The story of one clone

Three ways a person has to act wisely:
the first, the most noble, is meditation;
the second, the easiest, is imitation;
the third, most bitter, experience.
Confucius

Once, on a cool spring evening of 2013, I wanted to make my own analogue of the nicest old game Scorched Earth , but with different vosrebens. Under a good mood and groovy music, I rushed to code on the first IDE and the framework that came to hand. Ironically, this turned out to be the WFP for Windows 8 Store. But for the flight of the projectile and the reaction of the environment, I took the Farseer Engine - Box2D port C #.
I myself do not remember how I moved from the idea of ​​a destructive earth and ballistic missiles to catapults, block buildings and a monolithic landscape. And so began the biennial story of my clone Angry Birds.

Summer

The artist from me is awful, because I immediately expected to order content on the side. And the hedgehog is clear that cloning and so is not a profitable business, and the samopisny clone of the promoted game will in any case yield to it, because I wanted to make an easy treshchachok in a month or two and make a couple of cans of beer. This implied minimal graphics costs, possibly borrowing from other games. I collected an alpha version from someone else's content and was sure that the game was already a third ready, but again fate decided otherwise.

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In exchange for debts on another project, acquaintances agreed to provide me with blocks for the game. They ordered them to a professional artist, who at that time was freelancing and invested in the task completely, dismissing the idea of ​​“treshchachka” and copying blocks from the original. The blocks came out glossy, beautiful, completely incompatible with my attempt to make a “backdrop” in Photoshop from images that were jerked from an Internet.


Then I decided to contact the artist directly and order him backs for the locations of the game. What happened as a result turned everything upside down. The pictures of the locations seemed like a work of art compared to the rest of my content and model guns, made in a hurry by my comrade in 3dsmax.

Slowly, the realization came that the project was moving to another quality level, and it started: to match the backgrounds of the locations, I ordered another artist to illustrate, finished and finished the models of tools in 3d and 2d to fit the style, learned how to work with the Gleed 2D editor format and started draw levels one after another, ordered ambient music for locations, bought a soundtrack for the main theme and much, much more. So that the game was not “just a clone” I came up with a killer feature: opponents began to snap and attack the player.
Summer is over.

Autumn

When autumn began, I already saw that I had raised the bar of quality too high, and resources too little. I already knew how to draw stylish frames and buttons in Photoshop well, managed to make all 7 of three different magicians using filters and effects, edited sounds and music, customized the color gamut of illustrations, negotiated with Microsoft local office about features and devices for tests, came up with under a hundred different levels, planted sight at 0.1 on the table of Sivtsev. My wife was seriously looking at the suitcases - she hinted that it was time to go to the sea; I did all the work on the game myself, my head was boiling. A week of vacation unloaded the brain a little, but did not significantly change anything.

Against this background, I rarely wondered why the emphasis shifted from the “treshnyachka” from the stolen graphics to the large-scale project with a hundred levels, and instead of the engine I use WPF Canvas, Rectangle and ImageBrush. I debugged this fierce bundle quite well, used complex transformations, imitated the parallax effect for backgrounds, even if I spent an unforgivably long time on each such operation. For a while I reassured myself that all this would give me coverage of four platforms at once: desktop Windows, mobile Windows Phone 8 and tablet Windows 8, and at the same time Silverlight version for the web. And for Android and iOS, I'll think of something. Fortunately, Visual Studio did not cause any problems, and Microsoft provided me with devices and licenses from Microsoft.
At the same time, I made an incredible effort with a semi-automatic port with C # + WPF Canvas on JavaScript + HTML5 Canvas, to participate in the contest for Tizen and just go to the web, and maybe to other platforms without native coding.
A version was posted in the Tizen Store, the Windows Marketplace and the Windows Store and three out of five locations were ready when the white flies flew.

Winter

I started the cold season with cautious optimism - Microsoft's bought reviews and features brought a lot of downloads, although the game earned very little revenue — about $ 50 in a month and a half, although four times more was spent on reviews and advertising. I connected this with a bunch of factors, Windows Phone unpopularity, unobtrusive monetization through In-App purchases, etc. The last two locations all remained closed, but I still could not find the strength to make levels for them and release a large-scale update. The web version mercilessly slowed down on the Tizen emulator and on Apple mobile devices and cheap Android-phones, so it was abandoned.
Then the idea came to lay out the desktop version on Desura and Steam. There were no problems with the first one, and the second one turned out to be a difficult procedure for the community through the Steam Greenlight. It was in the Greenlight community that I first heard the opinion that the game was shit.
Then there was the birthday of one of the relatives, and I slipped the tablet with the game to a 12-year-old nephew. He honestly went through 17 almost identical first levels, three times he tried to go through the 18th and began to look for something else to play on the tablet.
By the New Year holidays, the income figure reached $ 100, which, along with the sale of prizes from contests, somehow managed to compensate for a third of expenses for graphics and advertising.

Spring

By April, the month of downloading on Windows Phone had stabilized at the level of 0-3 downloads per day and up to 5 downloads on Windows 8. It was time to close the project, but the idea was still spinning to finish the last two locations, but in some other way. I posted an advertisement about finding a level designer for drawing 30-40 new levels and adapting the old ones. After some time, an interesting artist was found, we talked, discussed the situation, and once again I heard that the game is shit. The guy turned out to be an experienced game designer, and instead of developing levels, I ordered a detailed plan for remaking the game for maximum appeal and playability. Leveley agreed to do another artist (who did not fail to declare that all the finished levels are shit) and everything seemed to come to life and play, especially on iOS. And then WPF delivered an insidious blow - the code was ported to native CGLayer, etc., he refused in principle. In fact, it was necessary to switch to a normal engine, but there was no strength and desire. I thanked the level and game designer, paid for their time and closed the project.

One year later

For a year I managed to move away from a heavy defeat, I released a handful of small and two medium projects, worked on the telecom giant in a commercial project. The clone was successfully forgotten, the content and code was stored in the archive, but suddenly in the fall of 2014 it was reported that the game received appruv on Steam and it can be uploaded to the market. It was strange, it was wild, it caused a lot of emotions. But I didn’t do anything - to lay out the project, to hear again about, I apologize, shit, I really didn’t want to.
In the meantime, my self-written OpenGL 2D engine for one Point & Click quest suddenly managed to become mature and quite stable, and at the same time allowed me to write business logic simultaneously for iOS / Android / WP / W8 / XP / Mac. Such a self-made, homegrown bike, which came more to the soul than Unity and his comrades. Under this engine, I came up with another small project “for two months” and with the beginning of summer 2015 I went to the designer’s last year’s level in order to think up levels for the new game. During conversations with him and a new partner, a seditious idea was born to resurrect a clone bird on a new engine. A couple of experiments showed that it is now much simpler than a direct port from WPF to native iOS graphics.
As a result, a new project was put on hold, and we spent two months re-creating the game. 80% of the old levels were thrown out, the gameplay was remade according to the plan of last year's gamediz, the number of repetitions was reduced, the graphics were improved, all locations were implemented, etc. In short, the game experienced a rebirth, but at the same time were made achievements, trade cards and badges for Steam.

Release

Last week I posted the game in three markets at once - iOS, Android and Steam. The first two are free with purchases, paid on Steam, for about a dollar. Naturally, not without patches at the last minute; there were bugs and crashes, suddenly not passable levels, etc., but everything turned out to be quickly settled. The Steam community took the game very positively, the number of negative reviews was only about 20%, purchases are underway and now, several people have already completed the game and have taken all the achievements, trading cards and screenshots.
In a word, it would be a story with a happy ending, if it were not for iOS and Android performance indicators - as a result of the start feature and review on w3bsit3-dns.com, it became clear that we already had 50 players and not a single purchase. And this is not surprising, as Angry Birds 2 came out this week, where, it seems, pigs can attack a player ...

Summary

Two years passed very quickly, and there were mostly falls, almost without take-off, but still something inspires hope. I was very pleased that the Steam community as a whole accepted the game, but as a developer I could not but rejoice at the work of the cross-platform engine. Acquired a lot of useful experience, I stepped on and grind the rake “We'll do it without an engine,” I learned how to display the game on Steam, and integrate the achievements. But most importantly, now I can soberly assess my strength and see what tasks I can solve myself, which ones with the help of the team, and which ones should not be taken.
And finally, the advice: do not make clones!