Developing a single game - a rewarding experience, some money and a lot of mistakes, P1
Today, quite a few programmers are thinking about creating a mobile application, making their first million, finding the glory of a successful developer, and continuing to work on their interesting and promising projects. Many not only think, but also try, successful and not so. So I am no exception about one such attempt, acquired experience and a small financial profit I want to tell.
Disclaimer: everything described below is just my work and thoughts on them, does not pretend to be instructed on how to (or should not) be done and serves only as a description of life situations during development, which can later be useful to the reader when creating their own applications.
There may also be a feeling that the presence of the CEP could not have been done here, but in my humble opinion, sometimes a discussion of the obvious things may push further already completely unobvious conclusions.
This article does not pursue the goals of PR, advertising or any other kind of promotion of the illuminated application for several reasons - the game has "outlived its own", the process of building the application itself and, above all, the opinion of other developers, which may push on interesting and correct decisions in the future, is interesting.
')
So let's get started.
It will be about the application - the game released in 10-11, the development of which took about 2-3 months of hard work without the initial experience of creating games. Everything - from design to promotion was done by hand.
Total:
It's all quite simple - mobile applications run on mobile devices, which every year becomes more and more. The statistics presented the other day by Google clearly shows a steady increase in the number of mobile tablets. About the spread of smartphones in developed countries can not even talk.
Every year, breaking through the wild number of applications in markets is becoming increasingly difficult, so the choice of category to create one of the first commercial applications focused on games ... why?
If a person for quite a long time quite comfortably can use, for example, the same book reader, calculator, messenger, etc., then playing the same game all the time will simply get tired, this is what I found casual toys - having tried top applications, sooner or later, the user may stumble upon my application. In other words - applications from this category most often change on phones and the probability of setting yours higher.
After determining the type, it was necessary to choose the very essence of the game by searching and playing flash applications found on the request of a type of “top flash games” stopped on something like a line rider - we draw a track, a controlled machine drives it, you need to get to the finish.
The question of choosing a platform was not, because was engaged exclusively in the development of Android, a cross-platform application at that time was too expensive for me and the development for other platforms was postponed until when and if the application is gaining popularity.
I started working on the application with the development of a design, and homemade - the simplest in this case is to use the “sheet style” option - a checkered sheet, a pencil and a pen.
Today, such games have clearly lost their relevance, applications in this style are no longer enough, and users are accustomed to powerful devices, bright and beautiful graphics.
The rendered screens became a kind of “prototype”, by which you can start development, which I directly proceeded to ...
But, looking back, having accumulated some experience in development, it is safe to say that the omission of the design stage, not only from the point of view of architecture, but also of “user interaction” (which, for example, Alan Cooper , for example) dealt a very serious blow to the final product.
Too late, having tested this application on friends, quite expected errors that were not worked out initially were discovered - a regular user cannot understand the essence of the game at first glance and pass the first level. Realizing this from the very beginning and realizing why in the game Space Physics the lines are completed for the user, maybe the history of this game would take a completely different turn. The guys from Chillingo (for which I am extremely grateful to them) opened my eyes to this aspect, to whom I turned some time later about the publication of the application.
As often happens, the code itself is not particularly interesting. As aphysical game engine, the popular AndEngine library was chosen, which contains a layer for working with OpenGL, work with the physics engine Box2D and is constantly evolving. The only significant problems encountered are the lack of design before development, drawing a line along a user’s trajectory that has physical properties and which, if desired, can be erased in small pieces.
Regarding drawing - the result is an extremely simple algorithm - between two points we draw a line consisting of N small lines.
The first levels were created by hands on paper and also transferred by hands to a notebook in the form of XML, which affected the time and complexity of drawing up levels. In the future, the level editor was developed, which, among other things, allowed anyone to create a level on the site, and immediately ride through it in the game itself.
The main mistake at this point is that, apart from the initial design, it was necessary to outline the circle of what needs to be done for the first release, and when it should take place. The absence of such requirements introduces a certain share of “slobliness” - we all know how much time to do more per unit of time before the deadline ...
Undoubtedly, there was a desire to receive a certain monetary profit and the question arose of the application monetization model.
In fact, at that time there was still no what was called an In-app now, so it was decided first, as soon as it was ready to release an application with advertising and then make more levels and the lack of advertising for money in a separate application.
At conferences there are debates about whether trial version or F2P is better. In my opinion today F2P wins, because the user can at any time "purchase" the necessary functionality directly in the application, and we, the developers, in turn, are freed from the need to synchronize process states in different applications. But in the case of F2P applications, you need to be prepared for more negative reviews, because the probability of downloading a completely unnecessary application, for example, out of boredom, is higher for a free application, which means getting a unit is also higher.
Again, the eternal debate - the publisher or himself ..., then everyone decides for himself, at that time I was interested in the entire life cycle of the program, so I posted the application on my own behalf.
As expected, the product itself can become popular in the minimum number of cases to which mine does not apply.
After a while I tried to turn to well-known publishers, including to the same Chillingo, and here they described to me those details that would have to surface at the design stage of the application:
If in brief - the threshold of entry is too high - the game, and even more so casual, should be as simple as possible in order to start enjoying it.
A little less than a year later, the guys from Ubi-nuri wrote to me, references to which can be found, for example, here and here . The essence of the proposal is that they liked the meaning and implementation of the game, and Korean hardcore players, they say, love just such a pretty hard gameplay in terms of gameplay. Looking ahead, I can say that I received the main financial return from the Korean partners, including Now I think that publishing can be given to people who are good at it and know how to do it.
Special forces were not initially invested in the promotion, the maximum is a small (useless) advertising campaign in AdMob, reviews on free sites.
According to my personal observation, the presence of a video on the game's page in the market successfully acts on the conversion of visitors into users.
Tracking events related to mobile technologies allows us to plunge into the world of mobile development, as they say “watch and show others”, for example, the application was registered and participated in the AppCircus application competition . This event allowed to get acquainted with other professionals and enthusiasts in the field, brought useful contacts to create and promote future developments.
At one point, w3bsit3-dns.com.ru launched the program "support for Russian developers", on which they laid out free reviews of domestic developers on the main page. This kind of review brought about 300 paid downloads in 3 days, from which I could make quite a logical conclusion that reviews on popular resources can help quite a lot in promoting applications.
To date, I have already heard several times that the main PR support of the application should be carried out during the first two weeks of the application’s life, so for the next big projects I plan to act according to this scenario.
A very big omission on my part was that initially there was not even an idea to collect statistics on user actions in the application. So, for example, at one of the conferences it was told about an interesting experience of collecting statistics: it was revealed that at a certain stage of the application, some users simply “fell off”, toli due to the complex behavior of the program, toli simply from unwillingness to understand further, but the fact in that the simplification of a single screen of the application could stop more than 50% of users from closing the application at this step. And there are quite a lot of such examples, so you need to understand as clearly as possible how and at what stage the user feels in your application, otherwise there is a high probability of losing it.
This article would not be complete without some coverage of application statistics:
In google play and admob, a little more than $ 1000 was received during the lifetime of the application, the average profit per day for advertising is ~ 1usd / day.
Korean partners from Ubi-nuri in Korea and Japan sold approximately 25,000 copies, bringing about $ 10,000, and they also bought the rights to distribute the application in one Japanese market as a marketing tool for $ 6,000, i.e. Estimated total profit from the application can be estimated around $ 20,000, which in my opinion is enough to feel the excitement of developing applications for mobile platforms, because the realization that you could create something useful for the end user can be little compared to.
Today, the new game is at the final stage of development, in it I tried to take into account all previous mistakes that I managed to face, but using new tools, trying new approaches, I came across other equally interesting and complex problems requiring new solutions. In the future, I’m happy to share the experience of creating an already cross-platform game created in collaboration with the designer and the help of friends as testers of the loyalty of potential users to the game.
I will be glad to any questions \ clarifications \ disputes (except holivar) in the comments. They are designed to help both me and other developers get closer to users, understand their problems and create high-quality applications.
Disclaimer: everything described below is just my work and thoughts on them, does not pretend to be instructed on how to (or should not) be done and serves only as a description of life situations during development, which can later be useful to the reader when creating their own applications.
There may also be a feeling that the presence of the CEP could not have been done here, but in my humble opinion, sometimes a discussion of the obvious things may push further already completely unobvious conclusions.
This article does not pursue the goals of PR, advertising or any other kind of promotion of the illuminated application for several reasons - the game has "outlived its own", the process of building the application itself and, above all, the opinion of other developers, which may push on interesting and correct decisions in the future, is interesting.
')
So let's get started.
Priming
It will be about the application - the game released in 10-11, the development of which took about 2-3 months of hard work without the initial experience of creating games. Everything - from design to promotion was done by hand.
Total:
- an application that is not ashamed to show in the portfolio, the participant of the competition is the AppCircus application,
- 10k + $ - revenue for the lifetime of the application,
- Partners - Korean publishers, which have already been mentioned in Habré.
Reflections - why mobile apps?
It's all quite simple - mobile applications run on mobile devices, which every year becomes more and more. The statistics presented the other day by Google clearly shows a steady increase in the number of mobile tablets. About the spread of smartphones in developed countries can not even talk.
Idea or how it all began
Every year, breaking through the wild number of applications in markets is becoming increasingly difficult, so the choice of category to create one of the first commercial applications focused on games ... why?
If a person for quite a long time quite comfortably can use, for example, the same book reader, calculator, messenger, etc., then playing the same game all the time will simply get tired, this is what I found casual toys - having tried top applications, sooner or later, the user may stumble upon my application. In other words - applications from this category most often change on phones and the probability of setting yours higher.
After determining the type, it was necessary to choose the very essence of the game by searching and playing flash applications found on the request of a type of “top flash games” stopped on something like a line rider - we draw a track, a controlled machine drives it, you need to get to the finish.
Design - where to start?
The question of choosing a platform was not, because was engaged exclusively in the development of Android, a cross-platform application at that time was too expensive for me and the development for other platforms was postponed until when and if the application is gaining popularity.
I started working on the application with the development of a design, and homemade - the simplest in this case is to use the “sheet style” option - a checkered sheet, a pencil and a pen.
Today, such games have clearly lost their relevance, applications in this style are no longer enough, and users are accustomed to powerful devices, bright and beautiful graphics.
The rendered screens became a kind of “prototype”, by which you can start development, which I directly proceeded to ...
But, looking back, having accumulated some experience in development, it is safe to say that the omission of the design stage, not only from the point of view of architecture, but also of “user interaction” (which, for example, Alan Cooper , for example) dealt a very serious blow to the final product.
Too late, having tested this application on friends, quite expected errors that were not worked out initially were discovered - a regular user cannot understand the essence of the game at first glance and pass the first level. Realizing this from the very beginning and realizing why in the game Space Physics the lines are completed for the user, maybe the history of this game would take a completely different turn. The guys from Chillingo (for which I am extremely grateful to them) opened my eyes to this aspect, to whom I turned some time later about the publication of the application.
Development
As often happens, the code itself is not particularly interesting. As a
Regarding drawing - the result is an extremely simple algorithm - between two points we draw a line consisting of N small lines.
Pseudocode
onTouch(Point firstPos, Point lastPos){ int lineCount = getLineCount(lastPos - firstPos); for (int lineIndex: lineCount){ drawPhysicLine(new Line(firstPost, lastPost, lineIndex), new PhysicData()); } } Screenshot of what exactly is in question
The first levels were created by hands on paper and also transferred by hands to a notebook in the form of XML, which affected the time and complexity of drawing up levels. In the future, the level editor was developed, which, among other things, allowed anyone to create a level on the site, and immediately ride through it in the game itself.
The main mistake at this point is that, apart from the initial design, it was necessary to outline the circle of what needs to be done for the first release, and when it should take place. The absence of such requirements introduces a certain share of “slobliness” - we all know how much time to do more per unit of time before the deadline ...
Monetization model
Undoubtedly, there was a desire to receive a certain monetary profit and the question arose of the application monetization model.
In fact, at that time there was still no what was called an In-app now, so it was decided first, as soon as it was ready to release an application with advertising and then make more levels and the lack of advertising for money in a separate application.
At conferences there are debates about whether trial version or F2P is better. In my opinion today F2P wins, because the user can at any time "purchase" the necessary functionality directly in the application, and we, the developers, in turn, are freed from the need to synchronize process states in different applications. But in the case of F2P applications, you need to be prepared for more negative reviews, because the probability of downloading a completely unnecessary application, for example, out of boredom, is higher for a free application, which means getting a unit is also higher.
Product edition
Again, the eternal debate - the publisher or himself ..., then everyone decides for himself, at that time I was interested in the entire life cycle of the program, so I posted the application on my own behalf.
As expected, the product itself can become popular in the minimum number of cases to which mine does not apply.
After a while I tried to turn to well-known publishers, including to the same Chillingo, and here they described to me those details that would have to surface at the design stage of the application:
Chillingo response text
We’ve discussed the game
with a proposal. This is based purely on commercial reasons. To give you
we have two headline concerns:
1) When we sign a deal, we look for multiple things. Clearly a great game
but the second thing is what i call "deck appeal". That is, the 5 second
hook up the app. It could be the artwork, theme,
icon, screenshots etc etc. I feel this is a big weakness with your game.
Even if the game is great, it's not enough. It is often a very difficult
iOS app to get to the mass market.
I think the line is the rider of the visuals and the doodle style.
which has been done several times before.
2) I think a big challenge
You´re face is getting people into the game. iPhone is very much like the
old coin-ops. That is, you have 30 seconds to convince someone they need
quarters to keep playing Consider this blog:
sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2010/08/how-big-is-your-red-zone.ht
ml
Essentially, instant appeal
learning curve. Flight Control, Fruit Ninja, Cut the Rope etc. Your game
comes across as very complex because of the navigation.
I always feel the best
to be open.
We wish you all the best with your launch
with a proposal. This is based purely on commercial reasons. To give you
we have two headline concerns:
1) When we sign a deal, we look for multiple things. Clearly a great game
but the second thing is what i call "deck appeal". That is, the 5 second
hook up the app. It could be the artwork, theme,
icon, screenshots etc etc. I feel this is a big weakness with your game.
Even if the game is great, it's not enough. It is often a very difficult
iOS app to get to the mass market.
I think the line is the rider of the visuals and the doodle style.
which has been done several times before.
2) I think a big challenge
You´re face is getting people into the game. iPhone is very much like the
old coin-ops. That is, you have 30 seconds to convince someone they need
quarters to keep playing Consider this blog:
sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2010/08/how-big-is-your-red-zone.ht
ml
Essentially, instant appeal
learning curve. Flight Control, Fruit Ninja, Cut the Rope etc. Your game
comes across as very complex because of the navigation.
I always feel the best
to be open.
We wish you all the best with your launch
If in brief - the threshold of entry is too high - the game, and even more so casual, should be as simple as possible in order to start enjoying it.
A little less than a year later, the guys from Ubi-nuri wrote to me, references to which can be found, for example, here and here . The essence of the proposal is that they liked the meaning and implementation of the game, and Korean hardcore players, they say, love just such a pretty hard gameplay in terms of gameplay. Looking ahead, I can say that I received the main financial return from the Korean partners, including Now I think that publishing can be given to people who are good at it and know how to do it.
Promotion and support
Special forces were not initially invested in the promotion, the maximum is a small (useless) advertising campaign in AdMob, reviews on free sites.
According to my personal observation, the presence of a video on the game's page in the market successfully acts on the conversion of visitors into users.
Video games
Tracking events related to mobile technologies allows us to plunge into the world of mobile development, as they say “watch and show others”, for example, the application was registered and participated in the AppCircus application competition . This event allowed to get acquainted with other professionals and enthusiasts in the field, brought useful contacts to create and promote future developments.
Video from the event
You do not feel very confidently speaking to the public for the first time, but nevertheless you should work on yourself, because confidence in some plan is the key to success with partners.
At one point, w3bsit3-dns.com.ru launched the program "support for Russian developers", on which they laid out free reviews of domestic developers on the main page. This kind of review brought about 300 paid downloads in 3 days, from which I could make quite a logical conclusion that reviews on popular resources can help quite a lot in promoting applications.
To date, I have already heard several times that the main PR support of the application should be carried out during the first two weeks of the application’s life, so for the next big projects I plan to act according to this scenario.
A very big omission on my part was that initially there was not even an idea to collect statistics on user actions in the application. So, for example, at one of the conferences it was told about an interesting experience of collecting statistics: it was revealed that at a certain stage of the application, some users simply “fell off”, toli due to the complex behavior of the program, toli simply from unwillingness to understand further, but the fact in that the simplification of a single screen of the application could stop more than 50% of users from closing the application at this step. And there are quite a lot of such examples, so you need to understand as clearly as possible how and at what stage the user feels in your application, otherwise there is a high probability of losing it.
Some finance and statistics
This article would not be complete without some coverage of application statistics:
In google play and admob, a little more than $ 1000 was received during the lifetime of the application, the average profit per day for advertising is ~ 1usd / day.
Korean partners from Ubi-nuri in Korea and Japan sold approximately 25,000 copies, bringing about $ 10,000, and they also bought the rights to distribute the application in one Japanese market as a marketing tool for $ 6,000, i.e. Estimated total profit from the application can be estimated around $ 20,000, which in my opinion is enough to feel the excitement of developing applications for mobile platforms, because the realization that you could create something useful for the end user can be little compared to.
Future plans
Today, the new game is at the final stage of development, in it I tried to take into account all previous mistakes that I managed to face, but using new tools, trying new approaches, I came across other equally interesting and complex problems requiring new solutions. In the future, I’m happy to share the experience of creating an already cross-platform game created in collaboration with the designer and the help of friends as testers of the loyalty of potential users to the game.
Afterword
I will be glad to any questions \ clarifications \ disputes (except holivar) in the comments. They are designed to help both me and other developers get closer to users, understand their problems and create high-quality applications.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/187888/
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