Aurora Feint, the guys behind the hugely popular social gaming network “OpenFeint” have bestowed a great honor on Depict.  Depict has been named the next Gold game of the month!  OpenFeint Gold titles are selected for their high quality and exceptional use of OpenFeint’s social gaming features.  We’re proud to have joined the ranks with titles like, Fieldrunners, Jet Car Stunts and Bird Strike.

Header over to OpenFeint.com and check out the sweet landing page they’ve setup for Depict.  Be sure to check this page often because OpenFeint will be sponsoring a bunch of contests over the next few weeks.

UPDATE: Version 1.6 fixes the issue.  Available now.

Unfortunately, Depict is temporarily unavailable due to a critical error in the latest update.  We’ve already submitted another update and emailed Apple to get it rushed.

The error slipped past our testing because it only occurs on 3.1.x devices built for distribution.  Although we tested it on 3.1.x devices, we didn’t catch the bug because the configuration was different for the test build compared to the distribution build.

Sorry for the inconvenience, Depict will be back up and better than even in a few days.

Depict 1.5 is the largest update ever!  Depict looks better, runs on more devices, and connects you with friends like never before.  Here’s a list of the major new features:

• OpenFeint 2.5
• Universal App / iOS 4.0 Tested
• iPhone 4 support – Full resolution
• All add-ons included free (Avatar Creator, Lightning Round)
• Moderators – Special users who have tools for dealing with rude players in-game
• Chat phrases – Over 50 phrases to further express yourself
• New “Skilled Depictors” leaderboard – Earn stars to climb this ladder
• Improved main menu – Easier access to OpenFeint features
• Achievements are broadcast to other players
• Easier to add friends in and out of games
• Improved eraser – It’s usable now!
• Social media integration

In our continuing quest to find the best format for Depict, the next update will be a universal app with support for all iDevices, including iPhone 4.  We’re also unlocking all the features and doing away with the in-app purchases in favor of a $0.99 price point.  Version 1.5 will be available mid-July as a free update to existing Depict owners.

We’re very excited about this release because we have alot in store for Depict.  We’ll be issuing an announcement a bit later with more details about upcoming features and partnerships which we think will make Depict a household name.

If you’re a Depict HD owner, don’t worry, we’ve got you covered.  Anyone who failed to upgrade before the price change can email us and we’ll make sure everyone is taken care of. If you don’t want to upgrade, that’s fine too.  You’ll be able to use Depict HD for the foreseeable future.

UPDATE: Version 1.5 was submitted to Apple on July 9th.

Have you ever gotten to the end of a Pictionary game and wanted to keep playing, but you were too tired or drunk to play by the rules?  For us, it usually devolves into people taking turns drawing and everyone else shouting out answers.  We realized that this style of Pictionary is a lot of fun, so we decided to bring it to the iPhone.

The Goal: Concentrated Pictionary Goodness

In Depict, we wanted only the concentrated essence of Pictionary.  No board, no lengthy games or commitment, and most of all, NO TYPING. What we came up with was a multiple choice guessing game where players are rewarded based on how many people guess their drawing and how fast they can differentiate a drawing from a group of similar words. Don’t have much time? No problem, a game only last about 5 minutes.  Didn’t get enough? Stay as long as you like!

What Worked?

Core Gameplay
Aside from a few diehard Pictionary fundies, player response to this adaptation of the drawing-and-guessing formula was overwhelmingly positive. People continually email and leave reviews telling us they are addicted or that Depict is their favorite game on their device.

Avatars
Another thing players love are the simple, yet surprisingly engaging social interactions through avatars and ratings.  Even without the custom avatars add-on, players love to express their emotions using the iconic faces in the game.

No Signup
For some games, creating an account is unavoidable.  However, we wanted to avoid it if at all possible. Players simply login to the game with their OpenFeint account.  Or, if they don’t have one, they can play as a guest for as long as they want.

Dynamic Messaging
Knowing that things are bound to go wrong, we planned ahead so we would have a variety of ways to communicate with players in-app  without having to push an update. This has worked out very well, and it’s something we expanded on in Depict HD.  Now we have a specially-formatted web page on the main menu we can use for whatever content we desire.

Smartfox Server
The Depict game server runs on Smartfox, a multiplayer server platform written originally for Flash. Smartfox has proved to be easy to integrate with and very reliable. It has great tools and is very flexible. We were able to write a very efficient game plug-in for the server that consumes very little CPU, memory, and bandwidth per player. Having an efficient server has allowed us to keep our hosting costs down. The only downside is that Smartfox is a little pricey for indies and their support and sales team are a little slow at answering emails.

Failures, Misjudgments, and Other Shortcomings

Pixel Art is a Turn-off
It’s sad, but it seems like fewer people “get” pixel art every day. Despite a seemingly healthy retro revival in the game space, we’ve had a lot of complaints and misunderstandings about the pixel style.  Initially, I’ll admit that we got a little carried away, and there wasn’t enough detail in the drawings.  Despite fixing this, we still get complaints about it. Just how detailed do people think they can draw with their fat fingers anyway?  We’ve also gotten a lot of reviews phrased, “At first I passed it up because of the bad graphics, but then a friend recommended it and now I love it!”. If we were to start over, would skip the pixel art style all together.

Launch Woes and Monetization
Apparently, we weren’t the only ones who saw a need for a better Pictionary style game in the App Store.  Charadium and Draw! both launched within days of us, stealing a lot of our launch thunder.  Charadium saw immediate success as a $0.99 app, while Depict quickly fell into obscurity.  There are a couple key differences between the games to which we attribute this outcome:

1. - Charadium was created by an ngmoco employee and got more press and cross promotion as a result.
2. - Charadium’s icon isn’t pixel-art (see pixel-art fail above)
3. - Depict received no coverage from bloggers or Apple

Since a multiplayer game is no fun without someone to play with, we soon decided to make Depict a free app. Once free, Depict had no problem attracting players and maintaining high concurrent player levels.  However, every time we tried to switch back to $0.99, Depict fell hard.  After a few failed attempts, we decided to make it free forever with in-app purchases.

Being Free
Free is a bad place to be. Players love Depict, but the problem is, they don’t realize it until they play it. So far, the only way to get them to try it has been to offer the core game for free. This is something we are struggling with to this day. Here’s why free with in-app has been a disaster for Depict:

1. - It takes far too many downloads to produce enough conversions to make money. We were recently featured in the UK and saw downloads in the 10-20k per day range.  However, on each of these days, we made less than $200 (about 2% conversion rate).
2. - Free players have no equity in the game and are detrimental to the game’s community. Once we went free, a tidal wave a penis drawers infiltrated the game and we immediately had to change the way our moderation tools work. We are still working to find a good way of dealing with rude players.
3. - For the same equity reason, free players tend to rate apps lower.  People who didn’t pay anything for the game are more likely to quickly dismiss it, leading to the dreaded delete and rate.

Not Ready for a Lot of Players
The first time we were featured in the US, we had to switch back to $0.99 to prevent server overload. When we were featured in the UK, we wanted to ride the wave as high on the free charts as we could so we stuck with free. We quickly found ourselves paying for Smartfox license upgrades until we had upgraded all the way to the highest license (about $2700 in the end). Another issue we had was with hosting.  Originally we were hosted on Media Temple on a $50/month virtual dedicated server. The problem is that while we never came close to using our resource limits, they impose a limit on the number of simultaneous socket connections you can have at a time. We would have had to upgrade to their full-dedicated for over $700/month to get the number of socket connections we needed, even though were only using 10% of all other server resources allocated to us.  We tried calling them to work out a custom deal, but they refused.

Due to Media Temple’s failure to provide what we needed, we had to quickly find a new host in the middle of the night before the Depict hungry citizens of the UK woke up. Dedicated servers were not an option because those take at least 24 hours to setup.  We quickly narrowed it down to Go Daddy which was running a deal that seemed too good to be true. After talking to one of their techs and explaining what we wanted to use their dedicated virtual hosting for, he assured us it could handle it.  I was still very skeptical, but we didn’t have much choice.  This turned out to be one of the best hosting moves we’ve ever made and we’re huge Go Daddy advocates now.  We now pay less than $40/month to host Depict on Go Daddy’s virtual dedicated Windows hosting.

What Next?

While Depict hasn’t been profitable for us yet, we’ve manage to break even.  We’re excited about the iPad version and some of the new features we’ll be rolling over the next month. Some of our goals for the future are to improve the moderation tools and provide more ways for players to participate in the Depict community.

Would we do another multiplayer game after finding out how much work it is to maintain?  Armed with the knowledge and technology we have now, it would be a waste not to!

Depict HD has been approved and will be available along side the launch of the iPad.  The initial release of Depict HD is pretty much the same as the iPhone version except that it comes with all of the in-app purchases unlocked.  iPhone and iPad players will be able to play against each other so there should be plenty of people to play with.

Unfortunately, the iPad version of the OpenFeint SDK is not available yet, so iPad players will have to wait for the v1.1 to get OpenFeint features back.  As soon as they release it, we’ll put out the update the next day.

1.2 is packed with some really great updates, almost all of which were suggested by players. The biggest update is the switch over to a higher resolution, which we think really adds a lot.

• Higher resolution (2.5x higher)
• Guessing and drawing streaks
• OpenFeint 2.4
• Add Friends in-game
• Improved invite system
• Offline invites with push
• 13 new achievements
• 2 new leaderboards
• Clone custom avatars

Depict 1.1 is now available in the App Store. Make sure you update to unsure uninterrupted access to the game and access to all the new features. Watch a video here.

In case you haven’t heard, all of the features from version 1.0 are now free! If you’re looking to get more out of the game, have a look at the new in-app purchases: Custom Avatars and Lightning Round.

The Custom Avatars add-on unlocks an in-game avatar editor, which you can use to draw faces, symbols, and short words for use in the game.

Lightning Round is a frantic, guessing-only game type that leverages Depict’s huge database of stored player drawings. Drawings are shown to players in rapid succession with one goal: Be the first to tap the correct word for each drawing to earn points.

Other new features in version 1.1:

- Ignore player toggle
- Sound on/off
- Improved stability

The first update to Depict has been submitted to Apple. The big news in version 1.1 is in-app purchases. We have decided to keep the game free, and offer some $0.99 goodies for those who like the game and want to get a little more out of it. Other changes in this version include improved stability, OpenFeint chat, and an ignore player feature.

So what can you buy? Version 1.1 offers two in-app purchases:

Avatar Creator
This was one of the most requested features. In addition to the standard avatars, players can now draw unlimited custom faces, symbols, short words, etc and show them off in the game.

Lightning Round
A frantic, 1-minute long game where the goal is to guess as many puzzles correctly as possible. Drawings from past games are served up rapid fire as the players battle it out to see who can guess correctly first.

If this model works well, you can bet there will be more add-ons coming.

Depict has been approved an is on sale for just $0.99 for a limited time.

Grab it now in the App Store.