Let's Twist: The Path to the Unknown

At the beginning of this year, a group of novice developers worked on a game studio that violates all the canons of mobile development. Low influx of users (or rather, its absolute absence), lack of advertising budgets and publisher support dismantled the team, and it was decided to risk and create something of their own, to prove first of all to themselves that large budgets and fame are not the main success factor.

In this article, I, Arthur, founder and game designer of the indie team ArmNomads Games (consisting of three people), want to share our path through the dangerous jungle of mobile gaming. From idea to final release.


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The main task in creating an idea was to find a specific publisher and target audience. We perfectly understood that to make something universal is very difficult. Guided by the limited resources and time, it was decided to cooperate with the publisher Ketchapp, but at the same time, to have ways of withdrawal. To do this, we have attempted to combine minimalistic gameplay and beautiful art. Having experience with the Unity engine, we thought it was the best option. From the advantages of this engine, you can note the speed of development, graphical interface and cross-platform.

First stage

From words to deeds. The publisher’s games have been downloaded, dozens of mechanics concepts have been drawn and filtered, and out of several prototypes created in haste, one is chosen that seemed the most successful at that time. The player had to identically match the elements with the cells in order to earn points and beat his record. For this was provided for 3 variations: horizontal, vertical and rotary. The longer the session, the more peace opens in the background.

Screenshots of the initial version:



We have not seen anything unique in mechanics, and therefore we decided to make a major bet on spiritual design and music. Knowing the publisher's love of minimalistic, rigorous graphics, we used the vector style and found that there were certain pitfalls in it. Such a choice put us in a narrow framework, with which it was difficult to make the active objects of the main background and not copy the birds and pixel ninjas abound in the games of the selected publisher. Therefore, we stopped at the symbol of natural elements.

The initial version of one of the levels:



Particular attention I want to focus on the music. Beginner developers can do as we: write to any musicians you like and ask permission to use their tracks, with the condition of issuing a fee only in case of signing a contract with the publisher. Many have responded to our requests. There were those who requested the amount in advance (a license for a flat fee costs between 300 and 500 euros). The overwhelming majority of domestic artists reacted to the proposal more favorably, and the choice fell on the talented composer Manu Shrine , who was eventually devoted to the game (Eternal Memory, Sergey ...).


After creating the Alpha-version of the project and testing on a limited number of Android and iOS platforms, it was decided to send a letter to the publisher. I created an eloquent letter in which I described the activities of our team and attached a pdf of the project and the game itself with a link to the repository. That same night, we received an encouraging letter from a publisher who wrote that he was interested and would give a final answer within seven business days. I will not go into details, but we received about four such letters within three weeks. There was no refusal or any changes in the structure. The parallel bombardment of other publishers initially did not bear any fruit.

Personal online document that contains the publishers of minimalist games with their most successful projects.

I think we are not the first to encounter such an attitude, so I advise you not to stop and write to all publishing houses, both domestic and foreign, and to continue to improve the game as much as possible. At that time, only Chinese wisdom supported us: “The temptation to surrender will be especially strong shortly before the victory.” Who would have thought that this “shortly” would stretch for another 7 months of development.

By the end of the first month of waiting, the other major publishers seemed to have come to terms and began to shower us with feedback on the reasons for the refusal, suggestions and suggestions. From the answers we have learned a lot of useful information, which I hasten to share with you :

• Very many discriminate against the games under Ketchapp . Some quite unequivocally wrote this in letters. Therefore, if you are doing a minimalist game in the style of Circle or ZigZag , be prepared for a change of mechanics and gameplay complexity.
• The publishers Chillingo , FDG , PicPoc and Nevosoft liked the game very much, they praised its design and atmosphere, but did not dare to take it under their wing due to the lack of levels and the inability to change the version to the paid one. Three out of four in one voice said that the market is overfilled, and the trend will soon change, and the popularity of free-to-play will decline.
• Do not be limited to publishers. Write letters and the usual well-known developers. Many people wanted to collaborate with us and test themselves as a publisher.

It is not recommended to consider yourself above all and to love your child so much as not to listen to the advice of publishers and especially those who are themselves developers. Thanks to them, we decided to remove some of the mods and make the same mechanics for all variations. We changed the controls to moving cells, instead of elements, added auto swype, and the game gained the desired dynamics.

Rethinking

Based on the accumulated experience, we continued sending out letters and one after another interest in publishing was expressed by Mildmania , Yodo1 and several other well-known studios. The choice fell on Mildmania , since they themselves are the developers and have gone the same way as we. Together, the game was transformed: additional levels and variations of gameplay were added. But, despite the high speed of work, the release of the game was constantly postponed. Finishing the 3rd level of the game, we understood that we were so far away in graphic style that we had to redo the first levels.



The main requirement was content. Thus, the game consists of one level and four elements , has grown into a project with 6 levels and 50 elements , which include characters from the well-known games Darklings, Rop and Jelly Lab .



Since novice developers have a lot of problems with knowledge, I advise you to have a common document with training articles. At one time, Habr helped a lot: hundreds of articles were saved in the document by all team members and then filtered and divided into categories. Thanks to this method, lists with potential publishers, submit forms for Internet reviewers and subject forums were found in a short time.

Standby mode

The first big delay in the release was due to the desire to add an online component to the game. We got to the period of transition of the Unity engine to the new version and therefore could not use the services of a ready server. It took almost 2 months of work on independent technology of receiving and sending data and synchronization with different time zones. We also had to change the name of the game to Let's Twist , because when setting up an account, someone took our favorite name (the answer to the question of who occupied it, you will find out at the end of the article).


The second delay was due to the fault of the US Apple. We did everything according to the rules and sent a Roadmap 3 weeks before the release, to which European Apple replied that he was pleased with the game and would give featuring on the day of release. However, at the last moment we were contacted by the American department and hinted that if we want to advance in the US zone, we should wait another six weeks, since November is the best time for release. In addition, we received a hint that it is better to make the game paid and to abandon the free 2 play models with In-App. At that moment we experienced financial difficulties, but promotion in America is the dream of every developer, so it was decided to change the model and wait for the new release date.

A week before Apple’s release, an application for the creation of Featuring Art arrived, and we coped with the task for a couple of days, because we understood that this was a chance to get the “Editors Choice”. The most interesting was the day of the release itself. Less than an hour after our release, as in the App Store there is a game called Twist (the publisher of which was Ketchapp ). Coincidence? I do not think. They had over 32 weeks to release a game with that name, but the dates matched perfectly. In addition, the name has been reserved since May.

We waited for the evening with impatience and increasing anxiety, as we entered into direct competition with a publisher with a multi-million dollar budget and an impressive user base. The hours of the App Store update were struck and finally managed to exhale. Our game received:

Editors Choice in 78 Countries
Global Promotion in 135 countries (including America and the UK).



Let's Twist game was released on November 12 in the App Store and on December 19 on Google Play (Android version is free). The start was promising and work is already underway to strengthen the position and to finish drawing new content. One of these days, versions for Google Play and Amazon will be ready. With the funds raised, we are going to focus on creating full-fledged Level Based games. Thanks for attention. I hope you liked the article.