10 theses indie development, which led to success
About 10 years ago, when I was just starting my journey in the gaming industry, nobody had yet spoken the word indie, and gaming corporations in the post-Soviet space seemed like a mythical tale. In those beautiful times, when the first Russian browsers only flourished in the gaming market, my friend and I started doing our own project. We did not consider ourselves entrepreneurs or startups. Not. Yesterday's students, ordinary players, fans of Warcraft, Heroes and other classic games. Today I want to share with you my personal experience gained during the indie development of a browser game from scratch. Novice developers, this is an article for you.
')
So, two young students with basic programming skills, inspired by cool games, decided to create their own project. We have conceived a game of enormous proportions. A kind of World of Warcraft in the browser.
Experience number 1. Soberly assess your strength.
We not only enthusiastically took up work that we could never master, but we were absolutely confident in its success and our capabilities! 100500 abilok, 1000 features and of course over 9000 heroes - this is what most indie projects don't need. Without realizing the scale and never having heard about the word “planning”, we set to work. Being experienced players, we were sure that this was enough to make our game. Dima, my development partner, at that time had already heard such words as the alpha test and had a clear methodology in his head - let's start alpha, and we saw the content, then beta and money. Doom to success.
Experience number 2. Do not underestimate the importance of the methodology.
Having read the articles, I already knew that game design begins with dizdokov. By the end of the first year of development, they appeared with us.
We worked hard and hard. And a month later, we got a playable prototype: moving around the location map, a text lock on menus and a step-by-step combat without graphics. Everything was done on my knees and in general it was justified. Now I understand that this is the way to write prototypes. Here only then they are thrown out not to drag in the main code of crutches and bicycles. The moment of adoption of the prototype marks the beginning of the stage, which is now called Vertical Slice. By the way, very soon, on March 2, I will tell in details about the documentation and methodology at a public lecture. More about this in another article on Habré.
Experience number 3. Do not be afraid to send a prototype to the basket.
Well, many years ago, instead of saying: “Excellent! We came up with a cool game ", - throw out a prototype and start developing, we continued to work on it, turning it into a combat version.
The work continued for many more months: graphics, content, client part on HTML / JS and server part on PHP. Finally, on January 7, 2008, the long-awaited alpha test was launched. We sent invitations to all friends, posted information about the launch on the forums known to us, and waited for an influx of players. By evening, the MAU project reached 30.
Experience number 4. Prepare traffic to Soft Launch.
Quickly realizing the mistakes of our path, we began to make a PR project and work with the community. Social networks then still not so densely entered our lives and potential players were sitting more on the forums. After some time, we learned about ad networks and started buying traffic to Google AdWords. By that time, the first content manager and professional artist joined our team. What was our surprise when 80% of registrations did not turn into anything! People left the game without even paying money. We started thinking about tutorials and monetization.
Experience number 5. Monetization mechanisms should be incorporated in core gameplay.
After analyzing the competitors, including the well-known BC and a couple of similar markups, we identified a number of key income items and realized that we want to sell in our game.
We constantly communicated with our players on the forum and in the project chat, receiving feedback from them and promptly modifying the project, based on their tips. But the money did not become more, as well as online players. At this point, we are thinking about analytics.
Experience number 6. The system for collecting and analyzing statistics should be ready for Soft Launch.
We have learned to count retensch, understand what conversions are and analyze where our players fall off. We started working with traffic and fighting for low CPAs.
Obvious shoals were closed, and the game was lined with metrics. The lifetime of an active player has exceeded many months. The percentage of payers sometimes reached 20. Online consistently held at 100. But the more we introduced new features, the more recipes, talents and quets appeared in the game, the more complaints appeared on the forum. At a certain point, the volume of new content and its correlation with the old became higher than what we could analyze. The new quest was added not by the fan, but by increasing discontent. The second artist, whom we hired for the growing revenues of the project, did not save the situation.
Experience number 7. Do not neglect quality control.
It took many weeks to create a system for properly pouring updates instead of manually copying them to the server. Appeared test cases and checklists updates. Patches are no longer rolled into production without testing for PTR (Public Test Realm). All players were notified in advance about upcoming updates and participated in their discussions. The project has an encyclopedia, testers and community. We have created an institute of moderators from among the players. Technical support has been reborn from a topic that is always filled up with pain on the forum into a separate convenient page of the site.
We have gathered our community - loyal and madly in love with our project. But the further growth of the audience and revenue went very slowly. The project has a beautiful landing, there was a good ARPPU - 1800 rubles. But conversions remained low. Only a year after the launch of the alpha, two people with a technical cast of mind realized why.
Experience number 8. The product should be beautifully packaged interfaces from the beginning.
Retribution interfaces were terrible. To us, they seemed comfortable and quite acceptable. But only fairly hardcore users were ready to deal with our HTML tables. We hired an interface designer, and I took up usability. The realization that one really convenient cool interface is done in a month, and in the game you need a hundred, we were disheartened. What should have been developed from the very beginning, a year before launch, appeared only in MBT. By the way, we have not changed all the interfaces of the game to new ones and in some places remained “artifacts” of ancient times.
Our artists pumped. There was a simple and fascinating tutorial. The game began to accumulate an audience. We had big clans, and the number of registrations exceeded 100,000. The bottleneck for expansion was monetization. We looked at competitors and introduced artifacts.
Experience number 9. Direct selling power negatively affects the game.
The percentage of paying jumped to 37! Monthly revenue amounted to hundreds of thousands of rubles. And everything seemed to go just fine. But having purchased premium accounts, powerful gear and boosts, our favorite loyal players began to absorb content at a tremendous rate. What we have planned for six months, she mastered for a month. In the beginning, we accelerated the release of content, but the awareness of the deadlock of this path came to us very quickly.
Then there was a painful nerf. The impact on the revenue of the project was not strong, and the balance was slightly corrected. However, most players have already bought everything they wanted. And we were still doomed to introduce new content: factions, territories, bosses, dungeons, resources, battlefields, recipes ... We threw all our strength on the production of content. But the game was slowly declining.
Experience number 10. Content without new mechanics is not enough to support the project.
Strong competitors burned on the market: "Legend: Legacy of Dragons", "Three Kingdoms", "Territory", "Technomage" and other well-known browser games. In one warm August day, we suspended further support for the project.
Many years later. During this time I took part in the development of several more browsers, action-rpg Panzar, the mobile game Evolution: Heroes of Utopia and other mobile and social projects. He became director of game design for a large Russian game company. He taught game logic at RealTime School for 5 years, and two years ago, with his colleagues at the workshop, he launched Russia's first state education in the gaming industry at the Higher School of Economics. All this time, work in geymdeve was and continues to be for me the most interesting thing in life.
In conclusion, I want to say that the gaming industry is a place that opens for people with burning eyes the prospects of work that brings pleasure. And when you do your favorite thing, then money and success eventually come. They come through mistakes, through their own “rakes” and lack of sleep. But if the eyes are burning - then all this is surmountable!
')
So, two young students with basic programming skills, inspired by cool games, decided to create their own project. We have conceived a game of enormous proportions. A kind of World of Warcraft in the browser.
Experience number 1. Soberly assess your strength.
We not only enthusiastically took up work that we could never master, but we were absolutely confident in its success and our capabilities! 100500 abilok, 1000 features and of course over 9000 heroes - this is what most indie projects don't need. Without realizing the scale and never having heard about the word “planning”, we set to work. Being experienced players, we were sure that this was enough to make our game. Dima, my development partner, at that time had already heard such words as the alpha test and had a clear methodology in his head - let's start alpha, and we saw the content, then beta and money. Doom to success.
Experience number 2. Do not underestimate the importance of the methodology.
Having read the articles, I already knew that game design begins with dizdokov. By the end of the first year of development, they appeared with us.
We worked hard and hard. And a month later, we got a playable prototype: moving around the location map, a text lock on menus and a step-by-step combat without graphics. Everything was done on my knees and in general it was justified. Now I understand that this is the way to write prototypes. Here only then they are thrown out not to drag in the main code of crutches and bicycles. The moment of adoption of the prototype marks the beginning of the stage, which is now called Vertical Slice. By the way, very soon, on March 2, I will tell in details about the documentation and methodology at a public lecture. More about this in another article on Habré.
Experience number 3. Do not be afraid to send a prototype to the basket.
Well, many years ago, instead of saying: “Excellent! We came up with a cool game ", - throw out a prototype and start developing, we continued to work on it, turning it into a combat version.
The work continued for many more months: graphics, content, client part on HTML / JS and server part on PHP. Finally, on January 7, 2008, the long-awaited alpha test was launched. We sent invitations to all friends, posted information about the launch on the forums known to us, and waited for an influx of players. By evening, the MAU project reached 30.
Experience number 4. Prepare traffic to Soft Launch.
Quickly realizing the mistakes of our path, we began to make a PR project and work with the community. Social networks then still not so densely entered our lives and potential players were sitting more on the forums. After some time, we learned about ad networks and started buying traffic to Google AdWords. By that time, the first content manager and professional artist joined our team. What was our surprise when 80% of registrations did not turn into anything! People left the game without even paying money. We started thinking about tutorials and monetization.
Experience number 5. Monetization mechanisms should be incorporated in core gameplay.
After analyzing the competitors, including the well-known BC and a couple of similar markups, we identified a number of key income items and realized that we want to sell in our game.
We constantly communicated with our players on the forum and in the project chat, receiving feedback from them and promptly modifying the project, based on their tips. But the money did not become more, as well as online players. At this point, we are thinking about analytics.
Experience number 6. The system for collecting and analyzing statistics should be ready for Soft Launch.
We have learned to count retensch, understand what conversions are and analyze where our players fall off. We started working with traffic and fighting for low CPAs.
Obvious shoals were closed, and the game was lined with metrics. The lifetime of an active player has exceeded many months. The percentage of payers sometimes reached 20. Online consistently held at 100. But the more we introduced new features, the more recipes, talents and quets appeared in the game, the more complaints appeared on the forum. At a certain point, the volume of new content and its correlation with the old became higher than what we could analyze. The new quest was added not by the fan, but by increasing discontent. The second artist, whom we hired for the growing revenues of the project, did not save the situation.
Experience number 7. Do not neglect quality control.
It took many weeks to create a system for properly pouring updates instead of manually copying them to the server. Appeared test cases and checklists updates. Patches are no longer rolled into production without testing for PTR (Public Test Realm). All players were notified in advance about upcoming updates and participated in their discussions. The project has an encyclopedia, testers and community. We have created an institute of moderators from among the players. Technical support has been reborn from a topic that is always filled up with pain on the forum into a separate convenient page of the site.
We have gathered our community - loyal and madly in love with our project. But the further growth of the audience and revenue went very slowly. The project has a beautiful landing, there was a good ARPPU - 1800 rubles. But conversions remained low. Only a year after the launch of the alpha, two people with a technical cast of mind realized why.
Experience number 8. The product should be beautifully packaged interfaces from the beginning.
Retribution interfaces were terrible. To us, they seemed comfortable and quite acceptable. But only fairly hardcore users were ready to deal with our HTML tables. We hired an interface designer, and I took up usability. The realization that one really convenient cool interface is done in a month, and in the game you need a hundred, we were disheartened. What should have been developed from the very beginning, a year before launch, appeared only in MBT. By the way, we have not changed all the interfaces of the game to new ones and in some places remained “artifacts” of ancient times.
Our artists pumped. There was a simple and fascinating tutorial. The game began to accumulate an audience. We had big clans, and the number of registrations exceeded 100,000. The bottleneck for expansion was monetization. We looked at competitors and introduced artifacts.
Experience number 9. Direct selling power negatively affects the game.
The percentage of paying jumped to 37! Monthly revenue amounted to hundreds of thousands of rubles. And everything seemed to go just fine. But having purchased premium accounts, powerful gear and boosts, our favorite loyal players began to absorb content at a tremendous rate. What we have planned for six months, she mastered for a month. In the beginning, we accelerated the release of content, but the awareness of the deadlock of this path came to us very quickly.
Then there was a painful nerf. The impact on the revenue of the project was not strong, and the balance was slightly corrected. However, most players have already bought everything they wanted. And we were still doomed to introduce new content: factions, territories, bosses, dungeons, resources, battlefields, recipes ... We threw all our strength on the production of content. But the game was slowly declining.
Experience number 10. Content without new mechanics is not enough to support the project.
Strong competitors burned on the market: "Legend: Legacy of Dragons", "Three Kingdoms", "Territory", "Technomage" and other well-known browser games. In one warm August day, we suspended further support for the project.
Many years later. During this time I took part in the development of several more browsers, action-rpg Panzar, the mobile game Evolution: Heroes of Utopia and other mobile and social projects. He became director of game design for a large Russian game company. He taught game logic at RealTime School for 5 years, and two years ago, with his colleagues at the workshop, he launched Russia's first state education in the gaming industry at the Higher School of Economics. All this time, work in geymdeve was and continues to be for me the most interesting thing in life.
In conclusion, I want to say that the gaming industry is a place that opens for people with burning eyes the prospects of work that brings pleasure. And when you do your favorite thing, then money and success eventually come. They come through mistakes, through their own “rakes” and lack of sleep. But if the eyes are burning - then all this is surmountable!
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/277773/
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