Errors when developing games for mobile platforms

Hi, Habrasoobschestvo!
In this article I want to talk about my experience in developing applications for mobile platforms, as well as their monetization.

My husband and I are working as programmers in a large IT office and, pretty tired of the gray days of bug fixes, we decided to create our own Android application. It seems like the experience is interesting and useful to acquire, and the opportunity to reap financial benefits also tempted.
All interested, please roll.

First pancake

I once flirted with games in the genre Room escape (Escape from the room). These are such short quests where the player needs to get out of the room, for which he has to solve a chain of sometimes non-trivial puzzles. And we, without thinking twice, decided to create another Room escape, seeing a number of advantages:
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1) The room for imagination in Room escape games is limitless, so every game of this genre is unique
2) The game involves a short plot, so it does not take much time to develop
3) Room escapes allow for unpretentious, sometimes sketchy graphics. In my opinion, it even gives them a favor.

The third argument was especially important for us, because we ourselves were very superficially familiar with graphic design, and we did not consider it possible to invest money in a professional designer.
We didn’t have any experience before developing Android applications, so we pored over this toy for quite a long time, especially as we drew all the graphic resources ourselves. Well, finally, after a few months of intermittent work, we laid out our “masterpiece” called Bathroom Escaper to the market.





The application is free, so all earnings had to go from viewing and clicks on advertising. We did not expect any special results from this application, because we were objectively aware of the fact that:

- The graphics, as you can see, are frankly homegrown, and can scare the audience away, so it was not necessary to count on a large number of downloads. The professional has only drawn an icon (yes, this is the face of the application).
- The toy is short and out of order it has been removed and deleted, therefore, from each download, the number of views of ads will be on average small
- We didn’t try to promote the application, we don’t invest in advertising.

Earnings surprised

Well, we earned a few cents a day. We were ready to bury this venture, as a month later, unexpectedly, our Bathroom began to bring in $ 15! In a day.
And here we are inspired. Since this short, with the "harsh" graphics toy brings money, then what will happen if you approach this case at a slightly higher level.

And the second pancake

After analyzing the comments to our Escape and some trends on the market, we made the following conclusions, which formed the basis of our next game:

1) The most popular among the escapes were those in which there were many levels. They have significantly higher downloads, and the player will spend more time on average, which will increase the number of ad views. The same was said about comments in the spirit of “well, just one level”. Therefore, in the new toy, we decided to make many levels of puzzles.
2) Professional audiences and the presence of animations still enjoy a large audience position. Therefore, for a new toy, we decided not to skimp and hire a professional designer, being sure that it would pay back with interest.
3) It was noticed that on the eve of the holidays, games with festive themes are in great demand. There were 2 months left until the new year and we decided to do a Christmas-New Year quest, designed to give people a festive mood on the eve of winter holidays.

So, time was running out. A little more than a month remained before the game was supposed to appear on the market. We had to work actively. For several days we wrote a document with the concept and description of 10 levels of the game (heh, the other levels were supposed to be written later on the money from the game).

On freelance, we found the designer, optimal in terms of the price-quality ratio, and as resources arrived from the designer (which, by the way, had to be pushed all the time), we saw new levels. As a result, we met the deadline and in the beginning of December put our brainchild of Bob's Christmas story on the market.

Did not go

This business, of course, we noted and waited for mega earnings. Which, as you already understood, did not follow ... Yes, after a couple of weeks the game began to have about 1000 downloads and $ 8 a day, but it quickly faded away.

The game was even less successful than our first Bathroom Escaper. As a result, the toy did not even pay off the designer’s work, not to mention our work.

findings

I would like to work on the mistakes that we made, but I would, frankly, put a question mark next to each of the following paragraphs (I am not sure how significant each of them is):

1) There was no money spent on promotion. All that was done - information about the game was posted on known resources.
2) We were disappointed with the results that we didn’t even fix bugs. Naturally, we also did not add new levels. That is, the game was left without support and development.
3) Christmas theme. Now I would not do seasonal games - the season / holiday passes, and interest in them drops sharply. The update of the icons, the interface in a festive style - this is what is worth limiting.
4) Game genre. Some could not pass even the first level, which seemed to us elementary. Consequently, we immediately lost a significant part of the audience, and this also had a negative effect on the assessment.

Well, we must not forget that the interest and tastes of the audience is very changeable and unpredictable. And what aroused interest yesterday may end up in the far box tomorrow.