Indie Developer Tool Belt

I want to share some of the tools I have in my Indie Developer Tool Belt.  I’ve acquire a pretty good collection in the 20 months since I started this adventure.  Some of these may be old news to you and some you may not have tried.  I’m curious for you to respond with your arsenal of tools you use on a daily/weekly basis.

My first tool I use is “Snapz Pro X” to make my marketing videos.  You can see the results here.  Pretty good for my low-end Macbook Air.  I tried various free tools, but found the $69 for this to be well spent.  It’s one of the few that gave me a decent framerate and didn’t spin up my cpu while recording.

I also spend a lot of time in Gimp making my graphics.  It took me a while to get use to the interface and the X11 windows, but I’m pleased with the results I get.  Recently I moved to Photoshop (mostly because this is what most 3rd party outfits want from you), but I still find myself going back to Gimp for small little edits.

For my sounds I mostly use GarageBand and Audacity.  Between the two (and some excellent soundtracks from Kevin at incompetech.com) I’ve been able to furnish most of the sounds for my games.  I think sometime people forget that there are some really good sound effects in GarageBand that are free to use.

My most useful utility is AppViz.  I couldn’t live without it.  It scrapes your iTunes Connect account and gives a great view into your sales reports.  It would be nice if Apple provided an API for this, instead of everyone having to screen-scrape and breaking every time there is an update.  The guys at ideaswarm are quick to provide fixes however, so this has rarely been an issue for more than a day.

Two web-based tools I use everyday are APPlyzer and appannie.  Both do a great job of tracking your rankings.  Again… I think they’ve figured out how to scrape the iTunes pages to figure out rankings up to the Top 1000, something Apple doesn’t provided in their standard RSS feed (I think it only supports up to the Top 300).  Since most of my apps hover around the 300-1000 mark, it’s nice to be able to see if my marketing attempts have any affect.   With APPlyzer you can follow your daily rankings for FREE  (and also in combination with AppViz).  You can also follow your rankings hourly for a low price per month.  appannie is also free (while in beta).  appannie also fills the role AppViz does and graphically displays your sales data.  I even imported all my archived sales reports (which I easily exported from AppViz) and the numbers match pretty closely.

Also as an indie the networks I’ve joined have been invaluable.  I think OpenFeint is a great way to have contact with your users and post announcements (I love that a badge shows up when they enter the UI).  PlayHaven is great for cross-promoting and getting exposure from bigger titled apps.  I would also encourage indies to check out the Indie Apps Alliance and consider joining.  And my 2 favorite indie-friendly websites would have to be The Portable Gamer and AppVader.  These are some of the friendliest and pro-indie guys I’ve come across.

So that’s my tool belt.  Please let me know any tools you use.

On a concluding note… Jiggle Balls HD got released last Friday.  Immediately it was put on the iPad’s Entertainment New & Noteworthy list.  I’m pretty excited, as it’s the first time I’ve ever been featured.  Unfortunately, I’ve heard being on the iTunes App Store only lists aren’t as lucrative as being on the lists visible on the device.  I’m happy to get recognized but it’s still unclear to me as to if this is automated or someone at Apple took note.  Thanks Apple!

Also check out my interview on The Portable Podcast this week.

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