How to start young mobile game developers from Russia in the current realities

Lyrical digression

Good day to all!

Immediately a small disclaimer: "In this post, you will not see the program code, stories about the simplicity of development and calls for everyone to do igrodelstvom under the tempting prospect of getting rich on your hobby."

I want to talk about how our young indie studio began to be created and what conclusions we learned for ourselves.

Briefly about us and how it happened

About six months ago, I took part in the life of a web studio. During this time, I and like-minded people formed an opinion: it’s enough to do custom development, you need to make your product. The question remained for small - what kind of product we want to do?

There were lots of options, all of them were carefully worked out and small business plans were put together.
We decided to dwell on the field game dev. I want you to understand correctly that in this area there really are both their enormous prospects and chances, as well as the enormous risks of losing a lot of time, money, strength and at the same time not getting anything in return. Much has been written about the stories of success and falls, so we omit these moments.

Beginning of work

To start the work of a banal decision to do something is not enough, in the end we all work not for the sake of work, but in order to achieve success in this or that sphere. In my life I came across three types of internal motivation for working people:

• People who need to make money;
• People who want to be the best in their field;
• People for whom work is a hobby for which they are paid.

All of them are guided by different incentives, but in fact their success is measured all the same only in monetary terms. This is the measure of how well you are moving towards the goal. This factor has become the main indicator for our further analytics.

For small startups it is very important to properly evaluate their strength. With the general analytics in hand, we began to analyze specific mechanics and sales markets. The action plan looked like this:

1. Market analysis;
2. Platform selection;
3. Selection of mechanics;
4. The choice of the engine under the mechanics;
5. Writing concepts;
6. Preparation of materials;
7. Start of development.

Market analysis and platform selection

At the moment, the annual growth of the mobile games and applications market is nearing 30%, while PC games and consoles cannot boast of such indicators.

The undoubted favorite for us was the mobile platforms Android and iOS. The development was decided to be carried out on both platforms and were guided by such logic that it is not so interesting to produce a product for the market of Russia and the former CIS countries (where Android dominates), as for the countries of Europe, Asia (China and Japan) and of course the USA The audience that uses the selected platforms in these countries is almost equally divided.

Mechanical selection

Let's just say: tops for downloads and fees - MMO and farm, but for a young studio it is too long and expensive. In second place - casual format 2048 and three in a row, but the niche is very crowded with such applications and take a decent place in it will be difficult. Then we saw that the subway surfers, temple run and the like runners have a huge number of downloads, are in the tops in popularity but do not have marks on the top of fees.

The conclusion suggests itself for itself - they did not figure out how to monetize it correctly. We decided to try. About how the in-game economy was developed, I will tell in the next post.

Engine selection

Everything was as simple as possible. We chose unity3d because of the relative ease of development and porting to different devices.

Writing concepts

Easy too. Several scriptwriters were tasked to write several sets of selected mechanics and platforms. Of all the options collectively choose the best option.

A recommendation that we have heard from many developers and that I want to give you: in the first couple you don’t need to go deep into the details. As development proceeds, the concept will change and unnecessary details will lead to a loss of time. At the very beginning, this is unattainable luxury.

Preparation of materials

Next were collected cases of successful games, which distinguished themselves by the visual component and atmosphere. According to the reference, the task was set for illustrators and programmers.
The first sketches were made and a small level was assembled without graphic elements (a set of circles and squares). Further, the work of programmers, game designers and illustrators had to be put on stream and standardized. We used Google docs as a platform for diz.Dokov, Trello for task tracking and Telegram for corporate communication. For a small team to use Jira or Bitrix24 in our humble opinion does not make sense.

Start of development

After the format of the work has been formalized, it remains to work out the planned volumes and observe the deadlines. The mechanism began to work. This is what we managed to do in one calendar month.

PS

At the moment we launched our promo clip, which tells a small part of the script and shows a piece of raw gameplay, only about 30% of the intended volume. You can view it by the link .

In the future, I would like to reveal many topics, but to do this at this stage is impractical, but I will definitely do it when they turn from hypotheses into dry analytics.

We will have a lot of topics related to promotion, networking, team selection, publication of applications. I think that the list will definitely be updated.

To be continued ...