I have always believed that there is some special magic in the game together for one device. Once, at the time of the undivided reign of consoles and at the dawn of the advent of the Internet, this was due to purely technical aspects. But even now, this magic, the excitement of face-to-face opposition has not gone away. Many, probably, like me, remember with great warmth many hours of hotseat-parties with friends in “Heroes of Might and Magic”. What about the famous “Chopper Duel” (under DOS) depicted in CDRV? How many epic duels were played on computer science pairs!

Under the cat you will find a gamedev story, on the development, monetization, creating a game. Everything, starting with the appearance of the idea and ending with the publication on Google Play.

Idea

In general, when the question arose: what is not the hackneyed gameplay to choose for the game, the answer was obvious. As a source of inspiration, I decided to take the very "Chopper Duel". But here there are several problems that are typical for the implementation of this type of game on mobile platforms. On a PC or consoles, players look at the screen, roughly speaking, from a single point. Here, the most convenient is the situation when the players are opposite each other, putting the tablet / smartphone among themselves. Therefore, the “side view” is categorically not suitable (we will force players to look at the scene, rotated at an angle of 90 degrees). So, the best solution would be “top view”. Each player receives into his control an aircraft (aircraft) equipped with a rocket launcher. Each player displays the control panel of his aircraft. Perhaps the fact is that I grew up on gaming consoles and "physical" joysticks, but the onscreen stick seems to me a very non-digestible solution. Therefore, we will not use it, but on the control panel, we place the following elements: “JET” - acceleration (switching on the jet engine), “FIRE” - launching a rocket, plus the buttons “roll to the left” and “roll to the right”.
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By the way, here you can see the initial version. Then I realized that the arrangement of the buttons as on the joysticks would be more familiar: the movement buttons are on the left, the action buttons are on the right.

Aircraft fly forward at a constant speed. If you turn on the jet engine, press the "JET" button, the plane accelerates; if released, it slows down. The roll buttons cause the plane to shift to the appropriate side. The next step is to give the game more dynamics, to force players to maneuver not only to evade the enemy rocket.



Moving forward (using acceleration) is necessary for advance shooting. Since the planes are in constant motion, when fired to the side, the point of impact is slightly behind the aiming point. The strategy becomes the most profitable: overtake the enemy and shoot back, with such a shot, the speed of the rocket relative to the plane will be maximum (the opponent has less time to maneuver). But here a force comes into play, forcing us to move left-right: planes fly between obstacles that we must avoid (we have islands hovering in the sky with the help of unknown magic). And being ahead, at the edge of the playing field, the player risks not having time to dodge the next island.



The rules of the game are very simple: the duel continues until 10 victories, the task is to destroy the enemy and at the same time, not to be hit by himself. If a player encounters an obstacle, a loss is counted for him, if players die at the same time (as with a ram, for example) - then a draw. There is a “single player” in the game, but this is more a formality, the heart and soul of the game is a duel for 2 players, of course!



We should also say about the armament of our aircraft - the rocket launcher. It is self-guided, but turns only in 90-degree increments (which, however, allows you to shoot while away from the enemy). The rocket launcher does not recharge very quickly, so “crush it with fire” in this game will not work. Rather, it should be a duel between two snipers with verified and timely single shots. By the way, an interesting detail: in the original “Chopper Duel”, the rate of fire was limited by the number of bullets simultaneously on the screen. If my memory serves me, there could be no more than eight.

Development

Regarding the technical part, this is the second game where I use AndEngine (I write the code in Eclipse out of habit). The engine is quite simple to learn, functional and with a large community. To all the questions arising in the development process, I easily found answers to Stack Overflow. I also want to recommend a book that helped me a lot to understand how the AndEngine game should look like in general (transitions between scenes, downloading resources, etc.) - “AndEngine for Android Game Development Cookbook” (you can buy it in electronic form). The only, but very significant disadvantage is that this engine is not cross-platform. Now I started to study the Corona SDK , I will probably switch to it. If you ask: why not so fashionable lately, Unity ? Hmm, I don’t know ... Wouldn’t it be “shooting sparrows”? Heard about what appeared in Unity, 2D "out of the box", we should take a closer look, I agree.



Also, TexturePacker helps a lot - a tool for the formation of texture atlases, a license is paid, but it is not expensive and there is a trial. From the "not included in the release," we can mention the utility for generating explosions - Explosion Generator 3 . Of course, such explosions are not always suitable for the style, but they can always be used in the prototype at least.



Testing the game took place using another useful program - Genymotion . This is an easy to install and configure the Android emulator, and most importantly, its speed is comparable to a real device. Although I already had a small litter of Android devices (in the amount of 3 pieces), it is sometimes very convenient to quickly see some edits in the emulator. There is a plugin for Eclipse, by the way!

Directly development, took about 2 weeks. When the program part was ready, the search for the artist began. Initially, I was not very lucky with artists. It all started with the fact that a proven performer, drawing in the right style, was busy. With the first artist, we just had some kind of global misunderstanding of each other, we had to leave. The second one understood the tasks, but could not adhere to the deadlines. Freelancers receive offers mainly from "website designers". Understand me correctly, I have nothing against designers, an excellent and interesting profession, but “drawing a website” and “drawing a game” are two big differences. Finally, when I was almost desperate, Cyril was found in “gamedevblogs”, with which we created this game (on the basis of profit sharing). So for the visual part, praise (or scold) - it.

Monetization

Like many players, I don’t like the dominance of free-to-play games that we can watch lately. Yes, sometimes this business model not only brings money, but is also relevant for the player. Although in most cases, it is simply “far-fetched.” On the other hand, selling on the Play Store is extremely difficult (I know this from my own experience). But the monetization scheme of the game must be. Therefore, do not get tired of repeating, the best solution for indie is advertising. Of course, you should never hang a banner on the main game scene. It will not bring profits, since the player is busy with the game, but will only push to remove the game from the device as soon as possible. I stopped at fullscreen advertising, sometimes shown between rounds. The same AdMob Interstitial has a very good CTR and profitability is several times more than regular banner advertising. And if someone does not want to watch ads or just like the game and there is a desire to support our small team financially - there are several options for donations. But of course, we do not sell advertising disconnection, but just give it as a gift!

Placement on the Play Store

I have to say, addressing the publisher is definitely not my way. Firstly, it is unlikely that such a simple game will interest someone from the “middle league”, not to mention the “highest”. Secondly, with some of them, I myself can fray in the number of downloads.



In the successful edition of the game there is no secret who would not say. This is just an experience + a little luck. It is necessary to understand from what tools you can expect what return, constantly look for new channels, observe trends, look at successful solutions from others. The presence of previous popular applications gives some "inertia", but this is not the main thing. Plus, everything depends on the game itself, of course, if it doesn’t touch the player, then you can’t do anything about it, even if you're a marketing genius. In general, we prepare nice screenshots, an attractive icon, record video and go! Conquer the top of the charts.

The end?

Whether the Google Play audience will favorably accept the game and whether other players will like it as much as I like, time will tell. But the beta tests for friends and acquaintances say that it turned out quite recklessly and fun. If everything goes well, then in the next topic I will try to talk about downloads, marketing and financial results.