Bad start story on Google Play

I would like to share with you the experience of creating my first mobile game. In the spring of 2012, looking at the arcade "motorbikes" of his friend, who occupied the top places in the Google Play rating, he caught on fire to do something similar. The choice fell on the zombie, there are a ton of such games, but I thought to stand out with full 3D graphics, a garage with the ability to pump equipment. I already had experience creating games on the Unity3d engine, but I did it for mobile devices for the first time. Of course, he did not himself, but with the artist, in his spare time.

Development stage

Initially, it was planned to make the game in a month, for a maximum of two, to try the pen, to see what are the chances to break into Google Play, but in the end the development was delayed for almost a year, below I will explain why:

• I could not sensibly assess my strengths and the strengths of an artist who had time only in the evenings.
• We thought for a long time about the concept, in what future to do, 3D or 2D, how to optimize zombies so as not to reduce performance. Had to redo many times. After creating the first level, when test zombies were already walking on the map, creating the remaining levels was a matter of technique.
• I took the physics of the car from a ready-made example, I wanted to save time. In practice, everything turned out to be somewhat more complicated. For many reasons, I had to rewrite physics from scratch, which took a lot of time.
• Many days went to balance. It was necessary to achieve a balance of interest in passing and complexity so that the game had at least a small donut.

Level One Concept:

Freemium or premium?

The pre-release version of the game included only four tracks and five cars, it was not suitable for premium, moreover, the freemium is now more promising, and therefore it was decided to go this way: for free, but with advertising and micropayments.

Publisher Search

They puzzled for a long time how to publish the game: on their own or through the publisher:

1. If you publish the game yourself, then you need to fool around with the spread in the shops, do the promotion company yourself (although now the publishers do not really care, as far as I know), but no one dictates the terms, and you don’t have to divide the income (usually it is 50% /fifty%).
2. If through the publisher, it is of great help in publishing the game on the markets, in localization in different languages, in testing, in PR companies and just give a lot of useful tips at the development stage. This is ideal, but in fact there are unscrupulous publishers.

The choice fell on the second option, because The first game and experience was not particularly. We collected a list of publishers from various sources and started sending out, of the 30 contacts, only half answered, and there were mostly refusals - most wanted casuals about fairies, and some simply did not like the game and rejected it. After long negotiations, we decided to work with the publisher HeroCraft - they have a pretty good portfolio and the status of “best developer” on Google Play.

There is a discussion of publishers on our unity3d.ru community: unity3d.ru/distribution/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=8531
Still searching, I advise you to look for direct skype contacts, otherwise you can’t wait for an answer.

Release date

The release was hard, there were a lot of delays on the part of the publisher, we had problems integrating SDK payments and advertising in Unity3d, so the game only hit the market in May 2013.

The application appeared on Google Play just before the weekend, on Friday. Players began to download the game and then a sea of ​​minuses rained down and the rating plummeted. This was quite expected, since we introduced a lockscreen in the game for 5 seconds after each race and a lot of advertising. To convince the publisher did not work. It was clear that if nothing was done, the rating would go negative and there would be a complete failure, but since the weekend came, I had to wait until Monday.

In the morning, the rating was already around 3.5, and we immediately started fixing:

1. Removed ads in the garage, which greatly annoyed the players.
2. Removed ads while driving, which makes no sense as in any dynamic game.
3. Lockscreen was done for 2 seconds (it was 5), and they began to show it less often.

The update was released, and the negative became less, although many still complained, but not so much. There were fewer calls for banners, but on the other hand, the CTR fell by half, and advertising revenue by a third.

Now you can clearly identify the weak points in the game:

1. The limit in the wallet, which depends on the number of levels completed. This was done to maintain balance and the initial idea of ​​a phased pumping. Unfortunately, a better option has not yet been found. In general, balance is a very complicated thing.
2. Not the originality of the gameplay, since there is a similar game - Earn to Die, although when we started to do the project, it wasn’t close to the markets.
3. A small number of levels and machines - we can’t hold a player for a long time, you can complete the game in three to four hours.

The apprehension about the very weak advertising campaign from the publisher has taken hold. Advertising consists in posting topics on some forums, and sending out reviews. You will be very lucky if a paid review is made for your game. You can do all this PR yourself by collecting a list of resources. Reviews were sent somewhere on 100-200 resources and only 20-30 can now be found by request from Google - it seems that there are a lot of dead people, or simply did not manage to moderate, although a week has already passed.

It should be noted that I liked the video very much, which the publisher made for us as quickly as possible, despite the fact that the final of the game was lit up, but not scary.

We also remade the icon to our own, although it seemed to us that ours was more original (the one on the left):



I liked how politely the publisher responds to complaints in the market. I noticed that many, after receiving a polite and complete answer, changed their grades from units to “4” or “5”.

Some statistics:

About 3,000-5,000 downloads from Google Play per day and ~ 30-50 ratings.
The main audience is the CIS (70-80%), due to a weak PR company abroad.
Although the data are scarce and it’s too early to judge, it can almost certainly be said that in the CIS they pay somewhere twice as bad as in the USA, and the people will be meaner - a lot of units and insults are quite common.

A few words from the artist

At that moment, when I began to actively help the project, my predecessor had already formed a visual style of the game. Thus, the complexity caused the maintenance and development of the style so that my content did not violate the visual integrity. In addition to creating models and textures, sometimes I had to do a little research on the capabilities of the engine, I wanted to improve the graphic component of the project without losing performance. And this sometimes led to alteration of content. Also, a lot of time and effort was spent on internal testing and development of gameplay ideas. Many issues were resolved together, and had to be our own game designers.
By the way, there is a moment: keep your project in order, remove excess content, work in uniform metric coordinate systems, logically name models and textures, always send source codes to the head. It saves strength and nerves. When transferring the project to the publisher, to finalize the game, there will be fewer questions and the process will go smoothly and naturally.

Difficulties were caused by the lack of time, after the main work it was very difficult to force ourselves to continue work on our zombie crusher. And if you give a little advice, then do not be lazy, rest for an hour or two, gather your thoughts and begin to accomplish. This is useful for self-development and you will get additional experience that will certainly come in handy in the future.

Conclusion

In our game there are a lot of stocks, everything turned out not quite as we wanted, the fact of the publication of the game is an undoubted plus. On other platforms, the game will start based on the lessons learned. You can not overestimate the experience that we gained during the development. We were convinced that making their games is quite difficult due to great competition, every day more than a dozen games appear on the market, and many are quite good.

If you have a desire, and a good idea, then everything is in your hands. The main thing is that you yourself like your game, then everything will work out.