A good start on Google Play without attachments

Hello!

I want to share with you a small story of successful and free promotion in the Google Play app store.

Prehistory

My name is Dmitry, I am 22 years old, I am a programmer. When I was ten, when I bought my first computer, I started to get involved in games, or rather, in game development. Remember that wonderful, childish feeling, when the “Million Idea” comes into your head and you do not even know the basics of programming, sit down and start studying various engines, designers and other tools in order to bring your idea to life. That's exactly how it all started. Now I have a diploma of a programmer and a great desire to implement all those ideas that I couldn’t realize, without proper skills.
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Returning to the topic topic. I came up with the idea of ​​the game with my friend. Just one day they started talking about physical shooters and it started :)

Tools

The working environment was chosen engine / designer (call it what you want) Game Maker Studio. I know Game Maker since my childhood, this is a great environment for writing my projects, with built-in Box2D physics and the ability to create a project without using code, everything is built on event-actions. This designer saves a lot of time when writing your game and for this reason this option was chosen.
In addition to the working environment, standard tools were used: Adobe Photoshop for graphics, Audacity and FL Studio for sounds / music.

Development

The development of the game lasted exactly 30 days, I set such a bar for myself and the second developer, after reading articles on Habré that the project should be developed no more than a month, otherwise the development of such a project may be delayed for many years. Every day (or almost everyone), devoting several hours, we thought up new levels and mechanisms. Probably one of the most difficult things in development is to represent how your project will look, to come up with various interesting things. Since our interests differ significantly from the second developer, opinions about each thing in the game also differed, which is very good, because it allowed us to write the game based on different, combined opinions.

To write a game with support for physics on Game Maker Studio (hereinafter referred to as GMS), then another entertainment.
Firstly - the speed of physics in GMS, limited by the overall speed in the room (room speed). Since the idea was approved to realize the opportunity to acquire stronger equipment, which will allow to release arrows with higher speed, it was necessary to accelerate the arrow somehow. This is where the problem arose. Increasing the overall speed in the room, the arrows really flew faster, but also all the objects moved faster, it was necessary to find another way to increase the speed of the arrow.
We had already abandoned the idea with different equipment, when suddenly the physics_world_update_speed () function crawled onto the scene. As the name implies, this function allows you to increase the speed of rendering updates to the physical world, which made it possible to increase the ceiling of the speed of movement of physical objects in the room without affecting performance.

Next, there was a problem with the graphics. Since there were no designers in our team, I had to invent and draw everything myself. The idea was put forward to implement the graphics in the style of “pen in a notebook” , everyone liked the idea, and then began to implement it. The bonus of such graphics turned out to be its low weight. Since the main color is blue, and all the objects in the game are painted in the “stroke” style, the heaviest image by weight was the background :)

Gameplay

The essence of the game is to destroy robots at the level using a bow and arrows. At your discretion, you have 4 types of arrows. By combining various types of arrows, you must destroy all opponents on the level, while activating various types of mechanisms and traps. Each new season (10 levels) opens new types of mechanisms. For remaining after passing the level of arrows, you will receive game currency, the resulting currency, you can spend to buy a stronger bow. There are 100 levels in the game and 10 seasons respectively.

Promotion

Probably just like any developer, I re-read a bunch of articles on promotion, they are all almost the same: "Beautiful icon, detailed description, keywords and ... blah blah blah . " No, I do not deny that all these tips are effective, they just all are very monotonous. A lot of really cool and beautiful games lie in the depths of Google Play, with a detailed description and a beautiful icon, however, these tips did not work on them.
It's no secret that the success of the application is determined by its first week after being uploaded to the store. Having read a bunch of articles and tips, I decided to act.
All on the standard list: w3bsit3-dns.com, xda-developers, SlideMe, androidforums, androidcentral, and so on. There were also scattered links to various thematic forums in social networks, a post on Picaba, as well as articles in several blogs of friends.

Results

About a week later there was a boom of installations and the game jumped into the top 50 new products in the CIS countries.

Growth chart for unique users:


The source of income chose advertising (AdMob) and the paid version. The total profit for advertising was $ 70.
For the paid version, a little more pitiable, 34 purchases and $ 23 profits:


Thank you for your attention!