Elevator Joe icon redux

Elevator Joe launched to pretty dismal sales last September, and it's taken me a while to come to grips with the realities of releasing a game as opposed to simply creating the art and moving on.  I'd considered writing about that, but I'm not sure I have it in me to go through that process just yet.  Instead I'd like to be a little positive, and talk about one of the ways we're thinking of to increase our downloads, and that's by updating the icon.  All of Kuyi Mobile's have a built in ticker that lets Erick (the owner of Kuyi Mobile and my partner on Elevator Joe) cross promote through his library of games.  We were hoping that this would provide a constant stream of downloads for Elevator Joe, since Kuyi Mobile's last game, Streetfood Tycoon, has amassed quite a few downloads.  Unfortunately this wasn't the case.  We're not sure why, but people just weren't clicking on the icons like they did Erick's other games.  There was ultimately no way to find out why this was happening, but one of the things we discussed was redoing the app icon to try to visually entice more people to download the game.  The above icon was our original app icon.  We're both satisfied with it, but it since there was nothing to lose by trying, I went ahead and redid the icon.

Here is the new icon.  I used some of the same color schemes Apple is using in its new UI as well as retaining Elevator Joe.  the colored bars are a reference to the new minigame that we added to the game, and the buttons are obviously in reference to the nature of the game, which is to simulate (in a really cute way) being an elevator operator.  If the original icon had one drawback it was that it didn't really explain the game in any way, and I was hopeful this new design would do just that.

So did it help?  Well, ultimately yes, although not as much as I would have hoped.  There was a small uptick in downloads after the update went live, but not enough to really change things.  We're hopeful that the new icon and other changes we made to the game have made it that much better, and that all it needs is some more marketing to push it over the edge.

I'd be very pleased if you could try out Elevator Joe and vote for it to be Coronalabs' November App of the Month (we were recently chosen as app of the week).  Also, if you think that the icon layout I used here is cool, head on over to the awesome appicontemplate.com and give some kind words (or better yet a donation!) to Michael Flarup.