Farkle Diced game for Halloween haunts iPhones, iPads and Android

I am a big fan of prMac press release service. Below is my recent release through them. Feel free to use it as an example for when you need to write a press release.

Bellingham, WA    Oct 14, 2011 in Games

[prMac.com] Bellingham, Washington – Smart Box Design announced today the release of Farkle Diced, a Halloween edition of their chart-topping and highly entertaining game Farkle Dice for iOS and Android. The Halloween edition includes new ghoulish artwork, engaging eerie sound effects, ghostly achievements and plenty of scary surprises. Farkle Diced, Halloween edition, has quickly become a top 10 downloaded game, in the Apple app store Dice category.

Farkle Diced for Halloween is an exciting fast paced dice game for 2 – 4 players. The goal is to survive until your reach 10,000 points. You can try to beat the undead computer players or your zombie friends. You’ll have hours and hours of wicked entertainment.

Smart Box Design is known for the attention they place on both the playability and design of their games, and Farkle Diced is no exception. It is humorously designed paying homage to the 1950s B horror movie genre. There are very few dice games available for Apple iOS and Android with the quality and attention to detail that went into creating Farkle Diced. The game, which can be customized to accommodate regional rules, is extremely easy for users to pick up and begin playing upon installation.

“We had a blast making the Halloween version,” said Todd Sherman, Smart Box Design’s president. “Our players are in for a real treat when they play this classic game wrapped in tongue and cheek spooky theme.”

Supported Languages:
* US English, Danish, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Serbian and Spanish

Device Requirements:
* iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad
* Requires iOS 4.0 or later
* 17.1 MB

Pricing and Availability:
Farkle Diced Halloween HD 1.0 is free and available worldwide through the App Store in the Games category. It is also available for the Android platform.

Smart Box Design, based in Bellingham, Washington, was formed in 2003 by game industry veterans who share a common vision of creating exciting, high-quality, strategy and thinking games for mobile users. Smart Box Design licenses, develops, and publishes apps for iOS and Android devices. The company has previously released Farkle Dice, Triples, and WordPop!, Word Monaco Solitaire and Word Watch. Copyright (C) 2011 Smart Box Design LLC. All Rights Reserved. Apple, the Apple logo, iPhone, iPod and iPad are registered trademarks of Apple Inc. in the U.S. and/or other countries. Android is a registered trademark of Google.

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Todd Sherman
President
206 409-6198
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Our game Farkle has had tremendous success in 2011. I put out this press release today.

Bellingham, WA – May 25, 2011 — Smart Box Design today announced the chart-topping highly entertaining game Farkle Dice for iOS and Android has been downloaded more than 500,000 making it one of the most successful dice games available.

Farkle offers players an opportunity to challenge friends or compete against a variety of “intelligent” computer opponents with a wide range of personalities—from cautious to daring—that will determine the level of risk each opponent is willing to take when deciding just how far to push their luck.

Farkle is an enormously popular game throughout the world. Players roll a set of six dice for points and can continue rolling the dice as long as their roll continues to yield points. Any non-scoring roll is called a Farkle and the player forfeits their turn and any points accumulated during that turn. Like most games of chance and skill, Farkle’s attraction stems from players hoping to beat the odds and roll a high scoring combination.

Smart Box Design is known for the attention it places on both the playability and design of its games, and Farkle is no exception. There are very few dice games available for Apple iOS and Android with the quality and attention to detail that went into creating Farkle Dice. The game, which can be customized to accommodate regional rules, is extremely easy for users to pick up and begin playing upon installation. It is beautifully designed with the rich hues of a felt and wooden game-playing surface surrounded by a western theme.

Many games feature computerized opponents that are programmed with varying degrees of difficulty (smart, smarter, and smartest). Farkle, rather, comes with a collection of computerized opponents that are programmed to employ different strategies and take various degrees of risk when deciding whether to continue rolling for points—just like different people that Farkle players will encounter as they play the real dice game.

“We are delighted to bring one of the all-time classic dice games to the Apple iOS and Android Markets,” said Todd Sherman, Smart Box Design’s president. “Our version of Farkle provides mobile device users with a great game that can be picked up when they only have a few minutes to spare, but user beware—once the game is started, it can be very difficult to put down!”

Farkle Dice is available either as a free ad supported app or without ads for 99 cents.

Farkle Dice has been translated into French, German, Spanish, Japanese and Korean.

Download Farkle Dice

Farkle Dice for iPhone / iPod touch
Farkle Dice – Free for iPhone / iPod touch
Farkle Dice for Android Phones and Tablets

About Smart Box Design

Smart Box Design, based in Bellingham, Washington, was formed in 2003 by game industry veterans who share a common vision of creating exciting, high-quality, strategy and thinking games for mobile users. Smart Box Design licenses, develops, and publishes games for iOS and Android devices. The company has previously released Farkle Dice, Triples, and WordPop!, a best selling strategy, puzzle, word creation game and continued the series with Word Monaco Solitaire and Word Watch.

The iPad is being marketed as a very casual device as demonstrated by Steve Jobs on stage while sitting on a couch. The only way he could have looked more relaxed would be if he was in a t-shirt and boxers drinking a beer. His point was well taken by many including my team, the iPad will be used in the living room, den or some other communal space. This makes the iPad a shared device. Let me say that again, unlike the iPhone, which you might loan to someone for a brief moment, such as a friend at a coffee shop, the iPad is meant to be a shared device.

What does this mean for WordPop!? We’ve concluded that WordPop! will be shared among family members or friends, thus we will need a sign-in. This will allow several family members to start and play their own games and it will allow individual players to save multiple games. This is fantastic feature. One game could be played with the goal of getting the highest score ever on Medium Level while another game could be dedicated to making high scoring words for the Global All Time Best Words List. Even better, another game could be saved for a child who wants to practice making words (we’ve heard from several parents they use WordPop! in this way). Another advantage of having a sign-in is we can get a name up front for the High Score and Best Words pages.

I for one can’t wait until Wyatt finished with sign-in as I too want to play several games at once each with a different goal.

Sign-In Peek

If you are a developer and thinking of having sign-in make sure to plan this up front as it is a complicated feature if not thought out early. You will want to list out which items are saved per player and which items should be global, such as posting scores to our server. If you would like further information about our sign-in flow, please feel free to email me.

Look for more peeks into our development of WordPop! for iPad in coming blogs. Please share this blog and follow Smart Box Design on Twitter.

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When reading the advice from Apple in the iPad Human Interface Guidelines it is clear the language and tone assumes the developer is coming from the iPhone and is in the process of converting their iPhone app to an iPad app. Thus someone came up with the idea of describing the iPad UI as flattening the iPhone version. This is really just a very odd way of saying, “You have more real estate to use, put everything on the screen that you can that is important, and no need to hide it on other screens like you did for the iPhone version.”

When Jim, Wyatt and I were redesigning WordPop! for the iPad we asked ourselves what additional elements would engage and entertain our players in addition to the game itself. One answer was game statistics. The Best Words and High Score Global List stats are very popular among WordPop! players. They compare the player’s current game and words to other players, which then acts as an incentive to do even better as you want to beat the current high score or best word on the global list. However, the stats were hidden in the menu (two taps away). By moving the stats out of the menu system and onto the game board would result in “Flattening the Design“.

However, we all felt it was not enough to just move the existing stats. Thus we decided to add more fun stats, many of which were recommended to us by players of WordPop! for the iPhone. When the iPad version of WordPop! is released, players will be able to compare their game to several new, important, and exciting stats that will act as another incentive per round and word to do better.

Look for more peeks into our development of WordPop! for iPad in coming blogs. Please share this blog and follow Smart Box Design on Twitter.

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ratings.pngMy team and I created WordPop! for iPhone. Like many developers we decided to create a “free” version of our game so potential players could try it before they purchased. Over the last six months I noticed ratings for our free version was lower than our paid version. I wondered if other developers were having the same experience. I did an analysis of the top 20 best selling games in November in the Games: Word category.

I compared the ratings from the Paid version to the Free Version. If the paid version had an average 3.5 rating and the free version had a 3.0 rating, then there was a .5 negative change.

N/A     45%
No Change    10%
.5  Neg Change    35%
1.0 Neg Change    5%
1.5 Neg Change     5%
Total         100%

Not one application had a better rating for the free version and 45% had worse ratings.

Then I was curious if ratings determine if an application will be a best seller.

5       5%
4.5   5%
4    25%
3.5 35%
3     25%
2.5    5%
Total 100%

I was surprised that 65% had 3.5 or worse rating.

Although a small sample and taken from the Word Games category I came to the following conclusions.

1.  Creating a free version was once thought of as an important strategy to getting noticed and to be a top seller. Since almost half (45%) of the top selling word games do not have a free version I no longer think this is true.

2. Either players of free versions are much more critical of apps in general or the free version is missing a feature that makes it higher rated

3.  You can be a best seller without having a free version

4. You can be a best seller with lower than average ratings

All in all, as a developer I no longer believe it is critical for my team to create a fee version to drive sales or to become a best seller. And I think the costs to make the free version may not justify the return on investment (ROI).

You can read more about our game WordPop! here and the free version, Diet WordPop! here.