How to make a mobile game a team of 2 people with zero budget and get featured 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 is a UI programmer in game dev, I am a product manager in social media, then in fintech, and there was no strength left for our own game.

A year ago, we moved to Canada and decided that this was a good chance to try ourselves as an indie developer. True, my husband quickly found a job in an AAA game, but I did not succeed, and suddenly a lot of time appeared.

As we came up with

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

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

We tried to come up with such mechanics 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 - response to the movement of the device. That is, if you shake the phone or tablet during the game, then the balls in the game will jump and move according to the laws of physics.

As the simplest and cleanest graphical solution, we chose flat, especially since I drew the entire UI myself, but I'm not a designer at all. We also decided that there would be no pop-ups in our game - in any case, there will be a minimal number 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 the game cycle for quite some time: on the one hand, we didn’t want to complicate the development too much, but on the other, the game was supposed to be boring and less diverse. As a result, we got game episodes consisting of 20 levels, and new content appears in each episode.

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 full time, and my husband - only one day a week.

I must say that before we even 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 plan of tasks, divided into sprints. We also decided that we would launch the simplest version of the game, and modify it gradually.

Most of the time we took visual effects and sound design, mainly because we did not have 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 pleased with the sounds - I hope that for our next game we will have enough money for the composer.

Our friend Vasya helped us with testing - he went through the whole 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 remaining time is very difficult. Vasya, thanks!

How we released

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

Even before the release, I made a request for phishing in the App Store and Google Play through special forms (links to the forms are in the post below). It is very important to do this in advance, a month before the release. Unfortunately, I didn’t get any answers then.

The main issue after the release for us was the issue of game performance. What is her retention, is she capable of involving people, holding and earning. We did not know that. And at the same time, we had little idea of ​​how to promote an indie game with a zero budget in the absence of any support from the parties.

What did we do after the release

After the release, I wrote several posts in Canadian groups, gave my friends and acquaintances a play: this is how we got the first 40 players on ayos and 30 on android. The game’s performance on this traffic was impressive: first day returns of 70%, the funnel of passing the first levels is chic, and most importantly, ARPU (average income per 1 user) is $ 1 on iOS and $ 0.5 on android.

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

How do we know the real indicators

We had no money traffic, so we decided that we needed to find a publisher. Before deciding to publish a game, publishers always test its performance - they pour traffic and look at indicators of interest to them: as a rule, these are CPI (cost per install), retention of the 1st and 7th days, sometimes they look at the session length and their number.

To search for a publisher, we made a good pitch game, in which we described the mechanics, monetization, and features that distinguish the game from others. We also made a trailer and posted screenshots, talked a little about ourselves. And they sent letters to publishers with a proposal to consider our game. Half answered us. Some of them said that they liked the pitch very much (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 in order to decide on the publication. That was our goal.

We chose one publisher - although we didn’t really like their games, because they had just a million ads, but there were 8 million installations for these games, so we decided to try them. They also offered very good money if they decided to publish our game.

For 10 days, traffic was poured onto our game in two iterations, and we learned that our game has:

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

We didn’t reach the publisher’s targets, mainly because of cpi - they expected a much lower figure (in general, publishers ’expectations are the topic of a separate article), but we managed to conduct 3 experiments with a promo video over the past 10 days, and dropped 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 to such an audience.

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

• Choose starting levels or simple pieces of gameplay to display. Each developer wants to show in the promo video all the features of the game, complex content and variety, but in our experience this repels the casual player.
• Do not make frequent frame changes, it’s better not to change frames at all, but select up to 30 seconds of continuous gameplay at a stable and not too fast pace. You know how to play your game, and you can do it quickly, but the person who sees the gameplay for the first time needs to be given time to figure it out.
• Add a hand to the video - apparently, it’s easier for the user to understand the gameplay, and the likelihood that he wants to install the game is growing. In any case, she grew up with us.
• Add more moments to the video where the user gets something during the game: points, rewards, stars, medals, etc.
• Do not add anything to the video except the gameplay itself.

Examples of our promotional videos

This is a video that had a CPI (cost per install) for $ 2.50


And this is a video with CPI $ 1.50

How we got featured on Google Play

Just during the publishing testing of the game, we received a letter from Google Play stating that our game was chosen for featured in the 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 way to get paid items in the game.

Since March 8, our game has been fixed, and very soon we will find out how 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 him. We have also already begun to prepare for the development of the next, this time hyper-casual, game.

Summary

I summarize everything that I wrote at the stage of game development as an instruction

• For the first release, choose the simplest idea, and then think about it in such a way as to simplify it by half.
• Be sure to add something unique to the game mechanics. Unique, but not meaningless - this feature should help the player, and not just be an ornament. Such a feature will help you attract publishers and / or get featured.
• If your team does not have a designer, then choose the simplest graphic solutions: abstract figures and flat illustrations.

Before release

• Make a good pitch for the game, add videos and screenshots, write about monetization.
  
  Here is our pitch
• Write to the App Store and Google Play in advance, a month before the release. Here you will also need a pitch.
  Links to the featured request form:
  
  AppStore
  GooglePlay
• Send letters to gaming sites with a proposal to review your game, and for this, do a press kit - it's kind of a pitch, only without information about monetization, but with some 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, see your performance, conduct experiments (if you have time)
• Make sure that your game is capable of containing and monetizing traffic, and then you have several development options:
• 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 you make sure that the game will return your investment

Good luck!