Alien Star Menace

Sadly, our humble game has been removed from the Google Play Store, and with that it is no longer available on mobile.

Apple & Google *love* to update their app requirements every other week, and it’s a Task to stay on top of them, lest your app be removed. I’ve decided to forego the neverending maintenance that comes with mobile.

Fans kept asking for multiplayer in Alien Star Menace.

If you enjoyed Alien Star Menace, you may be interested in a board game by the same developer, Hero’s Crossing!

It’s a board game about building up a town in a video game RPG and selling resources to heroes who are passing through.

The game has a bunch of lovely pixel art made by some fantastic artists. 

It’s a deep strategy game centered on resource management and outwitting your opponents, something I know Alien Star Menace fans will dig. It’s not quite out, but it’s in late-stage development and could use your support.

Go check it out!

Welcome new iOS players!

It appears we’ve been getting significantly more downloads on iOS this month, in the 2-5x more than normal range. Again, no reasons that I can discern.

Alien Star Menace has been seeing healthy downloads and ratings that are holding steady long after I thought they would. Whatever changed our download numbers seems to be long-lasting, and our ratings have only increased the more people get their hands on it!

What’s more, the Android version is overtaking the iOS version in downloads per day! Given how markedly the Android version used to be dwarfed by iOS (a factor of 10 to 1), it’s fun to watch this shift. 

Alien Star Menace turned 2 today!

Well, the website did. The game is probably closer to a year and a half old. But Tumblr won’t give me a cupcake for that, so we take what we can get. 

We were mentioned by GameInformer you guys.

We hit the 10K download mark on Android! Woop woop, Happy Thanksgiving everyone! 

Our rating has also been gradually inching up from 3.4-ish to 3.8-ish. And our rankings, man. Our rankings:

China has been climbing gradually for weeks now uninterrupted. The other countries come and go, but the Chinese seem to really be digging ASM these days.

Alien Star Menace is *so close* to getting 10K installs on Android.

Tumblr friends! Help us push over that milestone. Gently nudge your pals to get the game on Android. You can even give them this handy link to get it on the Google Play Store. OR you can leave a nice rating/review - those push us up in the rankings and get more organic visibility on the game.

If iOS is more your friends’ speed, you can give ‘em this link to get it on iTunes. That version isn’t close to any cool milestones, but it’ll make me smile. 

I’m going to nerd out about Alien Star Menace’s download spike some more; bear with me.

Above is a graph of the entire lifetime downloads of Alien Star Menace on Android. You notice a beginning spike, which is expected - app stores tend to have a “What’s New and Hot” list, and press is picking up the game for the first time, and people are mentioning it, and there’s just a general umph that goes along with release.

And then over a year later, you see the most recent spike. Which is on track to surpass initial release. 

These things happen, but usually there’s an identifiable reason - you get mentioned by a big influencer or there’s a promotion or update some-such. ASM doesn’t have any of those that I can find. Best I can guess: Android changed its ranking algorithm and people are seeing the game who wouldn’t normally.

Following this trend, the game is climbing in ranking in some countries in... unexpected ways. Take China:

That’s over the course of 2 and a half weeks. I’ve *never* seen this kind of gradual ranking increase - usually a small game spikes for maybe a week (or less) and then falls off quickly. ASM has grown over time and is now in the top 200 strategy games in China.

This is echoed in a few countries (I’m looking at you lovely, sexy Canadians), but certainly isn’t the norm: the game made a flash in the US rankings and was super high in Luxembourg (??) before vanishing.

The Android download spike is still building, and I still have no clue why. No investigation has yielded clues. Still not quite on par with iOS download levels, but getting there.

We’ve also *finally* hit the 100+ review mark after sitting in the high 60s for months. Rating is holding strong - averages between 4.3 and 4.4. All the reviews have been damn positive:

“Best strategy game ever You can customize your own party and play the gauntlet for an endless game. I died from specters.”

“... WOW I'M LITERALLY SPEECHLESS... Like, SERIOUSLY, SPEECHLESS.. This game was the bestest that I've played at its genre so far.. Will be expecting great things from this new fella ^^”

Something’s happening on the Android end that’s causing our game to get a steep uptick of players. And I have *no idea what.*

As far as I can tell, it started around Oct 12 and hasn’t let up. It’s not a huge huge boost - though the graph is steep, we’re talking the difference between 10 and 50 installs per day, both of which are small numbers by mobile standards. 

Alien Star Menace is being featured in the App Store again!

But... I have no clue where. I can’t find it. I know that our downloads/sessions have spiked 10-fold over the last few days. I *think* there’s a “Welcome Home” promotion based on some analytics websites, but it doesn’t show up for me in the App Store. Maybe it’s not in the US?

I don’t know. But if you’re new to Alien Star Menace, enjoy!