Episode 3 - a new hope for the success of the game for Android
Hi, Habrasoobschestvo! In this article I want to talk about my game Hexoquan, released for Android. I will touch on the choice of ideas, the implementation, the difficulties encountered and the ways to solve them.
This is my third Android game, which has come down to release. There were actually more games, but not all reached the release or were not intended for it.
As I said in my first article , game dev for me is above all an interesting hobby. Nevertheless, I want to make games with higher quality and higher quality, to learn from our own and others' mistakes, to take into account previous experience and to release games, each time surpassing my previous ones. What I tried to do this time.
The question of choosing the idea of the game: here everyone decides for himself. Someone is trying to get into the wave and make another trendy clone (how many different Flappy appeared during the peak of the famous game). I want to do something new (or almost new). Therefore, during the search for an idea, I tried to invent something that is stillalmost absent. At the same time I wanted to use the popular and my favorite style of hex - the playing field, consisting of hexagons. The Internet is full of good articles describing the principles of working with a similar field. Well, the hexagons themselves give freedom and space in the generation of ideas.
')
The idea of Hexoquan is based on ăn quan - a traditional Vietnamese children's board game that improves the skill score. To score points in it, it is necessary to decompose larger numbers (2-9) into smaller components, creating groups of identical numbers.
Actually, the name Hexoquan was coined as a pun for hex (no, not hexadecimal, but hexagon) and quan. In my opinion, it turned out interesting and new.
Imposed on the hexagonal field of cells, the game provides an opportunity not only to train in the account, but also to make whole strategies for filling or skipping cells in order to score more points on the next turn.
I think it makes no sense to describe the entire gameplay with different examples in detail: if someone is interested in screenshots (after all, games are first judged by their clothes), then you can install and play. In short, as I said earlier, the point is to simply decompose numbers from larger to smaller. Before the player is a field with chips, 3 of which are filled immediately (randomly). Chips with numbers can be moved - one move to the next cell reduces the value of the chip by 1, and this lost unit remains in the previous position. It is possible to reverse the course until its complete cancellation. Thus, the field is filled with new numbers. As soon as the course is completed, points are scored - groups of chips with the same numbers are collected for this and are removed from the field, giving the player points equal to their values. After that, 1-3 new values fall on the field (depending on the field occupancy). And if there are no empty cells left, the game ends. All this is accompanied by animations and sound effects that enliven the gameplay.
As in previous times, the budget for the hobby was not allocated, because again it was decided to do everything on their own, including the schedule. But we must learn and improve the class, because we remember the famous video and go!
When developing a game, the idea to make different themes quickly arose. It takes into account the taste preferences of the players, and the themes of the holidays (did not have time to release the New Year and Christmas, because there is no Christmas theme). But you need to remember about the physical ability to play, choosing some topic - but this was one of the main problems!
You meet a beautiful picture on the Internet (unfortunately, the described picture is lost) with a dark background, bright letters on it - a very beautiful and interesting combination. You take from it the color for the background, the color for the cells, check in the graphical editor what it looks like, adjust it a bit and think - it’s beautiful! Then you transfer all this to the game, you start playing on the phone and after 30 seconds you realize that your eyes do not agree with your color taste. Thus, there were at least 4-5 iterations when creating each topic (there are three of them at the moment). But this is how the first, main and my favorite blue theme was born:
For the layout of the sprites in the atlases again applied TexturePacker and really advise him and recommend. Very convenient, very simple in the settings. The only drawback is that every time you start it offers to buy a version of pro, but I see no point in either pro or hacking - there are quite enough free opportunities.
A lot of problems added sounds and music. The search question itself was not urgent - there are a lot of resources in the network with good free melodies and sound effects (although not so many suitable ones). But you need to choose exactly what suits the game in style.
A rather calm, but not dull melody was chosen as background music. It seemed to me and volunteer testers, the music game is suitable. Good! With sounds it was more difficult, as well as with pictures for those. The sound itself is like, but in the game it sounds awful, ridiculous, unsuitable for the style of the game. To the rescue (in addition to the new search), a decrease in the volume came so that, against the background of a pleasant melody, the sound effects could be heard, but they would not stand out much or irritate. But for some reason, reducing the sound in the sound editor did not give the effect - it became quieter in it, and when you import it into the game, it is still too loud. The possibility of the Unity I used came to the rescue - the volume of the sound being played can be changed either in the settings or in the code (I preferred the second option).
One example of such sounds is the sound of scoring. For example, if a player “knocks out” three pieces with the number 7 from the playing field, he is given 21 points, which means the corresponding sound will be heard 21 times in a row (an idea inspired by the same video). In the first implementations, it looked like an annoying alarm clock in the early morning, but after lowering the volume and slightly shortening the sound effect in the editor, the game really acquired the desired zest.
To liven up the game a little more and make it more attractive, various live effects were added (I’m not afraid of a pun). For example, new numbers do not appear on the field immediately, but literally fly into it. Points are also awarded not instantly, but single-handedly with the corresponding voice acting.
For the first time in my games, at least some full tutorial was added (previously there was only a textual description of the basic principles of gameplay with pictures). In its implementation, there was a choice between showing how to play the animation and directly involving the player in the training. He won the second option as more correct, less lazy. In this case, the player is protected from error - he is shown step by step all the gameplay elements, their purpose. A couple of steps of the tutorial are expected directly from the player, where he is also shown what, from where and where to drag.
In general, the first tutorial experience. I can not call it very much complete, but it is already better than the dry text "in the game you need to do this and this." Maybe the players themselves will give you something else, because I, as the author of the game, perfectly understand it, everything seems to me easy and understandable.
I admit at once that this idea of the tutorial also showed its shortcomings: some of his acquaintances went through it, but they still didn’t fully understand the principle. But there were people who could play right away without a tutorial. This is what helped to decide to leave the current option, because the players will be different - someone will quickly understand, someone later, but for each tutorial you will not do it.
Obviously, success requires user ratings. When implementing this functionality, a number of articles were read, both on the habr, and on other sources (there were links from the habr news digests - all this needs to be stored and periodically re-read).
Key ideas:
As said above, the game needs ratings, but the ratings should be positive! If the request will annoy the player, then the assessments will be, but not at all what we want. Therefore, the following points were adopted and implemented:
If suddenly a player has not entered the game for some time, but it is still installed, it means, we believe, he still wants to play (well, we hope so). We just need to remind him a little of what he recently installed.
For the implementation of notifications some time ago was written its own plugin. I remember, and he delivered some problems, because This was the first and only experience of writing native plugins, and then connecting and calling them through C # in Unity. But it's done, the plugin is ready and working.
As soon as the player leaves the game, we prepare a notification, which will appear in the status bar of the phone in 2 days. If the player launches the game himself before the expiration of this time, the notification will be deleted and will not go. For variety, several sets of texts have been developed - each time one of them is chosen randomly. This is a kind of teasing player or polite calling back into the game, depending on the notification text.
Again, we don’t want to annoy the player, so there is a button in the settings that allows you to enable or disable notifications.
Hobby is a hobby, but income will be enjoyable.
It was immediately decided that all topics will be free. Therefore, there is absolutely nothing to sell in the game, except the possibility of disabling advertising, which was realized.
For a while there was a doubt about what kind of advertising to add - full-screen images or videos. It is known that the video gives more revenue, but also to wait for its completion for a long time (if you prohibit closing until the end of viewing), we do not want to annoy the players. Therefore, full-screen images were selected, which only occasionally appear in some places of the game. If the player wants to disable it (and donate in some way), he can make the corresponding purchase in the game store. As an advertising module, I use Chartboost again - a convenient management console, easy to connect and use.
To implement IAP, the Unity plugin was selected again. I already have a positive experience with it from my previous game Catch the square. The plugin is quite easily and quickly configured by the official instructions of Unity, so here we will not pay much attention to it.
Everything is simple here - because There is no budget, the promotion will consist in writing articles on thematic sites and topics on thematic forums. They have a lot of players who are interested in similar subjects of games, because the game will definitely find its niche.
At the same time, I refuse in advance from the fake raits “you to me, I to you”. First, Google learned to identify them long ago, but I don’t need a ban. Secondly, for a counter evaluation, you will have to put a lot of games or applications of dubious quality, but why should I litter my phone? Because the game is waiting for its audience and loyal truthful assessment.
Radically, the mechanics of the game will not change.
There are plans to release new versions, which can “revive” the gameplay even more. There are also ideas on new topics. This will help maintain the interest of existing players and attract new ones.
At the moment, all my games are only in Russian and English. There is a desire to finally add a few more popular languages: German, French, Spanish.
That's all. Play, enjoy, set new records, share your opinion in the comments. Thanks for attention!
This is my third Android game, which has come down to release. There were actually more games, but not all reached the release or were not intended for it.
As I said in my first article , game dev for me is above all an interesting hobby. Nevertheless, I want to make games with higher quality and higher quality, to learn from our own and others' mistakes, to take into account previous experience and to release games, each time surpassing my previous ones. What I tried to do this time.
No need to copy
The question of choosing the idea of the game: here everyone decides for himself. Someone is trying to get into the wave and make another trendy clone (how many different Flappy appeared during the peak of the famous game). I want to do something new (or almost new). Therefore, during the search for an idea, I tried to invent something that is still
')
The idea of Hexoquan is based on ăn quan - a traditional Vietnamese children's board game that improves the skill score. To score points in it, it is necessary to decompose larger numbers (2-9) into smaller components, creating groups of identical numbers.
Actually, the name Hexoquan was coined as a pun for hex (no, not hexadecimal, but hexagon) and quan. In my opinion, it turned out interesting and new.
Imposed on the hexagonal field of cells, the game provides an opportunity not only to train in the account, but also to make whole strategies for filling or skipping cells in order to score more points on the next turn.
I think it makes no sense to describe the entire gameplay with different examples in detail: if someone is interested in screenshots (after all, games are first judged by their clothes), then you can install and play. In short, as I said earlier, the point is to simply decompose numbers from larger to smaller. Before the player is a field with chips, 3 of which are filled immediately (randomly). Chips with numbers can be moved - one move to the next cell reduces the value of the chip by 1, and this lost unit remains in the previous position. It is possible to reverse the course until its complete cancellation. Thus, the field is filled with new numbers. As soon as the course is completed, points are scored - groups of chips with the same numbers are collected for this and are removed from the field, giving the player points equal to their values. After that, 1-3 new values fall on the field (depending on the field occupancy). And if there are no empty cells left, the game ends. All this is accompanied by animations and sound effects that enliven the gameplay.
GIF with gameplay
A small movie with the process of the game in several moves
Juice it or lose it
As in previous times, the budget for the hobby was not allocated, because again it was decided to do everything on their own, including the schedule. But we must learn and improve the class, because we remember the famous video and go!
Graphic design
When developing a game, the idea to make different themes quickly arose. It takes into account the taste preferences of the players, and the themes of the holidays (did not have time to release the New Year and Christmas, because there is no Christmas theme). But you need to remember about the physical ability to play, choosing some topic - but this was one of the main problems!
You meet a beautiful picture on the Internet (unfortunately, the described picture is lost) with a dark background, bright letters on it - a very beautiful and interesting combination. You take from it the color for the background, the color for the cells, check in the graphical editor what it looks like, adjust it a bit and think - it’s beautiful! Then you transfer all this to the game, you start playing on the phone and after 30 seconds you realize that your eyes do not agree with your color taste. Thus, there were at least 4-5 iterations when creating each topic (there are three of them at the moment). But this is how the first, main and my favorite blue theme was born:
The final version of the blue theme
For the layout of the sprites in the atlases again applied TexturePacker and really advise him and recommend. Very convenient, very simple in the settings. The only drawback is that every time you start it offers to buy a version of pro, but I see no point in either pro or hacking - there are quite enough free opportunities.
Sounds and music
A lot of problems added sounds and music. The search question itself was not urgent - there are a lot of resources in the network with good free melodies and sound effects (although not so many suitable ones). But you need to choose exactly what suits the game in style.
A rather calm, but not dull melody was chosen as background music. It seemed to me and volunteer testers, the music game is suitable. Good! With sounds it was more difficult, as well as with pictures for those. The sound itself is like, but in the game it sounds awful, ridiculous, unsuitable for the style of the game. To the rescue (in addition to the new search), a decrease in the volume came so that, against the background of a pleasant melody, the sound effects could be heard, but they would not stand out much or irritate. But for some reason, reducing the sound in the sound editor did not give the effect - it became quieter in it, and when you import it into the game, it is still too loud. The possibility of the Unity I used came to the rescue - the volume of the sound being played can be changed either in the settings or in the code (I preferred the second option).
One example of such sounds is the sound of scoring. For example, if a player “knocks out” three pieces with the number 7 from the playing field, he is given 21 points, which means the corresponding sound will be heard 21 times in a row (an idea inspired by the same video). In the first implementations, it looked like an annoying alarm clock in the early morning, but after lowering the volume and slightly shortening the sound effect in the editor, the game really acquired the desired zest.
Other effects
To liven up the game a little more and make it more attractive, various live effects were added (I’m not afraid of a pun). For example, new numbers do not appear on the field immediately, but literally fly into it. Points are also awarded not instantly, but single-handedly with the corresponding voice acting.
Player training
For the first time in my games, at least some full tutorial was added (previously there was only a textual description of the basic principles of gameplay with pictures). In its implementation, there was a choice between showing how to play the animation and directly involving the player in the training. He won the second option as more correct, less lazy. In this case, the player is protected from error - he is shown step by step all the gameplay elements, their purpose. A couple of steps of the tutorial are expected directly from the player, where he is also shown what, from where and where to drag.
In general, the first tutorial experience. I can not call it very much complete, but it is already better than the dry text "in the game you need to do this and this." Maybe the players themselves will give you something else, because I, as the author of the game, perfectly understand it, everything seems to me easy and understandable.
I admit at once that this idea of the tutorial also showed its shortcomings: some of his acquaintances went through it, but they still didn’t fully understand the principle. But there were people who could play right away without a tutorial. This is what helped to decide to leave the current option, because the players will be different - someone will quickly understand, someone later, but for each tutorial you will not do it.
We need estimates
Obviously, success requires user ratings. When implementing this functionality, a number of articles were read, both on the habr, and on other sources (there were links from the habr news digests - all this needs to be stored and periodically re-read).
Key ideas:
- Please rate the game should be!
- The request should not annoy the user and annoy him
As said above, the game needs ratings, but the ratings should be positive! If the request will annoy the player, then the assessments will be, but not at all what we want. Therefore, the following points were adopted and implemented:
- Our personal request to rate the game automatically appears only once and politely says something like, “It looks like you like the game, and your opinion is important to us. Would you like to evaluate it? This message appears only after 2 days have passed since the game was installed, and the user has already played 5 games. These figures were pondered. Initially it was 5 days, but I thought that if a person did not delete the game immediately or every other day, it means that at least she caught him. 5 games are also an indicator of the manifestation of interest, after all, not 1-2 and subsequent deletion, but 5 as many!
- The message has only 2 buttons - Yes and No. If the user selects No, the automatic message no longer appears in order to respect the user's choice. But we still hope to get a good rating, because the Rate button appears in the corner of the main menu screen, and when you click on it, you are asked to rate the application. The user understands this and then decides for himself whether to press this button or ignore him. If he chooses Yes, then we transfer him to the market for our game.
- It is impossible to track the actual fact of the assessment from the player, because we trust him with the word (and what we can do) and after agreeing to the assessment, we also hide the Rate button. Everything, we believe in the loyalty of the player and no longer distract him with hints on the assessment of the game.
Remind yourself
If suddenly a player has not entered the game for some time, but it is still installed, it means, we believe, he still wants to play (well, we hope so). We just need to remind him a little of what he recently installed.
For the implementation of notifications some time ago was written its own plugin. I remember, and he delivered some problems, because This was the first and only experience of writing native plugins, and then connecting and calling them through C # in Unity. But it's done, the plugin is ready and working.
As soon as the player leaves the game, we prepare a notification, which will appear in the status bar of the phone in 2 days. If the player launches the game himself before the expiration of this time, the notification will be deleted and will not go. For variety, several sets of texts have been developed - each time one of them is chosen randomly. This is a kind of teasing player or polite calling back into the game, depending on the notification text.
Again, we don’t want to annoy the player, so there is a button in the settings that allows you to enable or disable notifications.
What if the income!
Hobby is a hobby, but income will be enjoyable.
It was immediately decided that all topics will be free. Therefore, there is absolutely nothing to sell in the game, except the possibility of disabling advertising, which was realized.
For a while there was a doubt about what kind of advertising to add - full-screen images or videos. It is known that the video gives more revenue, but also to wait for its completion for a long time (if you prohibit closing until the end of viewing), we do not want to annoy the players. Therefore, full-screen images were selected, which only occasionally appear in some places of the game. If the player wants to disable it (and donate in some way), he can make the corresponding purchase in the game store. As an advertising module, I use Chartboost again - a convenient management console, easy to connect and use.
To implement IAP, the Unity plugin was selected again. I already have a positive experience with it from my previous game Catch the square. The plugin is quite easily and quickly configured by the official instructions of Unity, so here we will not pay much attention to it.
Promotion plans
Everything is simple here - because There is no budget, the promotion will consist in writing articles on thematic sites and topics on thematic forums. They have a lot of players who are interested in similar subjects of games, because the game will definitely find its niche.
At the same time, I refuse in advance from the fake raits “you to me, I to you”. First, Google learned to identify them long ago, but I don’t need a ban. Secondly, for a counter evaluation, you will have to put a lot of games or applications of dubious quality, but why should I litter my phone? Because the game is waiting for its audience and loyal truthful assessment.
Development plans
Radically, the mechanics of the game will not change.
There are plans to release new versions, which can “revive” the gameplay even more. There are also ideas on new topics. This will help maintain the interest of existing players and attract new ones.
At the moment, all my games are only in Russian and English. There is a desire to finally add a few more popular languages: German, French, Spanish.
The final version of the themes of indigo and monochrome
The subject of indigo arose the same way as the blue one - based on a randomly encountered picture on the Internet.
Monochrome theme created in tribute to the good old games (Tetris, etc.)
Monochrome theme created in tribute to the good old games (Tetris, etc.)
That's all. Play, enjoy, set new records, share your opinion in the comments. Thanks for attention!
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/319796/
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