How to make a mobile game a team of 2 people with a zero budget and get fichering on Google Play

My husband and I have long wanted to make games together, but there was never enough time for this. We both worked: he was a UI programmer at game development, I was a product manager at social media, then at Fintech, and I had no strength left to play.

A year ago we moved to Canada and decided that this was a good chance to try ourselves as indie developers. The husband, however, quickly found work in the AAA game, but I failed, and suddenly there was a lot of time.
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How we thought

Although we had a lot of ideas (and even prototypes) of interesting and complex games, we decided to start with something very simple, to spend as little time as possible on developing and get invaluable experience in releasing and promoting indie games as soon as possible. Therefore, after some thought, we stopped on a mobile puzzle with honest physics.

We ourselves play quite a lot and always celebrate what we like and what is not. The main point that annoys us in modern mobile kazualkahs is the monotony of their mechanic, the abundance of pop-ups with offers to buy something and long descriptions, as well as the oversaturated UI with a bunch of dice, bubble and large fonts. Therefore, in our game we tried to do the opposite.

We tried to come up with a mechanic that would be simple, but would not repeat any of the existing games. As a result, we still met one game with similar mechanics, the release of which was a month before ours, but graphically and ideologically these games are still very different.

We also added one interesting feature to our game - the response to the movement of the device. That is, if you shake your phone or tablet while playing, the balls in the game will jump and move according to the laws of physics.

We chose flat as the most simple and clean graphic solution, especially since I drew the whole UI myself, and I’m not a designer at all. We also decided that there will be no pop-ups in our game - in any case, there will be a minimal amount of them, and we will try to explain the essence of the game and its basic rules with the help of game design.

We thought about progression and game cycle for quite a long time: on the one hand, we didn’t want to complicate the development too much, but on the other hand, the game should have been boring and less diverse. As a result, we got game episodes consisting of 20 levels, and in each episode new content appears.

As for monetization, we chose free2play with the sale of boosters and advertising as an alternative to getting paid items for free.

How we developed

The development itself took 4 months, while I worked on the game fulltime, and my husband - only one day a week.

I must say that even before we started work, we discussed our ideas, graphic and game design solutions for 3-4 months, so by the beginning of development we had a clear task plan, divided into sprints. We also decided that we will launch the simplest version of the game, and refine it gradually.

Visual effects and sound design took up most of our time, mainly because we had no such experience. For three weeks, we searched for suitable sounds with a commercial license on free and paid sites, and then processed them for a long time. As a result, we are least satisfied with the sounds - I hope we have enough money for the composer for our next game.

Our friend Vasya helped us with testing - he went through the entire game on a test build several times, and it was invaluable help, because making the game 5 days a week and then playing it in the time left is very hard. Vasya, thanks!

How we released

We decided to start with a soft lunch in Canada (soft lunch is a “quiet” and limited launch of the product, for example, only for one country, in order to get the first indicators or to make sure that everything works well on live traffic), because did not know what to expect after release. It turned out that nothing should be expected, because nothing is happening :). Previously, fresh games at least fell into the “New” section, but now this is no longer in the stores.

Even before the release, I made a request for a feature in the App Store and Google Play through special forms (there are links to the forms below in the post). It is very important to do this in advance, one month before the release. Unfortunately, I did not receive any answers then.

The most important issue after the release for us was the question of the performance of the game. What is her retenshena, whether she is able to involve people, hold and earn. We did not know this. And at the same time, we had little idea how to promote an indie game with a zero budget in the absence of any support from the sidelines.

What we did after the release

After the release, I wrote several posts to Canadian groups, let my friends and acquaintances play: so we got the first 40 players on Ayios and 30 on Android. The performance of the game on this traffic was impressive: the return of the first day was 70%, the funnel of passing the first levels was awesome, and most importantly, ARPU (average income per user) was $ 1 per iyos and $ 0.5 on the adroid.

But we, of course, understood that, firstly, there was too little traffic to draw any conclusions, and besides, it was too motivated. That is, we still did not know the real indicators of the game, and it was necessary to look for some investors or traffic partners.

How we learned the real indicators

We did not have any traffic, so we decided that we needed to find a publisher. Before making a decision to publish a game, publishers always test its performance - they pour traffic and look at the indicators they are interested in: as a rule, these are CPI (cost per install), retention of the 1st and 7th days, sometimes they watch the session length and their number.

To find a publisher, we made a good pitch of the game, in which we described the mechanics, monetization and features that distinguish the game from others. We also made a trailer and laid out screenshots, told us a little about ourselves. And they sent letters to the publishers with an offer to consider our game. Half answered us. Some of them said that they liked the pitch a lot (a pitch is a brief presentation of something, in this case, a game, for potential partners and / or investors).


All publishers offered to start testing the game on purchased traffic and look at our indicators to make a decision on publication. That was our goal.

We chose one publisher - even though we didn’t like their games very much, as there was just a million advertisements in them, but these games had 8 million installations each, so we decided to try with them. They also offered very good money if they decide to publish our game.

Within 10 days, two iterations of our game poured traffic, and we learned that our game:

• 1st Day Retention - 30%
• 7th Day Retention - 14%
• Game session length - 5.35 minutes
• Funnel of the first 20 levels - 23%

We did not reach the target indicators of the publisher, mainly because of the cpi - they expected the figure to be much lower (in general, the publishers' expectations are the topic of a separate article), but during these 10 days we managed to conduct 3 experiments with the promo video, and dropped the CPI from 2.5 to 1.5 bucks (States, IOS).

We also experimented with our onboarding and return notifications, and as a result, we understood something about the audience of casual games and how to present the game for such an audience.

Here are the basic rules for creating a promotional video for a casual game (in our experience):

• Choose to show initial levels or simple pieces of gameplay. Every developer wants to show all the features of the game, complex content and diversity in the promo video, but in our experience it repels the casual player.
• Do not make frequent changes of frames, it is better not to change frames at all, but choose up to 30 seconds of continuous gameplay at a stable and not too fast pace. That you know how to play your game, and you can do it quickly, but the person who sees the gameplay for the first time must be given time to figure it out.
• Add a hand to the video - apparently, the user is easier to understand the gameplay, and the likelihood that he wants to install the game is growing. Anyway, we have grown.
• Add more moments to the video where the user gets something during the game: points, reward, stars, medals, etc.
• Do not add anything to the video, except for the gameplay itself.

Examples of our promotional video

This video has a CPI (cost per install, price per install) was $ 2.50


And this is a video with a CPI of $ 1.50

How we got featured on google play

Just at the time of the publishing testing of the game, we received a letter from Google Play stating that our game was selected for featured in an indie corner.

Based on the indicators obtained after testing, we formulated several hypotheses for testing, made changes to the balance of the game and onboarding, added advertising as an alternative method of obtaining paid items in the game.

Since March 8, our game has been finished, and very soon we will find out how much these changes will improve (or not) our performance.

What's next

Ideally, we would like to find a reliable traffic partner and share profit with it. We have also begun to prepare for the development of the next, this time hyper-casual, game.

Summary

I summarize in the form of instructions everything that I wrote

At the stage of game development

• For the first release, choose the simplest idea, and then think it over to simplify it in half.
• Be sure to add something unique to the mechanics of the game. Unique, but not meaningless - this feature should help the player, and not be just an ornament. This feature will help you attract publishers and / or get feature.
• If there is no designer in your team, then choose the most simple graphic solutions: abstract shapes and flat illustrations.

Before release

• Make a good pitch for the game, add videos and screenshots, write about monetization.
  
  Here is our pitch
• Write in the App Store and Google Play in advance, one month before the release. Pitch is also useful here.
  References to the requisition feature form:
  
  AppStore
  GooglePlay
• Send letters to gaming sites with a proposal to review your game, and to do this, make a press kit - this is something like a pitch, only without information about monetization, but with some kind of game resources.
  Here is our example . In our case, this did not work, and no one answered our call, but this does not mean that it will not work with you.

Immediately after release

• Contact publishers, offer your game for publication, even if you plan to do it yourself
• Test the game on real traffic, look at your performance, conduct experiments (if you have time)
• Make sure your game is able to hold and monetize traffic, and then you have several options for development:
• Sell ​​the game to the publisher: for a one-time payment or on a profit sharing basis
• Find a traffic partner or investor
• Or invest your money when make sure the game returns your investment.

Good luck!