Developer Path, Part 4: Towards a Dream
Hello! With you again, after almost 2.5 years, Konstantin Delfuego is a participant in various adventures in IT and game development, and I want to tell you a lot of interesting, funny and insane things that happened to me during such a long radio silence.
And there is something to talk about: how I promoted my mobile game, conquered Augmented Reality, burned with betrayal, found and lost my dream job, almost despaired, but still crystallized a very clever concept of geolocation MMORPG, under which profile investors are ready to give me money . The article will have some juicy details of all this madness.
')
Sit back, fly!
All events are fictional; any coincidences with real companies and events are accidental and unintended.
Let's go back to the summer of 2015. After a year of active development, our game Sling Monsters finally came out. I understood perfectly well that without proper PR, she would not fly, and since February 15 I have been searching for possible ways to move. I did not have a budget for this enterprise, the concept of the game was absolutely uninteresting to the publishers (for more information about interaction with publishers, it was written in the previous article), so I had to make the most of all possible ways of budget-free promotion.
First, all sites were found on which you can post an article on game topics. Suddenly, it turned out that the site that generates the most traffic to game articles, and which in addition you can publish yourself, is the game portal of Alisher Burhanovich. Surprisingly, this site then did not fall into any guides for indie with a list of resources on the promotion of games.
But youtube has the most voluminous and practically inexhaustible source of contacts with potential players, so I began to actively write to his personalities. After months of searching, hundreds of letters and messages, I found two dozen guys and girls who are ready to lay out vidos about my game or embed prerolls for a small fee or just for a great love of indie. It turns out that there are good people in the world!
As a result of the promotion plan, it turned out that I would be able to achieve the number of downloads of the game required to bring the application to the top. And then, I was hoping, the viral would do his dirty work and I could earn at least a few dozen franklins clean.
But the reality turned out to be colder than the ice soul in Antarctica.
Not all sites managed to post an article about the game’s exit, some of the bloggers changed their mind to help, others disappeared with the money, after adding me to the ignore list, and others stopped contacting right before the release. But the biggest fail was in conversion rates. The percentage of conversion of views into installations was several times lower than I expected, focusing on data from the network. And a few months after the release, while the video continued to gain views, the conversion of views into installations reached a phenomenally low figure of ~ 0.003%. Now it is clear how foolish it was to rely on high conversion, but then the first day after the release I was in complete prostration. The situation is not saved even the three cool reviews. The most significant promotion channel that I could afford did not work, the game was not interesting for publishers, I could not get to Startup Chile, and I felt the independent painstaking promotion and refinement of the game month after month, the attempt of an international release, the search for a non-core investor. what I have to do, it was the opposite way of success.
Giving all your strength is much easier than finding the right direction for their use. And I still had to find the right path.
The situation was aggravated by the fact that at that time I was hopelessly in love with a girl with whom I could not get close to. She is not an easy girl, and neither in the short, nor even in the long run, has anything shone for us. She was like a forbidden fruit, clouding the mind, intoxicating only about her thoughts, attracting, but completely inaccessible. The inability to get anything from what I was striving for and the collapse of all my expectations led me to complete despair.
But fate clearly has a sense of humor and irony. A day after the failure to launch the game, it turned out accidentally that some of my feelings are mutual. The next week was the best in my life, although I expected this to happen for a completely different reason.
No hints, just shots from a children's cartoon.
Our romance ended after a couple of months of intermittent communication with complete failure.
In the meantime, in the late summer of 2015, helping my grandfather Stakhanovite to sell pumpkins on the market in the southern city far from Peter, I realized that the long-awaited game was only a line in the summary and a handful of bitter, sobering experience.
I didn't really want to look for a game designer job. There were much more programmers' vacancies, and I already had a fairly presentable project in the portfolio. This resulted in the slingshot monsters launching me back to Peter, through the window of an augmented reality application company, where I got a coder. The topic of AR was interesting to me for a long time, I felt that I was on the right track. The entrepreneurial spirit in me does not burn out with a hot iron, so then, in the fall of 2015, I began to make a tricky game, under which I almost managed to attract investments. But first things first.
The first dives in tons of sophisticated and, according to my cattle standards, too complex code, caused primal fear in me. Which, however, managed to be overcome in a couple of days. And after a couple of weeks I was very actively developing the project. In that company, despite the successful releases of 4 applications, I only worked for 9 months, and then the management decided to save on my services. This happened almost immediately after I took credit for my game.
But back for a couple of months before being fired. At that time we were doing a difficult project and I gave all the power to work: I often stayed late and worked on weekends. And at this time, my view falls on the stunning art of the game of the genre, which I have always despised and avoided - MOBA. The character-DJ and the charming style of the artes for the game did their job, and I was dragged into the depths of the League.
The first drug intake, as usual, caused disgust, but already from the second the dependence began to grow exponentially. Kila mud, endorphins spin. A small amount of forces remaining after work, I began to send to someone else's game. This led to the fact that I overlooked something important, and, deciding to cover my incompetence in server development with money, I took out a loan for an expensive developer. This led to a long story that could have been avoided if I had been a little more attentive.
I attracted a person to the project both for serious payment, and with the expectation of his further participation as a service station, and as a result I attracted a banal incompetent cheater, who for a long time misled and even made some friendly steps, which greatly delayed our communication and my expectations . The biggest bastard is the one who pretends to be your friend.
Let's go back to the beginning of the story. Long ago, in the summer of 2011, when I was still working on Nevsky Prospekt as a striptease bar promoter, one customer dissatisfied with the service, which I attracted to this wonderful restaurant, reeling drunk and clapping me on the shoulder amicably, issued: “If you continue to do that the same thing, then one day they will kill you . ” Probably, with that freelancer, I returned my karma for past mistakes.
Top recommendation from the previous place of work: “Yeah, we had Vasya Pupkin. If this person continues to do the same, they will kill him. ”
Anyway, in the summer of 2016, I realized that my project is again stagnating, where and how to develop it is not clear. I had to look for a job again, and Mrs. Luck decided to flirt with me about this once again. On the very first visit to the hunter site, I came across a dream job: a product designer with game designer responsibilities in a food startup for developing innovative AR hardware. Bingo! Steeper can not imagine! For almost all the requirements, I approached, and my flaws unmistakably determined that I needed to break through there. This path was not easy, I had to show restraint and dance with a tambourine of a shaman of social engineering. And, after 5 months of fierce sitting under the gates of the Alamut fortress, I still got there. And again, as in 2012, I got a dream job, a dream company, a dream city. And again, the happiness was short-lived, because old acquaintances entered the battle: the swan, pike and cancer. As it turned out, the company had a misunderstanding of each other’s departments. I got into the company on the initiative of one, and worked in the one that was against my presence. In addition, I showed excessive zeal: as an entrepreneur and the owner of the product I began to get into the area of ​​management responsibility. I did not stay long in the company. It is interesting that the person whom I mercilessly swore at myself for the first time turned out to be my most adequate boss. And according to the ideas that I promoted in the company, now the whole industry is going crazy.
A shot from the anime of 1986, which is one of the first memories in my life (not the shot itself, but Wonder Beat as a whole). The guy on his head has the inverted logo of that same startup. No, what are you, I'm talking about that black line.
Again, I was left without work, but this time, quite a lot of money was included in the package for the next portion of experience and, as a result, time to think about a future strategy. And there was something to think about. Shortly before my dismissal, a gaming fund with an investment model appealing to me was opened: for a percentage of the profits of the game, and not for a share in the company. I was ready to accept this investment model, because all the way I wanted to do in the first place was a profitable business, and not a start-up bubble. Turning around the years around a startup, I never wanted to make a classic start-up and play by the rules of the industry: to subordinate the development of a project to the sales cycle of shares. All this fuss, I am sure, leads to numerous conflicts and distracts from the really important things.
So, the target investor was found. But will he talk to me? One day late at night, exactly right after I reached the bottom of my drink bottle, a genie came out of this bottle: I managed to intercept the head of the foundation on the network and get confirmation from him that they were ready to have a dialogue with me and the whole concept of my game they might be interested. It remains to pack my application in such a way that they are hooked in the same way as it hooked me when the last pieces of the project puzzle were in my head.
Crystallization of these particles took some time, and some time they took the pitch and the application. Just as planned, pitch and features of the game did their job. Even well-worn species, hardened cynics from the games industry are ready to give us sowing investments that are normal by the standards of the Valley. But there is one nuance ...
The fifth element, the missing, final link in the chain of evolution of the project - the team. Over the years of tamping and twisting cones in the games industry, I managed to get to the “bring a decent, motivated team, give money, there will be a game”. The main obstacle in collecting a team is the necessity and demand of investors to pay all teammates 5-7 months at a price lower than the market price or not pay at all, so that the core of the project consists only of motivated specialists who want to complete the project and get a well-deserved share of the profits. Investor money will go to the fact that we can not cover themselves and marketing. The task is to assemble a team of tough and motivated professionals who are ready to work “for food” for several months, to put it mildly, not easy, but I have already managed to partially assemble a team. On such conditions, the team consists of CTO, one of the main developers of a social network with millions of DAUs and an experienced unitist. Bezopopastniki, you want to know the contacts of our service station - well in my profile on Habré, there are links to its pages. Rare pokemon inside. Two more candidates make test items: the second unitist and an absolutely amazing artist who knows how to draw in a cool watercolor style. If she gets into the team, the game will look like a real work of art. In the team there are still places for server specialists, front-line specialist and IT lawyer.
I wonder how it will end?
I hope you enjoyed the new portion of my stories. If everything goes more or less as planned, wait for the last, final 5 article in a year and a half.
Thank you for your attention, have a great weekend!
Bonus tracks (can be found in contact):
1. Track for the title picture - ASOT 039 Shane - Too late to turn (Armin van Buuren remix) (exactly from the 39th edition)
2. Tracks for the picture “where are you?” - Battle Toads & Double Dragon - Title Theme / Battle Toads & Double Dragon Level 1 (2:30 version)
And there is something to talk about: how I promoted my mobile game, conquered Augmented Reality, burned with betrayal, found and lost my dream job, almost despaired, but still crystallized a very clever concept of geolocation MMORPG, under which profile investors are ready to give me money . The article will have some juicy details of all this madness.
')
Sit back, fly!
All events are fictional; any coincidences with real companies and events are accidental and unintended.
Let's go back to the summer of 2015. After a year of active development, our game Sling Monsters finally came out. I understood perfectly well that without proper PR, she would not fly, and since February 15 I have been searching for possible ways to move. I did not have a budget for this enterprise, the concept of the game was absolutely uninteresting to the publishers (for more information about interaction with publishers, it was written in the previous article), so I had to make the most of all possible ways of budget-free promotion.
First, all sites were found on which you can post an article on game topics. Suddenly, it turned out that the site that generates the most traffic to game articles, and which in addition you can publish yourself, is the game portal of Alisher Burhanovich. Surprisingly, this site then did not fall into any guides for indie with a list of resources on the promotion of games.
But youtube has the most voluminous and practically inexhaustible source of contacts with potential players, so I began to actively write to his personalities. After months of searching, hundreds of letters and messages, I found two dozen guys and girls who are ready to lay out vidos about my game or embed prerolls for a small fee or just for a great love of indie. It turns out that there are good people in the world!
As a result of the promotion plan, it turned out that I would be able to achieve the number of downloads of the game required to bring the application to the top. And then, I was hoping, the viral would do his dirty work and I could earn at least a few dozen franklins clean.
But the reality turned out to be colder than the ice soul in Antarctica.
Not all sites managed to post an article about the game’s exit, some of the bloggers changed their mind to help, others disappeared with the money, after adding me to the ignore list, and others stopped contacting right before the release. But the biggest fail was in conversion rates. The percentage of conversion of views into installations was several times lower than I expected, focusing on data from the network. And a few months after the release, while the video continued to gain views, the conversion of views into installations reached a phenomenally low figure of ~ 0.003%. Now it is clear how foolish it was to rely on high conversion, but then the first day after the release I was in complete prostration. The situation is not saved even the three cool reviews. The most significant promotion channel that I could afford did not work, the game was not interesting for publishers, I could not get to Startup Chile, and I felt the independent painstaking promotion and refinement of the game month after month, the attempt of an international release, the search for a non-core investor. what I have to do, it was the opposite way of success.
Giving all your strength is much easier than finding the right direction for their use. And I still had to find the right path.
The situation was aggravated by the fact that at that time I was hopelessly in love with a girl with whom I could not get close to. She is not an easy girl, and neither in the short, nor even in the long run, has anything shone for us. She was like a forbidden fruit, clouding the mind, intoxicating only about her thoughts, attracting, but completely inaccessible. The inability to get anything from what I was striving for and the collapse of all my expectations led me to complete despair.
But fate clearly has a sense of humor and irony. A day after the failure to launch the game, it turned out accidentally that some of my feelings are mutual. The next week was the best in my life, although I expected this to happen for a completely different reason.
No hints, just shots from a children's cartoon.
Our romance ended after a couple of months of intermittent communication with complete failure.
In the meantime, in the late summer of 2015, helping my grandfather Stakhanovite to sell pumpkins on the market in the southern city far from Peter, I realized that the long-awaited game was only a line in the summary and a handful of bitter, sobering experience.
I didn't really want to look for a game designer job. There were much more programmers' vacancies, and I already had a fairly presentable project in the portfolio. This resulted in the slingshot monsters launching me back to Peter, through the window of an augmented reality application company, where I got a coder. The topic of AR was interesting to me for a long time, I felt that I was on the right track. The entrepreneurial spirit in me does not burn out with a hot iron, so then, in the fall of 2015, I began to make a tricky game, under which I almost managed to attract investments. But first things first.
The first dives in tons of sophisticated and, according to my cattle standards, too complex code, caused primal fear in me. Which, however, managed to be overcome in a couple of days. And after a couple of weeks I was very actively developing the project. In that company, despite the successful releases of 4 applications, I only worked for 9 months, and then the management decided to save on my services. This happened almost immediately after I took credit for my game.
But back for a couple of months before being fired. At that time we were doing a difficult project and I gave all the power to work: I often stayed late and worked on weekends. And at this time, my view falls on the stunning art of the game of the genre, which I have always despised and avoided - MOBA. The character-DJ and the charming style of the artes for the game did their job, and I was dragged into the depths of the League.
The first drug intake, as usual, caused disgust, but already from the second the dependence began to grow exponentially. Kila mud, endorphins spin. A small amount of forces remaining after work, I began to send to someone else's game. This led to the fact that I overlooked something important, and, deciding to cover my incompetence in server development with money, I took out a loan for an expensive developer. This led to a long story that could have been avoided if I had been a little more attentive.
I attracted a person to the project both for serious payment, and with the expectation of his further participation as a service station, and as a result I attracted a banal incompetent cheater, who for a long time misled and even made some friendly steps, which greatly delayed our communication and my expectations . The biggest bastard is the one who pretends to be your friend.
Let's go back to the beginning of the story. Long ago, in the summer of 2011, when I was still working on Nevsky Prospekt as a striptease bar promoter, one customer dissatisfied with the service, which I attracted to this wonderful restaurant, reeling drunk and clapping me on the shoulder amicably, issued: “If you continue to do that the same thing, then one day they will kill you . ” Probably, with that freelancer, I returned my karma for past mistakes.
Top recommendation from the previous place of work: “Yeah, we had Vasya Pupkin. If this person continues to do the same, they will kill him. ”
Anyway, in the summer of 2016, I realized that my project is again stagnating, where and how to develop it is not clear. I had to look for a job again, and Mrs. Luck decided to flirt with me about this once again. On the very first visit to the hunter site, I came across a dream job: a product designer with game designer responsibilities in a food startup for developing innovative AR hardware. Bingo! Steeper can not imagine! For almost all the requirements, I approached, and my flaws unmistakably determined that I needed to break through there. This path was not easy, I had to show restraint and dance with a tambourine of a shaman of social engineering. And, after 5 months of fierce sitting under the gates of the Alamut fortress, I still got there. And again, as in 2012, I got a dream job, a dream company, a dream city. And again, the happiness was short-lived, because old acquaintances entered the battle: the swan, pike and cancer. As it turned out, the company had a misunderstanding of each other’s departments. I got into the company on the initiative of one, and worked in the one that was against my presence. In addition, I showed excessive zeal: as an entrepreneur and the owner of the product I began to get into the area of ​​management responsibility. I did not stay long in the company. It is interesting that the person whom I mercilessly swore at myself for the first time turned out to be my most adequate boss. And according to the ideas that I promoted in the company, now the whole industry is going crazy.
A shot from the anime of 1986, which is one of the first memories in my life (not the shot itself, but Wonder Beat as a whole). The guy on his head has the inverted logo of that same startup. No, what are you, I'm talking about that black line.
Again, I was left without work, but this time, quite a lot of money was included in the package for the next portion of experience and, as a result, time to think about a future strategy. And there was something to think about. Shortly before my dismissal, a gaming fund with an investment model appealing to me was opened: for a percentage of the profits of the game, and not for a share in the company. I was ready to accept this investment model, because all the way I wanted to do in the first place was a profitable business, and not a start-up bubble. Turning around the years around a startup, I never wanted to make a classic start-up and play by the rules of the industry: to subordinate the development of a project to the sales cycle of shares. All this fuss, I am sure, leads to numerous conflicts and distracts from the really important things.
So, the target investor was found. But will he talk to me? One day late at night, exactly right after I reached the bottom of my drink bottle, a genie came out of this bottle: I managed to intercept the head of the foundation on the network and get confirmation from him that they were ready to have a dialogue with me and the whole concept of my game they might be interested. It remains to pack my application in such a way that they are hooked in the same way as it hooked me when the last pieces of the project puzzle were in my head.
Crystallization of these particles took some time, and some time they took the pitch and the application. Just as planned, pitch and features of the game did their job. Even well-worn species, hardened cynics from the games industry are ready to give us sowing investments that are normal by the standards of the Valley. But there is one nuance ...
The fifth element, the missing, final link in the chain of evolution of the project - the team. Over the years of tamping and twisting cones in the games industry, I managed to get to the “bring a decent, motivated team, give money, there will be a game”. The main obstacle in collecting a team is the necessity and demand of investors to pay all teammates 5-7 months at a price lower than the market price or not pay at all, so that the core of the project consists only of motivated specialists who want to complete the project and get a well-deserved share of the profits. Investor money will go to the fact that we can not cover themselves and marketing. The task is to assemble a team of tough and motivated professionals who are ready to work “for food” for several months, to put it mildly, not easy, but I have already managed to partially assemble a team. On such conditions, the team consists of CTO, one of the main developers of a social network with millions of DAUs and an experienced unitist. Bezopopastniki, you want to know the contacts of our service station - well in my profile on Habré, there are links to its pages. Rare pokemon inside. Two more candidates make test items: the second unitist and an absolutely amazing artist who knows how to draw in a cool watercolor style. If she gets into the team, the game will look like a real work of art. In the team there are still places for server specialists, front-line specialist and IT lawyer.
I wonder how it will end?
I hope you enjoyed the new portion of my stories. If everything goes more or less as planned, wait for the last, final 5 article in a year and a half.
Thank you for your attention, have a great weekend!
Bonus tracks (can be found in contact):
1. Track for the title picture - ASOT 039 Shane - Too late to turn (Armin van Buuren remix) (exactly from the 39th edition)
2. Tracks for the picture “where are you?” - Battle Toads & Double Dragon - Title Theme / Battle Toads & Double Dragon Level 1 (2:30 version)
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/341628/
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