March 1st 2012 was a very important day for Glitch, it was the day our first app ever as a company was released; My Colourful Life.
We were very excited about this, not only because it was our first app but also because we really liked it. We thought we had something special that was a little different to most kids books available.
Working away in our little office.
We didn’t like the idea that we would have to wait a full day to find out what the sales numbers were so I decided to put in some code that would send a notification to our server every time someone hit the Purchase button for the IAP unlock. We then hooked this up to a simple auto-refreshing webpage sitting on a large TV screen in our office. This way we would know every time someone made a sale. If our life was a movie this would be the scene in The Social Network where they were about to celebrate hitting a milestone user count.
On the morning of the release we came in and looked at the number, it was already on around 20 and we were very happy and thought that was that. Then throughout the day the number just kept climbing, every refresh it had gone up. This is when we started to get really excited. In the back of our minds we couldn’t fully believe it but in the front, i.e. our faces, all we did was smile and talk about our instant and monumental success.
Then the Apple sales reports came in. 756 downloads and 8 IAP purchases. To this day we don’t actually know what happened, it was either some issue with networks meaning the message got sent multiple times, some form of piracy or an error in my code. Naturally the third option couldn’t possibly be true.
Since then sales did pick up a bit but peaked quickly and vanished faster.
However even earlier than our first app was released, while we were waiting for approval, we took part in Techority 2012 and won with our entry The Hauntening. We later released this app to gauge interest in this genre and as it turned out there was a fair bit.
With approval done and the release date set as the 1st of March we then started work on another app, Kids Love Animals, which was completed before My Colourful Life was released, and then later released on March 26th to similar levels of critical and commercial success.
While waiting for Kids Love Animals to be approved we decided a change of pace was in order and moved away from children’s apps to start work on a full length adventure game owing to the apparent popularity of The Hauntening. This was eventually named Forever Lost and has been by far our most successful app.
One of the features of Forever Lost is a camera that allows you to take in-game photos of clues, rooms, puzzles or anything else that takes your fancy which you can then scribble notes on to help you remember things. We decided that we didn’t want to constrain this ability to one single game and managed to make two further apps with it ( which ended up having a similar success rate as our previous ones ) namely My First Colouring Book and Wordoodle ( which incidentally has probably our best Credits screen yet ).
While still developing Forever Lost we made and released one further app, an actual game that was called Blox which although has had quite a lot of great user reviews and feedback it hasn’t been much of a high-earner. It’s pretty fun though so you should check it out if you can
Then on October 1st we released Forever Lost: Episode 1 to generally very positive reviews and decent sales numbers with it still going fairly consistently today. It was also recently released on Android to more nice user reviews and the ever present high levels of piracy.
Since then we have released a companion app called Forever Lost Camera which, as you’d expect, allows you to take photos of stuff around you then scribble notes all over them as well as a music creation app called Mixis.
Currently we are working on Forever Lost: Episode 2 which we hope to release in a few months if everything goes to plan but to paraphrase Moltke the Elder; no plan ever survives first contact with Glitch.
And finally in January this year, a year after the company was formed, we moved into a new office. As you’ll see in the following pictures that even though it is bigger we haven’t allotted any extra space for ourselves as we are still using the same monitor stand we built for the first office. We simply have more room for “research” activities.
