitted to MacGameFiles.com and then found its way to being Apple’s Kids & Learning featured download. Then in September, I released Bullfrog 1.2 which pushed Bullfrog back to the top of all the download listings.

The Numbers

Ok, so the graph is pretty (ooh, ah); but what about the hard numbers? All my site traffic statistics are generated using the AWStats Apache log analyzer. So they are only as accurate as this utility’s numbers.

This table clearly shows that “build it and they will come” did not work for me. From February 2006 – July 2006 traffic was primarily organic search, from one of my blogs, with a few still coming from the OMG contest site.

Referrers

I was not able to prepare a table of Bullfrog downloads by site referrer, but I do have visits by referrer. Since the overwhelmingly high percent of referred visitors are direct Bullfrog downloads, we can assume that this shows the best download referrers, though the numbers and exact rankings are probably slightly off.

These numbers are only estimates and only reflect my results for my freeware game. Your results may vary greatly depending on your product, your target audience, the time of year, etc. But the trend is clear, if you want the greatest exposure for your Mac software possible, get it listed on Apple.com.

Bandwidth by Country

One thing of interest is that two of the top referrers are Japanese and one is French. I have not localized Bullfrog to any other language, but I would certainly consider it based on the above numbers and the following chart and table.

Side Benefits

Some of the numbers I have not included but were also quite positive are the traffic to my blog and to my other product and services pages. I have seen a significant jump in numbers to my LicenseKeeper product page and to my Consulting Services page.

I seem to have also been added to some Mac Consulting and Cocoa Development recruiters’ lists and have received several inquiries since the surge in traffic began. The increased exposure directly related to this 8 week development project of a simple little freeware game has had some nice unexpected side benefits.

Conclusion

I hope you found this information interesting and helpful. It was certainly interesting for me and I hope that the increased traffic continues. Please keep in mind that these numbers are specific to my experience and that they are not exact. Your results may vary greatly.

I’m pretty excited about this release. There are bunch of cool new things in this version:

• Automatic Software Updates using Andy Matuschak’s awesome Sparkle Framework
• Online High Scores
• Pause Button
• Screen Shot Button
• Several bug fixes

Download Bullfrog 1.2.0 for Free

The “critical” bug has been squashed and all that remains is the new mystery feature.

This morning I finished up a rough and dirty prototype of a new Online Scoreboard. I thought it would be fun to have a little friendly competition between Bullfrog players of the world.

So, I’m officially announcing the big feature of Bullfrog 1.2: the Online Scoreboard.

When a player achieves a personal high score, Bullfrog will optionally check the online database over the internet to see how the score fairs against all other submitted scores. Players will be able to recheck their global rankings at anytime to see if anyone has out done them. Scores will also be viewable via your favorite web browser from a link on the Bullfrog product page.

If all goes well, this shouldn’t push this release out too much further.

Unfortunately, my weekend diversion has taken a bit more time out of the LicenseKeeper development schedule than I had originally planned, but I should be back on track shortly.

In the week that the code has been simmering, I received a bug report for a serious bug that has also lead me to think about one more piece of functionality to add — though I’ll keep it under wraps for now.

Depending on how long it takes me to track down the bug and implement the new feature, Bullfrog will probably be delayed about 1 week.