The difficulties of creating and publishing the first Android application

    What difficulties will a young developer meet along the way?

    An article for beginners, only their experience, their opinion, our knowledge and guesses.

    In the continuation of 7 detailed points that should be paid the most attention.

    1. Who will work with, who will develop?

    I decided to paint this item in more detail and put it in a separate post on the hub, since the question is quite serious and, fortunately, the experience was also good.

    In our case, we work as a team of like-minded people, 4 people, open to new people.
    In the best traditions of indie, no one received any money. To each - a percentage of the project’s income, if any, according to the invested labor. But the main thing is desire and a general idea; everyone likes what they do. And this is the most important factor.

    2. What to do?

    Partly, a rhetorical question. 2 main factors that we were guided by:
    a) It should be interesting to you personally
    b) It should be sold.

    Genre
    I think everyone read it, and they themselves thought that it was "coming in" and enjoying popularity. There are a number of articles, including those on the Habr, the code they try to analyze the tops, isolate common features. In principle, we did the same, maybe not in the context of large analytical reports, but the general features of the top are visible to the naked eye:

    Raners, arcades, puzzles, action games, card games, strategies.

    Arranged in descending order by subjective personal opinion. But in the “for young developers” aspect, we can immediately throw back strategies and actions, because it is quite labor intensive.

    Monetization
    Depends on the genre, it’s silly to say that only this or that works. Consider the main points - there are games designed for gameplay drag-ons that are monetized by internal purchases, there are those in which additional features are bought, and the main ones are squeezed in parallel, there are simply paid ones, and there is a paid additional content function.

    Again, in our aspect, we can take the time to drag out the gameplay - if, in general, game releases, like a map, can fall out well, or maybe badly, then experienced developers are also insured by such moments as banal experience, knowledge of which mechanics are for sure they have worked in the past, financial opportunities for revision, the ability to “reach out” the project with external resources and traffic, which would be pulled into the tops or somehow untwisted, by a team of marketers, analysts who will finish internal monetization to the desired level of profitability. You are a young team, you do not have experience, money or anything else, do not hope that someone will support you, initially tune in to the worst case scenario, and minimize risks.

    We went this way:
    Arcade - a puzzle, monetization by purchasing additional content + an ad unit in the stage, we remove it when purchasing content.

    This monetization has a huge minus - bought and forgot, no one will make repeat purchases. But then it is understandable - you played, you liked it, you bought more. I did not like it - I did not buy it.

    Ideas - all ideas are written to a common file, before development they jointly decided what we take now. Ideas - 20, done 1. Do not rush to make the first one that comes across, as my wife says: "I need to sleep with this bag, if I really want it."

    3. How to do?

    Organization of work, also a huge question, maybe I will write it in a separate article later, but I think that there is enough information on this topic on the hub Do not complicate your life - work in the way that is convenient for you and how effective the team is.

    We do everything in our free time, we break up the project into stages, use mantis as a bug tracker, and git for version control.

    At a certain stage, especially at the end, it turned out that the general dialogue on Skype is much more productive when you need to fix a bug and you know who will take it. In this case, there is no need to create a bunch of shuffles, hang them on someone, then accept and send them for revocations if something happens, and the changes will just commit in the git (yes, here the advocates of “order” will scold me, but it turned out more efficiently for us) . In any case, changes are collected in the mantis and are recorded periodically for roadmap and monitoring, someone has done what. Let me remind you, this happened at the last stage, not earlier! In the beginning it is very important to have clear objectives, timelines and steps.

    Everyone sees everything, tasks in the mantis, especially at first, are taken at will, we just dump the list of tasks for a given time period.

    Discussion of ideas and controversial issues - in person, over a glass of beer,
    sometimes on Skype, a group call.

    We live in a small town in Ukraine, but in this way are quite capable of working effectively and connecting new people. Even with joy, if there are like-minded people.

    4. Analytics and bug reports

    Your all. No matter how stupid it sounds for beginners, but it is, this point is very intersected with the following. Namely: nobody will ever tell you that he is not interested, where he has difficulties and what he does not like.
    No, of course, some will say, but all experienced developers know in what form, how accurately it will be and what kind of hellish torment you will go through until you sort the amateur bug report.
    And for beginners, a simple example is how to find out if the start button is normal or not. How to find out at what stage the user has difficulty? How to find out if some features are used or not?

    Specifically, we have problems with analytics due to architecture, it was not correctly taken into account at the start. For the rest - experience, consider. We use Google Analytics. A separate question on services, comparison, here let everyone decide for himself.

    5. Users

    All users to say the least, noobs. Take it as a fact, not as an insult, and then it will be easier for you to work. Keep up with the worst, so you will make more coverage, the smartest ones will understand the obvious, but the less experienced users will not.

    In addition, what we understood from our experience: The
    user does not care for much, the main thing is that it would be clear and convenient.
    The user does not need chips that "you think will be cool." Let them decide whether it’s cool or not.
    The user will not say honestly how best. See the previous paragraph.
    The user will not especially leave you feedback and feedback, do not rely much on feedback.

    6. How to publish?

    We decided to publish ourselves. Not because it’s better, more profitable, or something like that, we simply don’t know anyone, no one knows our product, we don’t have any idea what conditions can be negotiated, and is it possible and so on. There are more questions for beginners than answers.

    But if you think that you will do everything yourself, I will say right away - it will be difficult.

    I recommend to look aside:
    Payoneer - the service of receiving payments through USA will help, the data during registration was indicated as a US citizen, on the advice of the Habr and w3bsit3-dns.com, now I am trying to remove the mark of unconfirmed tax data by sending the SS4 form.
    This is for countries that are not able to sell applications, in particular for residents of Ukraine. For the Russian Federation, as far as I know, everything is already normal.

    7. Promotion

    Since the tops of Google Play in different regions are different, we decided at the first stage to concentrate only on the ru segment. According to the data collected in pieces, you need to reach 200-300 application instances in 2-3 days (the data scatter) in order to get into the top either new or gaining popularity (it’s also not completely clear which top is). Therefore, we make announcements on all known resources, we were searched at the request of "game dev", "android". VKontakte communities turned out to be added to several games (although the effect is weak). Of course, Habr, w3bsit3-dns.com and all personal acquaintances.

    Very well written on the publishing of games by Sergei Galenkin, in his free book.
    An important point - Google only considers new downloads, and only with Google Play. Keep this in mind, who did not know, and also do not rush to distribute your apk on the network and install it to everyone you know before release.

    What we miscalculated with: the paragraph above, because we did not know. With articles, before publishing the application, 3 articles were written, but I did not want to just spam everyone in a row. For each resource you need to adapt, rewrite, add something of your own. Every acquaintance needs to talk and minimize what and how, and some still try to "talk for life." Each resource requires its attention and answers, everywhere there are rules. In particular, I wanted to make the most useful article for the Habr, rather than stupidly “take a look at the game”, in fact, most of the information was received here, for which I thank all the participants.

    Consequences: we do not reach the indicated number of downloads, although according to analytics the game has already been downloaded by 500 participants from 18 countries, but on Google Play - only 75. Perhaps the interest of the habrasociety will save us.

    Additions to the article are also welcomed, I’m sure that a look at some points from more experienced comrades will differ from ours.

    A little about the application, all the same it was thanks to him that all this experience appeared:

    Crazy Buildings is a puzzle toy, with the task of constructing a structure as high as possible, using figures and physics, while preventing the elements from falling.

    java, libgdx engine, android. Simple mechanics, nothing mega original. The design was redrawn 2 or 3 times, and if I had not stopped our brothers, they would have redrawn a couple more times. Funny faces - the idea of ​​designers to turn in a bubble - mine, I really wanted to burst something.

    Due to the features of the engine, the figures can not only be put on top of each other, but also pushed out, this adds interesting possibilities in the gameplay, especially when there is not enough space.

    The main difficulty is in reaching a record line, in some stages you will have to think and pretty turn.

    We plan to add animation, stages, possibly new figures, to solve a number of problems that could not be solved before the publisher.

    Other useful links:
    “Game Marketing” - a book by Sergey Galenkin:
    galyonkin.com/book
    Audio podcasts from the interview, learn a lot of new and useful things in pieces:
    flazm.ru
    Gamedev blogs:
    gamedevblogs.ru Game
    genres, monetization and loyalty:
    app2top.ru / main /% D0% BC% D0% B0% D1% 82% D1% 80% D0% B8% D1% 86% D0% B0-% D0% BB% D0% BE% D1% 8F% D0% BB% D1 % 8C% D0% BD% D0% BE% D1% 81% D1% 82% D0% B8-% D0% BF% D0% BE-% D0% B2% D0% B5% D1% 80% D1% 81% D0 % B8% D0% B8-flurry-16565.html
    Video from various conferences, for example: www.youtube.com/channel/UCgoMppmHUHU_3vxMD7oDG7g

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