Good start on Google Play without attachments

Hello!

I want to share with you a small story of successful and free promotion in the Google Play app store.

Background

My name is Dmitry, I am 22 years old, I am a programmer. From the age of ten, when they bought my first computer, I began to get involved in games, or rather, game development. Remember that wonderful, childish feeling, when the Idea for a Million comes to your mind and you don’t even know the basics of programming, sit down and start to study various engines, designers and other tools in order to bring your idea to life. That's exactly how it all started. Now I have a programmer’s diploma in my hands and a great desire to put into practice all those ideas that I could not realize, being without the necessary skills.

I return to the topic topic. I came up with the idea of ​​a game with my friend. Just one day, they somehow started talking about physical shooters and it started :)

Tools

The working environment was selected engine / constructor (call it what you want) Game Maker Studio. I have known Game Maker since childhood, this is a great environment for writing your projects, with Box2D physics built in and the ability to create a project without using code, everything is built on events-actions. This constructor saves a lot of time when writing your own game, and for this reason this option was chosen.
In addition to the working environment, standard tools were used: Adobe Photoshop for graphics, Audacity and FL Studio for sounds / music.

Development

The development of the game lasted exactly 30 days, I set the bar for myself and the second developer, after I read articles on the Haber that the project should be developed no more than a month, otherwise the development of such a project can drag on for many years. Every day (well, or almost every), devoting several hours, we came up with new levels and mechanisms. Probably one of the most difficult things in development is to imagine how your project will look, to come up with various interesting things. Since our interests with the second developer differ significantly, opinions about each thing in the game also diverged, which is very good, because it allowed us to write the game guided by different, combined opinions.

To write a game with physics support on Game Maker Studio (hereinafter GMS), it’s still entertainment.
First - the speed of physics in the GMS, limited by the total speed in the room (room speed). Since the idea was approved to realize the possibility of acquiring more powerful equipment, which would allow the release of arrows at a higher speed, it was necessary to somehow accelerate the arrow. This is where the problem arose. By increasing the overall speed in the room, the arrows did fly faster, but also all the objects moved faster, it was necessary to find another way to increase the speed of the arrow.
We had already abandoned the idea with different equipment, when suddenly the function physics_world_update_speed () crawled onto the stage. As the name implies, this function allows you to increase the speed of calculating updates of the physical world, which allowed to increase the ceiling for the speed of movement of physical objects in the room without affecting performance.

Next, there was a problem with the graphics. Since there were no designers in our team, I had to invent and draw everything ourselves. The idea was put forward to implement graphics in the style of "pen in a notebook" , everyone liked the idea, after which he started to implement it. A bonus of such graphics was its low weight. Since the main color is blue, and all objects in the game are drawn in the “stroke” style , the heaviest weighted image was the background :)

Gameplay

The essence of the game is to destroy robots at the level using a bow and arrow. At your discretion, 4 types of arrows are available to you. By combining various types of arrows, you must destroy all enemies at the level, while activating various types of mechanisms and traps. Each new season (10 levels) opens up new types of mechanisms. For the remaining after passing the level of the arrow, you will receive game currency, received currency, you can spend on the purchase of a stronger bow. In total, the game has 100 levels and, accordingly, 10 seasons.

Promotion

Probably just like any developer, I read a bunch of articles about the promotion, they are all almost the same: "A beautiful icon, detailed description, keywords and ... blah blah blah . " No, I do not deny that all these tips are valid, they are just very uniform. Many really cool and beautiful games lie in the bowels of Google Play, with a detailed description and a beautiful icon, however, these tips did not work on them.
It's no secret that the success of the application is determined by its first week after downloading to the store. Having read a bunch of articles and tips, I decided to act.
Everything is according to the standard list: w3bsit3-dns.com, xda-developers, SlideMe, androidforums, androidcentral and so on. There were also scattered links on various thematic forums on social networks, a post on Picaba, as well as articles on several friends' blogs.

Summary

About a week later, a boom of installations occurred and the game jumped into the top 50 new products in the CIS countries.

Graph of the growth of unique users: I


chose advertising (AdMob) and the paid version as the source of income. Total ad revenue was $ 70.
According to the paid version, it’s a little pitiable, 34 purchases and $ 23 profit:


Thank you for your attention!