Posted on September 7, 2009 - by Eric

Rock Paper Laser FREE! is out!

Rock Paper Laser! Free is now available on the app store after 10 days in the queue. The approach we did for this one is to retain all the core functionality and modes but stripped away everything that is not essential. 90% of the sound effects are gone, the tattoo help are always activated (discarded the 2nd spritesheet), and the backgrounds are whittled down to one. The cuts resulted in a reduction of the app size by 24%. But with the Unity3d, Agon Online and other 3rd party stuff in it, it just wasn’t possible to go below the desired 10mb.

One cool thing we did in our lite version is how the full and the lite version shared the same leaderboard. The big difference is the Lite app only has 3 lives for the players while the full version had 5. So lite players will still be able to compete with everyone but will have a harder time getting higher scores. As a side effect. leaderboards are also very much populated.

We included a 2 player mode but in RPL version only. The free app is ad powered by Mobclix, as part of the experiment in testing these ad networks. We originally considered adwhirl, tapjoy and greystripe but went with mobclix at the last minutes due to conflicts with the other ad provider’s SDKs.

As expected, the lite version is now in the hands of brutal players and low-star reviews are trickling in, paid app customers are rating it highly so its the usual disconnect found between paid vs lite ratings.

If you have some free time, please download it here and try it. Leave a rating and give us feedback.  Our 1st day had over 700 downloads which looks promising. We are still observing how it all plays out. We had fun making our 1st iPhone and after a few weeks, we will write a postmortem and lessons learned with our forays into the iPhone app market.