The history of the development of Tower Defense for VK and Android
Hi Habr, I want to share my development experience first VC and then Android games.
He has never worked on gamedev before, but a small excess of time, as well as a desire to expand the area of ​​professional skills, was the impetus for starting development.
After some deliberation, I decided to make a game in the genre of Tower Defense, for the most part because I myself like this genre. The first prototype of the game was sketched on the same day, the squares of the towers shoot circles on the squares of enemies. That's all, the game is almost ready, I thought, it remains to fasten the graphics, GUI and make levels, enemies and towers, but before that it was necessary to choose a platform.
It was decided to make the VC application, probably because I myself at that time played in one popular VC game and seeing the numbers in the over 5 million participants thought that the VC application is very popular. As well as the development of VC applications for me meant the study of two new areas at once, PHP for the server part and ActionScript (Flash) for the client. I downloaded the book Colin Mook - ActionScript 3 and began to study. ActionScript was very easy to learn, the only thing that bothered me was the lack of a slip, but you quickly get used to it. PHP was great and without a book, probably because of its popularity, every little thing is googled with a bang immediately with examples. With mySQL, there were no problems at all. I already knew him. In all my projects I try to adhere to the paradigm of the PLO, which later made life much easier. The project turned out to be many times more voluminous than I originally intended.
The basic structure of the classes and the structure of the database was done quickly, here I was in my environment. Then types of towers were invented (each with its own characteristics) and level schemes were designed right in Excel. Very quickly, I rested on the need for graphics, namely GUI, level maps, as well as sprites of towers and enemies. The first version of the GUI was found quickly, the well-known Tiled fit perfectly for the levels, but I did not know what to do with the rest, where to get sprites for towers and enemies. In connection with the lack of ability to draw and the lack of a sense of taste, there was no question of making oneself. In the end, a spouse drew me one tower, I copied a little more somewhere where I corrected a little bit for myself, and I rendered another one in 3dmax with a free model that came up to me. I was so tired of these static sprites of towers, that when I thought about the enemies' sprites (which should be animated), my hands just fell. Fortunately, I stumbled upon a small prog CharCreator, it contained a huge amount of elements for creating animated characters.
')
When the issue with graphics was resolved, I spent quite a while with the balance. When already on the balance almost everything was done on Habré an article was published just on this topic, if it came out earlier, it would greatly save time. In general, development has continued for more than a year. It was a hobby and I did it when it was the right mood and time, but it was less and less. But despite this, the game was still brought to the first release in small steps and sent for testing.
Now unfortunately I can not find that option to show, but it is obvious that it was a GUI, it was terrible. It took more than a month to redo the GUI and add training (without it, too, did not begin to publish). And at the end of 2014 the game was added to the VC catalog. Over the next year, many improvements and fixes were made in the game, a new level, a skill system, and more. I did not make my goal to make money on this application, but probably everyone who has a hobby wants it to bring, in addition to moral satisfaction, also income. I didn’t do the purchase of game currency, but I screwed up the advertisements, I barely had enough income from advertising, but good reviews about the game were much more important and expensive for me.
Link to the application
At the end of 2015, I was thinking about porting to Android. I quickly mastered the fundamentals of unity3d on lessons in some kind of article, with # at that time I was already at a high level, so things went. Code moved quickly, thanks OOP. I had more complicated graphics, because before that I used Flash animation tools. Many things in unity are very convenient, but I actually did not use many of the chips that I had already implemented myself in the code. If I had been working on unity initially, it would be faster than ActionScript, but I don’t think that much, since most of the time as I already mentioned went in search of sprites.
Porting to unity has been strongly delayed, as it turned out over the 2 years of development (albeit sluggish) the project became quite large, but after exactly a year I laid out the mobile version for Android. But if in the VC of applications of this genre is not so much then in “Google play” it just sank in other similar ones and that is not unimportantly higher-quality applications. It simply does not find, and those who are spoiled by bestsellers of this genre and of course difficult to compete with them. I posted it on w3bsit3-dns.com and trashbox, and also posted a link from the VC application, but the effect is rather weak.
→ Link to the market
Summing up the development, I want to note that the purpose for which everything started was achieved in full. I studied a new area, mastered ActionScript, PHP and Unity3d.
The main conclusions that I made:
He has never worked on gamedev before, but a small excess of time, as well as a desire to expand the area of ​​professional skills, was the impetus for starting development.
After some deliberation, I decided to make a game in the genre of Tower Defense, for the most part because I myself like this genre. The first prototype of the game was sketched on the same day, the squares of the towers shoot circles on the squares of enemies. That's all, the game is almost ready, I thought, it remains to fasten the graphics, GUI and make levels, enemies and towers, but before that it was necessary to choose a platform.
VK application
It was decided to make the VC application, probably because I myself at that time played in one popular VC game and seeing the numbers in the over 5 million participants thought that the VC application is very popular. As well as the development of VC applications for me meant the study of two new areas at once, PHP for the server part and ActionScript (Flash) for the client. I downloaded the book Colin Mook - ActionScript 3 and began to study. ActionScript was very easy to learn, the only thing that bothered me was the lack of a slip, but you quickly get used to it. PHP was great and without a book, probably because of its popularity, every little thing is googled with a bang immediately with examples. With mySQL, there were no problems at all. I already knew him. In all my projects I try to adhere to the paradigm of the PLO, which later made life much easier. The project turned out to be many times more voluminous than I originally intended.
The basic structure of the classes and the structure of the database was done quickly, here I was in my environment. Then types of towers were invented (each with its own characteristics) and level schemes were designed right in Excel. Very quickly, I rested on the need for graphics, namely GUI, level maps, as well as sprites of towers and enemies. The first version of the GUI was found quickly, the well-known Tiled fit perfectly for the levels, but I did not know what to do with the rest, where to get sprites for towers and enemies. In connection with the lack of ability to draw and the lack of a sense of taste, there was no question of making oneself. In the end, a spouse drew me one tower, I copied a little more somewhere where I corrected a little bit for myself, and I rendered another one in 3dmax with a free model that came up to me. I was so tired of these static sprites of towers, that when I thought about the enemies' sprites (which should be animated), my hands just fell. Fortunately, I stumbled upon a small prog CharCreator, it contained a huge amount of elements for creating animated characters.
')
When the issue with graphics was resolved, I spent quite a while with the balance. When already on the balance almost everything was done on Habré an article was published just on this topic, if it came out earlier, it would greatly save time. In general, development has continued for more than a year. It was a hobby and I did it when it was the right mood and time, but it was less and less. But despite this, the game was still brought to the first release in small steps and sent for testing.
Now unfortunately I can not find that option to show, but it is obvious that it was a GUI, it was terrible. It took more than a month to redo the GUI and add training (without it, too, did not begin to publish). And at the end of 2014 the game was added to the VC catalog. Over the next year, many improvements and fixes were made in the game, a new level, a skill system, and more. I did not make my goal to make money on this application, but probably everyone who has a hobby wants it to bring, in addition to moral satisfaction, also income. I didn’t do the purchase of game currency, but I screwed up the advertisements, I barely had enough income from advertising, but good reviews about the game were much more important and expensive for me.
Link to the application
Transfer to Unity
At the end of 2015, I was thinking about porting to Android. I quickly mastered the fundamentals of unity3d on lessons in some kind of article, with # at that time I was already at a high level, so things went. Code moved quickly, thanks OOP. I had more complicated graphics, because before that I used Flash animation tools. Many things in unity are very convenient, but I actually did not use many of the chips that I had already implemented myself in the code. If I had been working on unity initially, it would be faster than ActionScript, but I don’t think that much, since most of the time as I already mentioned went in search of sprites.
Porting to unity has been strongly delayed, as it turned out over the 2 years of development (albeit sluggish) the project became quite large, but after exactly a year I laid out the mobile version for Android. But if in the VC of applications of this genre is not so much then in “Google play” it just sank in other similar ones and that is not unimportantly higher-quality applications. It simply does not find, and those who are spoiled by bestsellers of this genre and of course difficult to compete with them. I posted it on w3bsit3-dns.com and trashbox, and also posted a link from the VC application, but the effect is rather weak.
→ Link to the market
findings
Summing up the development, I want to note that the purpose for which everything started was achieved in full. I studied a new area, mastered ActionScript, PHP and Unity3d.
The main conclusions that I made:
- Game development is interesting, and great for mastering new environments and languages;
- The fact that your application is playing motivates to improve it, but the reverse process is also present;
- To make a worthwhile game in a team, there must be an artist / designer;
- In order to earn money on a game, you need to spend a lot of time on this, there must be either an original idea or a great performance;
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/319198/
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