The story of a bad start on Google Play

I would like to share with you the experience of creating my first mobile game. In the spring of 2012, looking at the arcade "motorcycles" of his friend, who occupied the top places in the Google Play rating, he also caught fire to do something similar. The choice fell on the zombies, there are a lot of such games, but I thought to stand out with full-fledged 3d graphics, a garage with the ability to pump technology. The experience of creating games on the Unity3d engine was already there, but for the first time I did it for mobile devices. Of course, he did not do it himself, but with the artist, in his free time.

Development stage

Initially, it was planned to make a game in a month, a maximum of two, for a sample of the pen, to see what chances to get on Google Play, but in the end the development dragged on for almost a year, below I will explain why:

• I could not sensibly evaluate my own strengths and those of an artist, who only had time in the evenings.
• We had a long thought about the concept in which perspective to do, 3d or 2d, how to optimize zombies, so as not to reduce productivity. We had to redo many times. After the creation of the first level, when the test zombies already walked around the map, the creation of the remaining levels was a matter of technique.
• I took the physics of the car from a ready-made example, I wanted to save time. In practice, everything turned out to be somewhat more complicated. For many reasons, it was necessary to rewrite physics from scratch, which took a lot of time.
• A lot of days were spent on balance. It was necessary to achieve a balance of interest in the passage and complexity, so that the game had at least a small donat.

The concept of the first level:

Freemium or premium?

Only four tracks and five cars got into the pre-release version of the game, it was no good for premium, and now the freemium is more promising, so it was decided to follow this path: free of charge, but with advertising and micropayments.

Publisher Search

Long puzzled how to publish the game: on their own or through the publisher:

1. If you publish the game yourself, then you need to fool around with putting it into the stores, doing the promotional company yourself (although now the publishers don’t even do much PR, as far as I know), but no one dictates the terms, and you don’t need to divide the income (usually 50% /50%).
2. If through the publisher, then there is a big help in publishing the game on the markets, in localizing into different languages, in testing, in PR companies and they simply give a lot of useful tips during the development phase. This is ideal, but in fact there are unscrupulous publishers.

The choice fell on the second option, because The first game and the experience was not particularly. We compiled a list of publishers from various sources and started a mailing list, only half of the 30 contacts answered, and there were mostly refusals - most wanted to know about fairies, and some simply did not like the game and rejected it. After long negotiations, we decided to work with the publisher HeroCraft - they have a pretty good portfolio and the “best developer” status on Google Play.
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The discussion of publishers is on our unity3d.ru community: unity3d.ru/distribution/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=8531
Even when searching, I advise you to seek out direct skype-contacts, and then you can not wait for an answer.

Release

The release was hard, there were a lot of delays on the part of the publisher, faced problems with embedding KFOR payments and advertising in Unity3d, so the game hit the market only in May 2013.

The application appeared on Google Play just before the weekend, on Friday. The players began to download the game and then the sea of ​​minuses fell down and the rating plummeted. It was quite expected, since we entered lockscreen in the game for 5 seconds after each arrival and a lot of advertising. To persuade the publisher did not work. It was clear that if nothing was done, the rating would go to a minus and there would be a total failure, but since the weekend came, we had to wait until Monday.

In the morning, the rating was already around 3.5, and we immediately set about fixes:

1. Removed ads in the garage, which greatly strained the players.
2. Removed advertising when driving, from which there is no sense as in any dynamic game.
3. Loxcreen was done for 2 seconds (it was 5), and they began to show it less often.

They released an update, and there was less negative, although many people still complained, but not so much. Colov for banners has become less, but, on the other hand, the CTR has fallen by half, and advertising revenues by a third.

Now you can clearly highlight the weak points in the game:

1. The limit in the wallet, which depends on the number of levels passed. This was done to preserve the balance and the initial idea of ​​a phased pumping. Unfortunately, no better option has yet been found. In general, the balance is a very difficult thing.
2. Not the originality of the gameplay, tk there is a similar game - Earn to Die, although when we started to do the project, it was not even close to the markets.
3. A small number of levels and cars - we can not keep a player for a long time, in three - four hours you can complete the game.

The fear at the expense of a very weak advertising campaign from the publisher was confirmed. Advertising is posting topics in some forums, and mailing reviews. You are very lucky if you make a paid review for your game. All this PR can be done by collecting a list of resources. The reviews were sent somewhere for 100-200 resources and only 20-30 now can be found on a request from Google - it looks like there are many dead, or they just did not have time to moderate it, although a week has already passed.

It should be noted that I really liked the movie, which the publisher did to us as quickly as possible, despite the fact that the final game was lit, but not terrible.

We also redid the icon on our own, although it seemed to us that ours was more original (the one on the left):



I liked how politely the publisher responds to complaints in the market. I noticed that many, after receiving a polite and complete answer, changed their grades from units to "4" or "5".

Some statistics:

About 3000-5000 races from Google Play per day and ~ 30-50 ratings.
The main audience is the CIS (70-80%), due to a weak PR company abroad.
Although there is little data and it is too early to judge, but it can almost be said that in the CIS people pay about twice as bad as in the United States, and the people will be more disgusting - a lot of units and insults are quite common.

A few words from the artist

At that moment, when I began to actively help the project, my predecessor had already formed a visual style of play. Thus, the complexity caused the maintenance and development of the style so that my content does not violate the visual integrity. In addition to creating models and textures, sometimes I had to do a little research on the capabilities of the engine, I wanted to improve the graphic component of the project without losing performance. And this sometimes led to a remake of the content. Also, a lot of time and effort was spent on internal testing and development of gameplay ideas. A lot of questions were solved together, and we had to be ourselves game designers.
By the way, there is a moment: keep your project in order, delete extra content, work in uniform metric coordinate systems, logically call models and textures, always send the source code to the manager. It saves strength and nerves. When you submit a project to the publisher, to finalize the game, there will be fewer questions and the process will go smoothly and naturally.

The lack of time caused difficulties, after the main work it was very difficult to force myself to continue work on our zombie press. And if you give a little advice, then do not be lazy, rest an hour or so - another, collect your thoughts and begin your accomplishments. This is useful for self-development and you will gain additional experience, which will certainly come in handy in the future.

Conclusion

In our game there are a lot of jambs, everything didn’t turn out exactly as they wanted, the fact of the game’s publication is a definite plus. On other platforms, the game will start taking into account the lessons learned. We can not overestimate the experience that we have received during the development. We made sure that it is quite difficult to make your games due to the big competition, every day more than a dozen games appear on the market, and many are quite good.

If there is a desire, and a good idea, then everything is in your hands. The main thing is that you yourself like your game, then everything will work out.