Sprint Driver - Feel the power of speed
Today I want to tell you about my most successful, at the moment, game on mobile platforms Sprint Driver.
In this game you have to drive a motorcycle riding on the highway and avoid collisions with traffic and other obstacles on the road. To describe the gameplay, the word “runner” that is widespread today is most suitable, although, according to the original idea, it should have been a fairly large-scale game with a bunch of vehicles, weapons and upgrades, but in the course of work I had to significantly revise the concept.
Game development lasted quite a long time, for a total of more than a year. Of course, the work on the game was not conducted all this time, day to day, several more games were being developed in parallel. At some point, I realized that I myself could not cope with all that I had begun and decided to hire a 3D model to help, but to my surprise, this only added to my work, and I had even less free time. Then I decided that I needed a programmer as well. Oddly enough, it didn’t get any easier from this either. I felt an acute shortage of another 2D artist, but that was too much.
')
The first version of the game was written in Flash. Away3D was used as the engine. In the initial stage, I still had the hope that we would be able to port the game to mobile devices with the help of AIR without much effort, but the very first tests showed no comforting result. Of course, you could sit for a long time, look for bottlenecks and win back the extra FPS with all sorts of tricky optimizations, but there was no guarantee that in the end we would get acceptable performance. By that time, I already had a very positive experience with the Unity engine, and I decided that it would be easier and more reliable to rewrite the game for mobile platforms on it.
Separately, I want to stop on the chart. I love games that look beautiful. No matter how many people say that the gameplay is primary and the graphics are secondary, it is very difficult to get a person to download and run the game if it looks bad. This is especially true of mobile markets, where the decision on the advisability of installing a particular game is made, in most cases, by the icon and screenshots.
The free version of Unity, and there was no money to buy the paid version of Unity, is pretty badly cropped in terms of graphic buns. There are no shadows, no post effects, so I had to try pretty hard so that the game would look good and that would not affect its performance.
The flash version has only one track and three motorcycles to choose from. When we started to make a mobile version, I realized that this would not be enough. One of the planned ways to monetize were in-game purchases of coins, for which you can open additional content, but in this form there was almost no such content. Then it was decided to expand the game, add two additional tracks / surroundings and increase the fleet of motorcycles.
In the final version, we had 3 tracks and 7 vehicles. An ATV and two snowmobiles were added to the motorcycles, and later, in the update, 2 more motorcycles were added, if you can call them that.
For the release I was preparing only the iOS version, Android was left for later. I tried to run several games at the same time to take advantage of the cross-promo and hoped that if one of the games went off, it would pull the rest. Did not work out. Running even one game requires a lot of effort and time to analyze and promote, if there are several games, then you are simply not physically able to attach enough attention to all of them. Sprint Driver at the start showed itself best, there were a few notes on small foreign sites and people liked the game, so I decided to focus all my marketing efforts on it.
Were sent requests for a review to all sites that could be found, but it did not bring any special effect. Everybody wants money for reviews, and quite considerable ones, but most of these sites have no real visitors.
Advertising has also been tested, both on the CPI model and on the CPC and CPM. The CPI model showed itself best of all, but this method is acceptable for games with a large advertising budget and good ARPU, since the installation price is quite high and this money will be very difficult to work out for the average game.
I tried to use the purchase of advertising in those countries where I saw a good growth momentum, in order to slightly push the game and help it get to the tops.
The result of all these gestures can be seen in the picture below.
Seven months have passed since the release and during this time the game gained a little more than 300K installations, 51% of which fell on the Russian Federation, followed by Israel (12%), China (7.5%) and United States (6.2% ).
As for earnings, then, judging by in-app purchases, the percentage ratio looks like this:
Russian Federation - 47%
United States - 19%
France - 8.9%
Israel - 6.6%
In general, Russian users pleasantly surprised me, I did not expect that they would bring almost half of the income.
Earnings from advertising will have a completely different percentage, since the Fill Rate for Russia is generally not high, and the cost of a click / install is much lower than the staff, but unfortunately, most of the advertising networks used do not provide data by country, and find out the exact numbers does not seem possible.
A few days ago I finally finished and launched the Android version of the game.
The release was pretty quiet, for the first day the game got something about 50 installations, which was a pretty strong shock for me, I expected a much better result. At the moment, the number of installations is growing, but there is nothing to boast about.
The fight for Android users is still ahead.
Flash version of the game can be found here:
http://www.gamesreality.com/racing/235-sprintdriver.html
Link to AppStore:
https://itunes.apple.com/app/sprint-driver/id599249491?mt=8
And google play:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.gamesreality.sprintdriver
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In this game you have to drive a motorcycle riding on the highway and avoid collisions with traffic and other obstacles on the road. To describe the gameplay, the word “runner” that is widespread today is most suitable, although, according to the original idea, it should have been a fairly large-scale game with a bunch of vehicles, weapons and upgrades, but in the course of work I had to significantly revise the concept.
Game development lasted quite a long time, for a total of more than a year. Of course, the work on the game was not conducted all this time, day to day, several more games were being developed in parallel. At some point, I realized that I myself could not cope with all that I had begun and decided to hire a 3D model to help, but to my surprise, this only added to my work, and I had even less free time. Then I decided that I needed a programmer as well. Oddly enough, it didn’t get any easier from this either. I felt an acute shortage of another 2D artist, but that was too much.
')
The first version of the game was written in Flash. Away3D was used as the engine. In the initial stage, I still had the hope that we would be able to port the game to mobile devices with the help of AIR without much effort, but the very first tests showed no comforting result. Of course, you could sit for a long time, look for bottlenecks and win back the extra FPS with all sorts of tricky optimizations, but there was no guarantee that in the end we would get acceptable performance. By that time, I already had a very positive experience with the Unity engine, and I decided that it would be easier and more reliable to rewrite the game for mobile platforms on it.
Separately, I want to stop on the chart. I love games that look beautiful. No matter how many people say that the gameplay is primary and the graphics are secondary, it is very difficult to get a person to download and run the game if it looks bad. This is especially true of mobile markets, where the decision on the advisability of installing a particular game is made, in most cases, by the icon and screenshots.
The free version of Unity, and there was no money to buy the paid version of Unity, is pretty badly cropped in terms of graphic buns. There are no shadows, no post effects, so I had to try pretty hard so that the game would look good and that would not affect its performance.
The flash version has only one track and three motorcycles to choose from. When we started to make a mobile version, I realized that this would not be enough. One of the planned ways to monetize were in-game purchases of coins, for which you can open additional content, but in this form there was almost no such content. Then it was decided to expand the game, add two additional tracks / surroundings and increase the fleet of motorcycles.
In the final version, we had 3 tracks and 7 vehicles. An ATV and two snowmobiles were added to the motorcycles, and later, in the update, 2 more motorcycles were added, if you can call them that.
For the release I was preparing only the iOS version, Android was left for later. I tried to run several games at the same time to take advantage of the cross-promo and hoped that if one of the games went off, it would pull the rest. Did not work out. Running even one game requires a lot of effort and time to analyze and promote, if there are several games, then you are simply not physically able to attach enough attention to all of them. Sprint Driver at the start showed itself best, there were a few notes on small foreign sites and people liked the game, so I decided to focus all my marketing efforts on it.
Were sent requests for a review to all sites that could be found, but it did not bring any special effect. Everybody wants money for reviews, and quite considerable ones, but most of these sites have no real visitors.
Advertising has also been tested, both on the CPI model and on the CPC and CPM. The CPI model showed itself best of all, but this method is acceptable for games with a large advertising budget and good ARPU, since the installation price is quite high and this money will be very difficult to work out for the average game.
I tried to use the purchase of advertising in those countries where I saw a good growth momentum, in order to slightly push the game and help it get to the tops.
The result of all these gestures can be seen in the picture below.
Seven months have passed since the release and during this time the game gained a little more than 300K installations, 51% of which fell on the Russian Federation, followed by Israel (12%), China (7.5%) and United States (6.2% ).
As for earnings, then, judging by in-app purchases, the percentage ratio looks like this:
Russian Federation - 47%
United States - 19%
France - 8.9%
Israel - 6.6%
In general, Russian users pleasantly surprised me, I did not expect that they would bring almost half of the income.
Earnings from advertising will have a completely different percentage, since the Fill Rate for Russia is generally not high, and the cost of a click / install is much lower than the staff, but unfortunately, most of the advertising networks used do not provide data by country, and find out the exact numbers does not seem possible.
A few days ago I finally finished and launched the Android version of the game.
The release was pretty quiet, for the first day the game got something about 50 installations, which was a pretty strong shock for me, I expected a much better result. At the moment, the number of installations is growing, but there is nothing to boast about.
The fight for Android users is still ahead.
Flash version of the game can be found here:
http://www.gamesreality.com/racing/235-sprintdriver.html
Link to AppStore:
https://itunes.apple.com/app/sprint-driver/id599249491?mt=8
And google play:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.gamesreality.sprintdriver
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Join Twitter and Facebook
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/196504/
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