Replica Island Released!

I released Replica Island almost two weeks ago, just before I gave a talk about Android game development at the Game Developers Conference.  Here's the quick details:

• Home page: replicaisland.net
• Source: http://code.google.com/p/replicaisland/

Here's a QR Code you can scan to bring the game up in Market:

And here's a quick trailer video:

Whew, glad to get that stuff out of the way.

You might be wondering why I am posting this now instead of two weeks ago.  Well, I wanted to run an experiment.  I wanted to see what the game would do on Android Market with zero promotion.  So other than mentioning the game in my talk, I've not advertised Replica Island anywhere or done anything (other than a quick update to address control concerns) to make it particularly visible.  I wanted to see what would happen if I just left it alone for a while.

So after 10 days on Market, I'm sitting at about 18k installs and 4 out of 5 stars.  Not bad!  By comparing the data I get from the Market Publisher site to the data coming back via my own reporting system, I can tell that about 15% of users choose to opt-out of the anonymous metrics reporting system.  Which is great--I have tons of data from users who are cool with me having it.

As of today I've had Nicholai, my PR guy, turn on the PR faucet.  He's going crazy with press releases and other promotional tools.  The next experiment is to see what happens to my download growth rate once Nicholai has worked his magic.  Once that experiment has produced enough data, I'll post about it here.

I've also rewritten a lot of my data visualization tools to deal with the huge amount of data I am getting from users.  I'll write a post about the new system I am using to visualize the player death data next.

In the mean time, check the game out and let me know what you think!