Masters of Pie is a 3D, character centric, London based creative studio created by Matt Ratcliffe and Karl Maddix. We are currently a year old and now have a couple of commissioned mobile apps on the market. Blue nose friends – Tatty Puppy, which is set of mini-games aimed at children 4-8, and Protrain Taekwondo which is a 3D educational app for Taekwondo practitioners of all ages.
Changing times
At Masters of Pie, we have seen a shift in games development within the last 5 years, most notably from small indie studios where alpha/beta products are released and monetised to an audience much earlier in development cycles. Probably the best example of this is Minecraft, which was sold as a reduced price alpha for about a year before it was officially released in 2009. I think instinctively what these indies are doing is simply taking a Lean approach to producing product. I won’t spend too much time explaining Lean practice (Eric Ries does a good enough job here on his blog), but in essence, lean encourages value to be generated quickly from products, reducing budget and time wastage; this can be very useful for small development teams. Also, by building a community quickly around your product through testing and fast release, you gain insight much more quickly into what your customers want, plus you generate buzz and increase discoverability.
However, taking a lean, iterative development approach with the mobile platform is challenging. There are certain barriers to testing on mobile that you can take for granted with browser/PC based development. Things like A/B testing, fast iteration, and rolling out updates are incredibly difficult on iOS because of the way Apple’s Appstore is built. Spending a ton of budget and time on version 1 of your app with little playtesting or the ability to test with your audience is incredibly risky (a great write up on exactly that can be be found here).
Is Testflight a dodo?
If you have released through the Appstore, you will have likely used Testflight. Although the integration is excellent with the iOS dev portal, keeping you tied into 100 total devices (which cannot be changed for a year with your developer license) is a real pain. You can get an enterprise developer license which costs $299 but you will only be allowed to distribute from within your organisations and not publicly. In our experience, as we are small development studio who work with external clients this is not at all practical. Add to this the convoluted certification and provisioning process and you can see the sheer amount of hassle and time required to test on a larger scale is prohibitive. Lastly, once you get your app validated and past review on the Appstore, rolling out updates can take days and sometimes even weeks…
Which is why we switched to Android for testing.
How switching to Android helped our testing
As creatives (and I have been guilty of this in the past) we instinctively want to stay in our studio and make stuff, rather than actually reaching out and talking to the very people who will be using our product. This is usually because we want to avoid the difficult issue of them actually not liking it and forcing disruptive change in the project. This obviously gets harder the more time and budget we burn through. Secondly, if we do user testing and we don’t get enough of an appropriate audience to test with, it can be incredibly difficult to pull any meaningful data out of the testing sessions. But switching to Android for testing helped us ease through the challenges above and helped to facilitate a customer-facing iterative development cycle.
Google Play
Our first approach uses the recently updated Google Play developer console. This now features beta and alpha testing with your app. Essentially, this allows us to have a product on the Google Play store that is available for a controlled set of users only. You can even monetise your alpha/beta app through the store before it is even released.
You can then invite in as many testers as you want via Google+ and send them the link to the APK file (which is the build file for your app). As you can invite people without Google email addresses you can create a useful community testing portal for your product without too much hassle via Google+. Once you have an updated APK file, you roll that out onto the Google Play store (which updates within a few hours) and notify your testers via Google +. This way you can slowly build up your testers, even combining this with marketing an “invite only” beta testing phase for your audience. With this approach you can quickly get a build out to your customers, gather feedback through analytics, messages on Google+, emails etc and then release another build within the next few hours.
If you want to go completely DIY you can remove Google Play entirely from the process (which is $25 for a developer license per year). With sideloading, you can send anyone your APK build file via email, FTP etc. All the user needs to do is allow installation of non-market apps in the settings and they can install the build. Very easy!
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