How to easily break up with $ 1000

• Prelude
• IOS game development
• Promotion of the game
• Pure neighing

Prelude

This story happened in May exactly on the bench where Berlioz and the Homeless had argued about the essence of Christ. My friends and I also argued about the possibility of making money on our iPhone game. I declared, all of a sudden, that without an investment of money this is impossible. My opponents reluctantly agreed. I increased the trolling and added: - My friends, without a lot of money it is absolutely impossible! Any amount less than $ 25,000 spent on the promotion of the application - will turn into zilch. Shh!

All were indignant and drove me off the bench. At the same time, too, from Moscow.

IOS game development

Once on the outskirts of financial flows and Europe, I decided to spend $ 1000 dollars (fallen from the old games) to prove my White Thesis, especially since I have a sofa. As you already guess, over the years, any developer creates only those projects for which he has enough strength. At 60, I have enough strength for exactly 3 days. For example, in June I made 10 new games. Basically fun slag, but the graphics and gameplay are great.

Graphics

The graphics in all games are the same. Let me explain - once a month I go to envato.market and buy a ready-made set of images for a mobile game for $ 10- $ 20 dollars. The kind of unusual pictures wakes hundreds of ideas in me, of which I implement exactly 10. For three days a game is a month of life and the author’s tired brain requires the next portion of images from artists. Artists! thank you for being. Drugs - no!

Now about the June pictures - a set of isometric cubes. Nice colors, precise pixels, what else is needed for happiness, Vereshchagin?


Font Troika. Amazingly rude and Cyrillic.

Gameplay

All games made by me on the basis of the above 2D graphics are very different. Ideas from pakman up to 2048. I will not give any links, but I’m noticing the devils, and I am a rock-old, extremely anxious about fighting. I’ll throw away my hooves, but I want to see what the iPhone 8 looks like.
But about one game selected for promotion, I will have to tell with links and other husks. And the husk is funny.

Title

A game called Blocks Chain. I understand the technology of the blockchain, but it has nothing to do with this game. The point is the following - given a pyramid of 56 three-dimensional blocks of four colors. Each block has a random number on its side, a multiple of 2. It is 2, 4, 8, 16, 32. You can collapse any 2 identical blocks. That is, block 2 and block 2 will turn into one block 4.

2 + 2 → 4
4 + 4 → 8
8 + 8 → 16
64 + 64 → X

If you are lucky - solitaire will converge into four large multi-colored blocks 128. What is the problem, you exclaim - this is elementary! The problem is that in the pyramid we initially see only 21 blocks out of 56. See for yourself.



In short, a sort of mahjong turned out.

I like the alignment 32306. I decided in 2 hours.

Development

Language Swift 3.0, the day to encode. What's interestnig? The interesting task of determining the visible-invisible block. I decided to do it with pleasure by building the barrier matrix 56 by 56. That is, the block numbers in the matrix are sorted by the Z coordinate

let a [1..56,1..56] // isHidden matrix

If block number 34 obstructs block 16 completely, then

a [34,16] = 0b11 // decimal 3

if block number 50 obscures the left half of block 45, then

a [50.45] = 0b10 // decimal 2

if block number 50 obscures the right half of block 46, then

a [50,46] = 0b01 // decimal 1

Running through the gate matrix for any block (say number 17) - we consider the logical sums of the corresponding elements a [*, 17] and if this sum is 3, the block is invisible. In all other cases, it is visible and ready for metamorphosis.

Alignments form randomly by starting random_seed. Only 1,000,000 unique puzzles.

Architecture

Elementary on 5 screens - 5 classes
MenuViewController

PlayViewController -> Obj
HelpViewController -> Obj

FinalViewController
ServerTopScoreViewController

In the game, the computing class Obj is added, where all manipulations with matrices and arrays are performed. This class stores the history of the player’s moves for the current hand. The history [] array has a triple purpose - 1) it helps Undo to undo the move, 2) saves the game history to the server (so that I can look at the solution), 3) plays the recorded decision in the Help section

Help

An important part for training players. In the project, I copy PlayViewController to HelpViewController, remove screen taps (touchesBegin, etc.) and play any of the beautiful solutions with Timer and Animation, reading the moves from the history [] array.

Debugging

Had two days in the game. First with the mouse on the emulator. Picked up the correct initial conditions for a set of blocks - the degree of two can be distributed in different ways. My version is for 14 cubes - 32, 32, 16, 16, 8, 8, 4, 4, 4, 4, 2, 2, 2, 2.

Sounds taken from old games - they were all borrowed from Angry Birds, I like Finnish music, the voice of Mordovian blood.

The second day - polishing the game on the gland. I prefer a small iPhone.

3rd part, 5th column

Advertising is activated as soon as the user becomes a pro. That is, I was able to collect at least one tower.

I made a server for the seed, where I select 3 out of 1,000,000 layouts and post it every day for absentee rivalry. Introvers can simply play and relax quietly without the excitement and flashes of photo correspondents.

Promotion of the game

The game is completed and posted to the store in 2 guises (paid and free).
Why 2 applications? For the experiment - I will promote both.

Promoter selection

Every active developer once a month receives letters from services to promote mobile applications (games). 90 percent are Hindus, the rest are Russians. As a racist (only white women), I chose the first available Russian office. I will not call that to avoid advertising / anti-advertising. I call.

- There is a budget of $ 1000, I want to promote the application ...
- Let's do it, sir !!!

Service is perfect, chatting in Skype, everyone talks, everyone shows, makes you change keywords if the current ones are not suitable, etc.

Advertising company

The goal is to get into the TOP10 Russian Appstore.
Price is for free $ 500.
Price - for paid $ 250.

For two days, entered the top10. 6000 free fake downloads were enough. And from the first attempt to enter the top 10 failed. The company was re-launched with other keywords (I didn’t master the specifics of their terminology) and achieved results, all honestly.

Paid downloads - 600 (the guys asked to change the price of the application for 15 rubles). As a result, $ 100 came back to me.

But the natural downloads did not happen, as I expected.

As a result, I threw away the free application, left a paid version, which brings me 1-4 dollars a week. As before the advertising company.

Pure neighing

It was funny to spend $ 1000 (actually $ 650). And he would have cried.
I hope with the help of this publication I will return the money. Ha ha ha.