Starting as a game developer - Part 3 (The Release)

It has again been a long time since my previous update. However, this time, I have good news: The game is finally ready and is available on the Google Play Market! So... what happened since the last post? A LOT! First, I lost my motivation for the game and I was really busy with university. Fortunately, my teammate, Teodor, was motivated for both of us. While I wasn't paying attention to the game, he rewrote the entire game in Haxe and Haxeflixel. We also had a talk and changed the design of the game to follow most of the modern puzzle games, without complex graphics, as we didn't have a designer. We changed the name, generated 500 levels and the game was ready for release.

The Release

We weren't expecting much of the game, however, we were enthusiastic about the release. The upload procedure to the Google Play Store is really nice and easy, so I won't spend much time describing actual release settings. We also set up AdMob ads, hoping that we can earn a few dollars on the side.

Now that the game was released, we didn't know what to do. The game was available on the market, but noone knew about it or was expecting it. We quickly told our friends about it and contacted Haxeflixel to include the game in their showcase, which they were happy to do.

Unfortunately, this was not enough. It has been 5 months since the release and the game still has 10 active out of 30-40 downloads, most of which were from our friends. And our AdMob campaign has generated 0$.

The Maintenance

As with every software product, a lot of bugs appear after the release. The same happened to us. After a friend of ours played the game for a while, she found out that a level was impossible to do. We quickly looked at the problem and found out that there was a bug in the level generator script. In 1 hour we fixed the issue and uploaded a fix, as well as some fixes with the performance of the app.

The Conclusion

So what I have learned:

Motivation is one of the most important things when working on a personal project. What went wrong in our project is that we were too busy with other things and there were periods when we didn't spend any time on the game. Not seeing any progress is something that can destroy your motivation. If i was starting this project today, I would definitely dedicate at least 4 hours per week on the game and I would use some kind of issue tracking system, in order to visualize the progress from the beginning. This would have kept my motivation up. Seeing progress and the game evolving, would have pushed me to work on the game even more.

Receiving feedback about this game is really important for us, as we are still learning about the world of game development. Unfortunately, we didn't show the game to anyone before the release and we were not able to get much feedback while we were developing it. I think this is one of our major mistakes. Receiving feedback during the development would have caused us to change our initial idea. It would have improved our game and would have made make it more fun. That is why for our next project, I am planning on finding alpha testers, who will be with us during the development and together we will be able to steer the game in the right direction.

Other mistake with this game is the lack of details. One can easily argue that adding a bit better graphics, some animations and sound would greatly improve the quality of the game and make it more appealing to the players. However, because of the lack of motivation, we didn't spend much time into the details of the game.

Now I am looking forward to my next project and I am going to make sure I am motivated enough about it, before starting working on it.