Monsters in Hawaii!

With all the activity these past 3 weeks, we had one technical issue (with Azure) that I'll describe in another post, and one non-technical issue.  The non-technical was that someone  in Hawaii posted a one-star review on the Play store, saying they installed the app, saw no monsters, then uninstalled.  Its true, I never generated any monsters in Hawaii.  The reason I never generated any there is because I had to do separate boundaries and generating for that area, and I wasn't sure the small area and population were worth it.  I told Kathleen this, and she said she'd sent emails to geocachers in Hawaii too.

So I quickly started generating monsters in Hawaii.  Using my new monster viewer, I could see the ones I was generating.  Of course, I'm bounding the islands with rectangles, so many are ending up in the water.  And many more end up in huge areas of forest, since that's what most of Hawaii is.  I started focusing on Honolulu then.  My initial numbers weren't making as many there as I hoped so I kept increasing it.  After a couple hours of testing and generating, I had the islands pretty well covered.  I then replied to the one-star review with:

"We are sorry for the inconvenience. You are correct that monsters had not made their way to Hawaii...until now! Now there are thousands of monsters all over the islands, so we hope you will try the app again, catch many monsters, and reconsider your rating. No need to re-register, the account you had made before will still work. Thank you!"

No adjustment to the review yet though.  But I also emailed all users in the database with home state of Hawaii to apologize and tell them the monsters were there now.  The good news is someone found one the next day and posted a message on the Facebook page!  That was good to see.

Monster Cache European Launch

Once Apple approved the latest Monster Cache version on iOS, we were ready to launch in Europe!  I'd already generated all the monsters a couple months ago or so.  I tried to use about the same monsters / square mile proportions as the U.S..  But when using the monster viewer, it still seemed like there were too many empty patches, so I added a lot more level 1 monsters than my initial calculations (And around the same time I generated another million level 1 monsters for the U.S., to try to reduce empty spots in U.S. as well).

To do the launch, I just went into the app configuration areas in both Android and iOS and selected all the new countries in which I wanted to release.  It was pretty much that easy, after all the other preparations had been made in the application itself.  Oh yeah, I also had to add the new countries to our "Supported Countries" table in the database so that they would show up on the registration form for people to indicate where they are from.

Next was promoting it.  I only had two leads there.

1. When we first made the beta and the Vimeo video a year ago, a German blogger had found Monster Cache and blogged about it.   Unfortunately, Monster Cache wasn't ready for Germany at that time.  Now that it was, I tried to comment on that blog post to let them know, but the comment never got approved.
2. As a result of that post, 3 German people had signed up a year ago during that beta.  I had had to email them to tell them we weren't ready for Germany.  So now I was able to email them again and let them know it was ready!  But I didn't hear back from any, nor did it seem like any started playing.

Even though both of those ideas seemed to fail, we started getting sign-ups from Germany and the UK.  As it stands now, we have 9 German players on the Legends board, and one from the UK.  Current Legend board total is 172 players with 2693 monsters found.  And we got our first German In App Purchase too.

Here is the full list of European countries for which I generated monsters and released the app, along with their approximate square miles, which I think I got from Wikipedia.  The countries I chose were essentially based on wanting to get the biggest Western European countries and then including other countries that fell within the large box that bounded all of those.  Not sure why Apple did not provide the capability to release in Boznia and Herzegovina.

UK	94060
Ireland	32595
Spain	194897
Portugal	35655
France	211209
Germany	137847
Belgium	13120
Netherlands	16485
Switzerland	15943
Austria	32383
Italy	116304
Slovenia	7819
Croatia	21829
Czech Republic	30365
Boznia and Herzegovina	19741	Android only

Emails to Geocachers

After I got back from my fishing trip on September 8th and we wanted to send emails to geocachers that weekend of the 13th.  Somehow, we didn't get around to it, but we did try one new promotion that weekend.  We put up a poster at Kansas Coffee Company in Olathe that had a picture of a Cyclops Bunny and said "There is a Cyclops Bunny here", with a short description of the game and some QR codes for download links.  Very nice of our friends there to put the poster up.  It has its own referral code, but I haven't seen anyone sign up with it yet.

Anyway, we thought about sending the emails on the Sunday of the next weekend, the 22nd, but realized we'd rather send them out on a Thursday so that people might use right away on the weekend without forgetting about it.  So finally, we started sending out emails on the 26th.  Kathleen had a list of 230 or so emails she got from web sites.  We sent them in batches of about 30 at a time and sent all 230!

Soon, we got rejection notices from Google saying that all of the email but one had been rejected as potential junk mail, i.e. spam.  I guess technically you could say they were spam, in that they were unsolicited emails trying to promote something to a large number of people we don't know.  But on the other hand, they were very specifically targeted to people who put their emails online because they weer interested in geocaching.  We do think they'll like it and they can try it for free to decide for themselves, so we don't feel too bad about sending the emails.

Since only 30 got out that first night, Kathleen tried sending more the next day and only got another 10 or so out before getting the message again.  And then maybe 10 more the next day.  That resulted in about 8 sign-ups, and 2 more people on the leader board, consistent with our ratio of about 75% of signups never finding a monster.  And interestingly, one Like of Monster Cache on Facebook, so that was nice.  But still not quite yet the impact we were hoping for.

There were 111 on the Legends board last week, and 113 now after the first 50 emails.

Geocaching: Can't find cache

Today I tried to find a virtual geocache using a different virtual geocaching game that a friend told me about.  Since MonsterCache is also a virtual geocaching game, I figured I better check out some of the competitors.  This one was actually more like a regular geocache than our monsters are because you have to find a physical sticker that someone else placed somewhere.  When you find it you're supposed to scan a bar code on the sticker to show you found it.

I hate to say it, but it reminded me why I found regular geocaching frustrating.  Its a lot of fun when you find the canister -- or whatever is hidden -- and see what's inside.  But its frustrating when you can't find it, and that's what happened today.

I drove near the spot on the map where the phone app indicated this virtual geocache was.  It was just off of a walking trail in the woods.  I parked, got on the trail, went into the woods towards the marker.  As I neared where the marker was indicating, I came to a clearing.  That seemed promising.  But after 10 minutes, at least, of walking around, looking in and under logs, I couldn't find anything.  Hard to imagine that another geocacher moved it.  Maybe some non-geocacher happened across it and took it, but most likely it was just hidden too well for me to find, or the point on the map was off, or the GPS was off.... I don't know.  But the point is, I couldn't find it and felt like I wasted my time.

I got back in my car, and turned on MonsterCache and saw that there was a troll a quarter mile away, so I went and found that right away, which made me happy.  Again, I know it is rewarding to find a hidden physical geocache after you look for it for a while, but I hope that others will agree with me that there's also a big advantage to finding the cache/Monster quickly and moving on to the next one!