The difficulties and joys of developing the first game on Android

I want to share the story of the development of my first android game.

Prehistory

To begin with, my name is Eugene, I am 26 years old. Throughout my adult life, I tried to make a game. In childhood they were homemade board games with cubes; in his youth attempts to understand the BASIC and programs for creating games on the ZX Spectrum; in adolescence, before I had a personal computer, I invented and drew mazes in which it was possible to collect keys, kill enemies, etc.

After the advent of the PC, I diligently searched for a program for creating games. Then one day, the disc did not get into the hands ... so I became acquainted with Game Maker 5.3 and firmly hooked on it. And now, after many years, I have the opportunity to create good games in Game Maker Studio, porting them to different platforms.
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Idea of ​​the game

The idea of ​​the game was born for the competition Ludum Dare 26 in the near 2013. You control a hero who tries to escape from the tower and bypass the traps. The trick is that the main character is so scared that he opens any door he passes by, losing the key he has found. Therefore, the player needs to think too hard to make the right route and not waste the keys. At the competition, the game received quite a lot of warm feedback and was well received.

In the spring of 2015, my good friend saw this game and advised to release it on Android, but choosing the setting is more interesting than just the GG and the tower. As a result, the idea of ​​a panda was born, which escapes from the zoo. However, this idea to the finale has changed. Now the essence of the game is to help the panda get to his favorite delicacy - bamboo.

Graphics

At first I made a prototype and started looking for an artist, which turned out to be quite a hard task: either they wanted money or they didn’t want anything. And since I was working on enthusiasm, I had nothing to offer. As a result, my friend pushed me to paint everything myself and are not afraid, for which I am very grateful. Although there were difficulties with graphics, in particular, with the choice of resolution for the game, so that it was not fine on the screen of the phone and it looked good on the tablet, but all these difficulties were successfully overcome and the game looked decent at 480 * 800 and 2048 * 1536.

Music and sounds

If I can somehow draw, then alas, no, to write music. Therefore, the composer was found and 3 short tracks were written: 1 for menus and 2 for game locations. Sounds found on opengameart.org and similar sites.

Game design

I read a lot about gamedizan. I understand that practice is practice, and theory is theory, but still I was well helped by articles on Habré and the book "The Art of Game Design." Reading the latter, I already food from pleasure. And of course, do not forget the gaming experience. During development I often opened games from the top of Google Play and casual games from PopCap.

For 4 months, a panda, levels, tiles, menus, etc. were invented and drawn, and the whole thing was put together.

Monetization

For monetization, it was decided to use Appodeal, which I don’t regret. The most difficult thing in monetization is, of course, choosing how, where, and how much to display advertising. Initially, I had interstitial every third death of the main character. However, after the release, the girl from the appodeal gave advice on improving monetization, in total, we have: the keys are given for watching the video, interstitials appear every fifth death of the protagonist, the banner appears on a pause or after passing a level without distracting the player.

Is this solution effective? It is not clear, but the opinions of the players are divided. Someone thinks it's great to see ads and get a key, you don’t have to strain yourself. And someone thinks that the essence of the game is lost, that before there was an interest in finding the key or getting to it, but now the whole charm is gone. For myself, I concluded: with regard to monetization, there is no limit to perfection, and it needs to be thought out no less than the balance, without being afraid to experiment.

Promotion

Back in the development period, pages were created in VK, Twitter, Facebook. The release was purchased a bit of motivated traffic and along the way the game is loaded into Amazon, Yandex Store, Slide Me, w3bsit3-dns.com. Scattered articles and links to gaming forums such as gamedev.ru and gcup.ru. As a result, since the release, we have a total of more than 6,000 installations. Ridiculous figure, which was typed in a month, since August 12.

Results, mistakes, experiences

Honestly, the first week after the release, I didn’t behave very adequately: I updated the statistics every 5 minutes and was happy as a baby to new players, fives and positive comments. But, perhaps, this is the best time for 4 months of development. Indescribable euphoria.

In the development of the game I invested about 10 thousand rubles. This includes buying traffic, composer, domain and other trifles. Today, 40 dollars have been earned from the game, and I consider this a failure.

But there is a spoon of honey in this tar barrel. My game was seen by one publisher who "supplies" games for bigfishgames and offered to release the game on PC. I plan to finish the PC version by October 1 and try to earn something on it. So this is not the end, anyway, I hope so. Successes to all!