Me too (sort-of). On Android. 2 years ago.<p><a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.selticeapps.snowboard" rel="nofollow">https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.selticeapp...</a><p>My stats: I only have a little over 21K downloads, and the non-ad version has only made a few bucks. Ad revenue equates to a couple movie tickets every so often I guess. Wrote it in Monkey-X for cross-platform functionality, but only ever put it on Android for some reason.<p>I've done no marketing. Never been featured. My dad likes it. I'm 35. I get sadder with every period I type.<p>EDIT: I wouldn't normally post self-promotion type stuff on HN, but I think it applies here because I did write a similar game, coded it by hand, put in the time, made my own silly graphics, but my stats represent the other 99% of us game devs that rarely get featured and remain off the radar. Some call our apps pollution in the app store, but those of us who legitimately write them are proud of them none-the-less, even if they make no money, though we'd honestly like them to.
Who is "we?" At first I thought you did the whole thing by yourself and was going to say I'm always amazed by the people who can design and code, especially a game. Seems impossible. Great stuff regardless how many people worked on it though. That's insane you did literally no marketing and the App Store picked it up like that, especially these days, congrats!
For 200k downloads, I would think there would be a few more ratings on the app. My app Orb has about 2000 downloads and about the same number of ratings. I do like the game graphics quite a bit and I love the simplicity.<p>[1] - <a href="https://joeblau.com/orb/" rel="nofollow">https://joeblau.com/orb/</a>
This looks gorgeous. On a related note you can get the original game too - <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/skifree/id588839086?mt=8" rel="nofollow">https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/skifree/id588839086?mt=8</a>
Not as pretty though :)
Does anyone know the process Apple uses to decide to feature an app?<p>Is there a process completely separate from initial approval that goes through every new app, or does it just come down to piquing the interest of someone in the approval process?<p>I'm not trying to take anything away from this game, or its developers, but this sort of success in the first week from a developer with only one other app in the app store seems akin to hitting the lottery.
Super nice, dude!<p>I made a port (rather than a remake, like yours, with fancy new graphics ;) for the web which works on mobile: <a href="https://basicallydan.github.io/skifree.js" rel="nofollow">https://basicallydan.github.io/skifree.js</a>. It has the monster and snowboarders.<p>Yours is much prettier though :D Nice work and well done on the success!
There's a constant background noise in your homepage video that doesn't seem to be related to what's happening in the game. Is that intentional?