Last weekend, I dropped the price of my iOS board game, Five-O, from $1.99 to free. I planned to run the sale for one day only, to promote the latest update, which added universal app support. As you’ll see, the sale was a big success, and the decision to let it run for a second day was a no-brainer.

Just flipping the switch to make your app free gets you instant press from websites and apps that automatically track price drops. AppShopper is my personal favorite. Posting on Reddit might seem like shameless self-promotion, but they love to hear about paid apps that have gone free, especially apps from indie developers, so long as you keep it in the proper subreddits. Touch Arcade also has a forum to post announcements of this kind. There are probably more places you could publicize a sale, but I stopped there, and spent the rest of my day playing Five-O online and periodically checking its rank in the App Store.

By the end of the day, Five-O was still climbing the charts. It was close to ranking in the top 10 iPad board games in the US. That was pretty cool, but I wanted to see how high it could go. The risk of leaving it free for another day was small. Losing a day of sales is no big deal. Obscurity, I have learned, is the real enemy in the App Store.

The next day, things really got interesting. I got an email notifying me that Five-O was on the “Apps Gone Free” list, a popular column featuring hand picked apps which have dropped from paid to free. Another email let me know that a German blogger had written about Five-O, which helped boost its rank in Germany. It was also doing surprisingly well in France, China, and Canada. Here are the rankings I am most proud of.

#1 iPhone Board Game in France
#2 iPhone Board Game in China
#1 iPad Board Game in Canada
#1 iPad Board Game in Germany
#1 iPad Family Game in Germany
#5 iPad Game in Germany
#7 iPad App in Germany

And in the US

#2 iPad Board Game
#7 iPhone Board Game
#9 iPad Family Game
#10 iPhone Family Game
#35 iPad Game
#94 iPhone Game
#100 iPad App

In 48 hours, Five-O was downloaded over 43,000 times! Almost 50,000 games were completed during those two days. It went from 250 DAU (daily active users) before the sale, to 3,800 on May 5th, and 22,000 on May 6th. Now came the time to see if I could turn this success into revenue. At midnight on May 6th, Five-O went back to it’s pre-sale price of $1.99.

Switching a free app back to paid in the App Store immediately obliterates its ranking. So it was with Five-O. But, much to my delight, it started to climb back up again. Five-O was soon hovering around #50 in the paid board games category on both iPhone and iPad. On May 10, another popular German website featured Five-O in an article, leading to a #124 top grossing game rank in Germany and my highest daily revenue to date. Worldwide, revenue for the week was up 1600% from the week prior.

Dropping Five-O from paid to free was an excellent decision. It cost me nothing and increased my game’s exposure immensely, leading to Five-O being featured on several websites that would have otherwise not known about it. And, the thousands of new fans will hopefully spread the game through word of mouth. To any of my fellow developers out there, if you’re a in a similar situation, with an app that’s getting good reviews but not a lot of exposure, I’d definitely recommend trying this strategy.

The nice thing about turn-based multiplayer is that not all players need to be present in a game at the same time. That makes it ideal for multi-taskers. After finishing your turn, you can leave the game to do something else, and the match will go on without you. When it’s your turn again, you will receive a notification to come back and play your turn. This also allows you to play in lots of different matches at the same time.

To try out online multiplayer in Five-O, you’ll need to be running iOS 5 on your iPad. As some people have recently discovered, if you’re not running iOS 5, and you try to download this version of Five-O, you’ll get an error saying the app is incompatible with your device. If you see that, don’t worry. It just means you need to update your iPad through iTunes on your computer.

I am looking forward to many challenging matches against you guys. Watch for my username, “CodeVandal”. So far only two people have managed to beat me.

The first step was coming up with an idea for a board game. It was around this time that Sudoku was becoming really popular. I remember thinking about how Sudoku puzzles were a lot like crossword puzzles but instead of words and clues, they used numbers and logic. I wondered if other word games might work with numbers instead of words, and came up with the idea of creating a number game that would be played like Scrabble.

I’m certainly not the first person to come up with the idea of a crossword-style number game. In fact, I remembered playing a board game like this growing up. But, when I searched the Internet, I found that there weren’t any available for the computer yet. So, I decided to make one. I started by crafting the rules, mocking up a game board, and coming up with a catchy name, Five-O.

It didn’t take long to make the first playable prototype of my new game. It didn’t score your plays, it didn’t even check that they were legal plays, but it was good enough to see that Five-O had potential to be a really fun game. So, piece by piece, I wrote the rest of the code for setting up games, handling turns, and validating and scoring plays. And, once all that was in place, I wrote the AI code for the computer opponent. It was really cool to see it all come together.

A screenshot from the original Mac version of Five-O

After putting the finishing touches on Five-O, I spent some time looking for a publisher. Having no luck, I considered self-publishing through a new online store called MacGamesArcade. But, graduating from college, moving to a new city, and starting a new job soon consumed my time and Five-O sat on the shelf, unpublished.

Then, during the summer of ’08, I started developing iPhone games. The App Store was just what I needed to finally get my games out into the world. It meant learning Objective-C, Cocoa, and a whole new style of user interface design, but something about writing apps for mobile devices was just so much cooler than writing plain old computer games, so I dove in head first.

My first iPhone app was nothing to write home about. It was a Pac-Man style arcade game with simple graphics and gameplay. I considered developing a version of Five-O for the iPhone, but I just couldn’t imagine it being much fun on such a small screen, so I worked on other projects in the meantime.

When Apple introduced the iPad, my first thought was “I’ve got to get Five-O on that.” The large touch screen was going to be great for playing board games. And, with my experience developing iPhone games, I knew I could get the job done.

It took a lot of evenings and weekends, but I got Five-O working on the iPad. Through all the rewriting, refactoring, and tweaking, it matured into a nice little game, with decent graphics and a slick user interface. I want to thank the Ludum Dare community for helping me power through the final stretch of development. They ran an “October Challenge” for indie developers where the challenge was to finish a game and sell one copy before November 1st. I worked hard to meet that deadline, and I’m proud to say Five-O got its first sales on October 30th, 2010.

Since then, Five-O has been featured by Apple in the New & Noteworthy and What’s Hot sections on the App Store, and it has been lauded in reviews on several different websites. The success has been really encouraging, and I’ll just wrap up by saying thanks to everyone who has purchased Five-O or supported me in other ways. I plan to continue development on this game, and I’m excited to see how far I can take it.

In the lite version of Five-O, the player gets a splash screen every time they launch the game reminding them of what’s available in the full version. They can tap the Learn More button to jump straight to the App Store page for Five-O, or they can tap the Play Lite button. The games are played exactly the same as in the full version, but the player can only play against the medium level computer opponent. If they want to play against their friends, or play against a harder computer opponent, they’ll have to upgrade.

When I started designing the game, I looked to other popular games for inspiration. I came up with the idea of making a game similar to Tetris Attack, but with game mechanics similar to PopCap’s Chuzzle. The idea was that you would try to match colored blocks to make them disappear before the board filled up, like in Tetris Attack, but you would move the blocks by sliding whole rows at a time, like in Chuzzle. Some of the pieces would also have locks on them, so you couldn’t move certain rows.

There were lots of technical challenges along the way. Early on, I made the decision that I wanted the player to be able to slide the rows even while blocks were simultaneously falling down or disappearing in other rows. After all, in a game where speed is important, nothing is more frustrating than when the game doesn’t let you move fast enough. Implementing this took some clever programming, but it was worth it. Another challenge was keeping track of combos for scoring.

I finished DropOut and turned it in at the end of the semester… and then I kept working on it. I added the “falling star” blocks, which made the game a bit more interesting. I also sent it out to friends and family and made changes based on their feedback. I knew the game was good when it got the mother-in-law seal of approval.

About a year went by where I didn’t work on DropOut much, and then the iPhone arrived on the scene. That’s when it dawned on me that DropOut was perfect for a touch screen. Being able to touch and slide the rows was just so much more elegant than using keyboard controls on a computer. The App Store was also proving to be a great tool for indie developers to self publish. So I ported the code from Java to Objective-C, redesigned all the graphics, added sound effects and online high scores, polished it up, and submitted the game to Apple.

DropOut was approved and released, and even though it didn’t make a big splash in the casual games market, it was a great learning experience and I really enjoyed working on it. Seeing high scores posted from all around the world was especially gratifying. Since the initial release, I’ve added, through updates, background music, a color blind mode, and even two new game types – Puzzle and Blitz. I don’t have any plans for a major update any time soon, but if I find time in the future, I think a multiplayer version might be a lot of fun. I’d also love to hear suggestions from you. Leave a comment if you have some!