That being said, for Episode 1 we did not have the music created specially for the game. We spent over a week listening to countless pre-recorded tracks before settling on the ones in the game and we couldn’t be happier with our choices.

For Episode 2 though we really wanted to have a custom soundtrack written just for us so we turned to the extremely talented Richard J Moir, not only does he write and direct films he also makes music, very very nice music. He’s also a fan of Episode 1 and knew exactly what we were after.

Richard has written eight songs that fit the game perfectly. We are very excited to get them into your hands, well ears, and are planning on releasing them as an OST on our site if people would be interested in that sort of thing. If you are please get in touch!

As a little teaser here is the first 30 seconds of one of the tracks, titled “Effugere“:

[audio http://www.glitchgames.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/effugere-snippet.mp3 |titles=Effugere |artists=Richard Moir|remaining=yes|animation=no]

If the above player doesn’t work the direct link to the track is here.

Also, if there any indie developers reading this that ever need music written please get in touch with Richard via his site or Twitter.

Welcome to our new site, just like our new office ( see above ) it’s not quite finished yet but we love it anyway. Most but not all of the content from the previous site has been transferred over and we’ll be adding the rest over the next few days/weeks/months depending on how busy we are.

Speaking of busy, on top of continued development on episode 2 of Forever Lost we are also going to run a 48 hour game jam for Corona SDK developers called GIG Jam.

That’s it for now, just a short post to say hi to the new site.

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.

For comparison, when we went free a few months back by ourselves we got around 60,000 downloads which we were very happy with.

For those that aren’t interested in colour charts and the like I will summarise quickly here, we got 598,085 downloads and 235 new reviews on iOS and 85,000 downloads on Android ( however Android being what it is that was a special Free version of the app that now has been pulled ) and 160 ratings.

Needless to say we are very happy with those numbers. We don’t know how much of an effect, if any, this will have on our paid downloads over the next few days but we will update this post with those numbers when they come in.

Our website also temporarily went down as we were getting over 30,000 hits an hour according to our host.

First, here is an image showing the downloads over the last 7 days:

A look at the daily IOS ranks shows we jumped up the free charts pretty quickly:

AppTurbo is currently not in every country, for reference these are the stores that it was targeting:

Here is a more detailed listing of the ranks, the list keeps going with other countries but we figured this was enough to show how well the promo worked:

Our total reviews jumped up quite nicely too which currently we think will be one of the biggest reasons for doing a promo such as this as it dramatically helps to increase discoverability:

In conclusion, we now have 600,000 more ( hopefully happy ) customers that are looking forward to episode 2 when we release it and if a fraction of those new users decide to buy the game it will be a pretty good day for us.

Update 8/3/13 – 1 Week Later:

One week has now passed since the promotion and we decided it was a good time to share just a few more numbers to show the affect it has had on our paid sales. As you can see from the following image  ( click to embiggen ), before the promotion we were getting around $50 a day on iOS.

These sales then naturally disappeared on the day of the promo and then shot up to $808 on the day immediately after it. They then started dropping off again and have now just about settled down to slightly above pre-promo numbers. The next few days will tell us if they actually have levelled off or just the drop-rate has decreased.

We have also seen a similar effect, yet to a lesser degree, on Android.

Overall we are happy with these numbers, in fact they are better than we expected. The reviews, and fan e-mail, are also still coming in pretty constantly so that’s nice too!