No Pain, No Gain! [Devlog]

Apollo14 · November 2019

oleg said:

Apollo14 said:
Rich multimillion-dollar company recently published idle gym game. And of course it's professionally crafted with big advertising budget, they gained 1mil+ downloads during first week.
(I must not post link here, because links help app ranking, and I shouldn't help their app ranking)

When I saw it, my reaction was: Fooook...........! I was supposed to release my damn project by this time!!
On the contrary, you can advertise your game at the expense of a competitor.
Just use the same keywords as your competitor. And next to search results, you'll always be in second place -

Which is very useful for the number of downloads, and further it will depend on the quality of your application

Unfortunately Google changed its design last year.
Now 1st position takes all. This way Google made rich developers even richer and screwed small developers.

oleg · November 2019

Apollo14 said:

Now 1st position takes all. This way Google made rich developers even richer and screwed small developers.

Google now works differently - 50% of users see the leader app and 50% of users see the competitor app. Not the rank of the app changes but the% of users who see it

antix · November 2019

@Apollo14 ahh that's too bad

But hey, I just posted before reading about this that I'm in the process of creating a UI editor for Gideros. It will of course come with some Lua code to run the interfaces that it generates.

Its coming along pretty nicely so far and I am finding all kinds of exciting ways to exploit HTML to create pools of textures and so forth

I don't know what people expect from such an editor but personally grids make me vomit so my editor will be an old-school absolute placement type of affair, which I always found gave you more control over your interfaces.

Apollo14 · November 2019

antix said:
@Apollo14 ahh that's too bad

But hey, I just posted before reading about this that I'm in the process of creating a UI editor for Gideros. It will of course come with some Lua code to run the interfaces that it generates.

Its coming along pretty nicely so far and I am finding all kinds of exciting ways to exploit HTML to create pools of textures and so forth

I don't know what people expect from such an editor but personally grids make me vomit so my editor will be an old-school absolute placement type of affair, which I always found gave you more control over your interfaces.

Wow that's great!!

Apollo14 · February 2020

Chapter 3.3: Dude, Where's My Game??

uh, I decided take a break from 2D gui monkey coding for a week or two. Ended up spending 2 months prototyping 3D stuff in UE4.

Now I feel that it would be much saner for me to continue working on 2D project (I've already spent so much time and effort on it, graphics is pretty much ready, after all).

But I can't continue my project without necessary analytics and sdks.
It would be naive waste of time, cause publishers don't even talk to nobody without analytics (and they are right). And even if I release game by myself, I will be blind, won't know anything about audience.

Unity is actually cool for casual games (I wish I understood it two years ago). But right now I don't wanna dive into Unity, cause it may take 2-3 months to understand how stuff works there and get used to workflow and C#.

Probably I'll create 2D mobile game in UE4.
It sounds wild, but actually it's not that wild nowadays. Empty apk is 40mb + my assets maybe 40-50mb, final build will be not more that 80-90mb.

Nowadays even mass market hyper-casual crap is 80mb, lagging on my Snapdragon 625.

Industry has changed. It's 2020, nobody gives a shit about apk size anymore.

p. s. I have a feeling about 3D (it may be wrong) that though learning curve is dozen times harder than 2D, but once you learn it, you can be pretty productive. I see that guys create really impressive things within short periods of time. And they're not some hardcore ex IdSoftware employees with decades of AAA game programming experience. The main obstacle is that 3D consists of many separate disciplines, if lonely developer isn't familiar with, for example, animating or, say, texturing, he is pretty much crippled. There're at least dozen of such disciplines, each takes lots of time to learn.

oleg · February 2020

Apollo14 said:
Industry has changed. It's 2020, nobody gives a shit about apk size anymore.

It is not true!

All major analytics services recommend apk =<25mb size(This is the size most players download)
The larger the file size, the greater the quality requirements of the game, and the larger the game studios will be to your competitors, which will set the bar for quality

It is like boxing where you are a champion in your weight, and if you are overweight you fall into a larger weight category and you are no longer a champion

(I see now that many known games are broken into several games to reduce the weight of the file)

oleg · February 2020

Apollo14 said:
p. s. I have a feeling about 3D (it may be wrong) that though learning curve is dozen times harder than 2D, but once you learn it, you can be pretty productive.

I have the opposite opinion. -for me 2d- much more complicated than 3d.
To create a nice sprite 2d in modern games, first make it in 3d and then translate it into 2d and make a postprocessing

Apollo14 · February 2020

oleg said:

The larger the file size, the greater the quality requirements of the game, and the larger the game studios will be to your competitors, which will set the bar for quality

It is like boxing where you are a champion in your weight, and if you are overweight you fall into a larger weight category and you are no longer a champion

If you wanna pray for orgranics, if that's your business plan, then you're right.

But don't forget that it's already 2020. It's not 2010 anymore. Not even 2015.
Such business plan (praing for organics) absolutely sucks in 2020.

Now studios either buy traffic themselves (mainly from Facebook).
Or work with publishers.

Yan · February 2020

Im the same about feeling new projects and thinking of going 3D, keep there bro !!! Ure not alone

oleg · February 2020

Apollo14 said:

oleg said:

The larger the file size, the greater the quality requirements of the game, and the larger the game studios will be to your competitors, which will set the bar for quality

It is like boxing where you are a champion in your weight, and if you are overweight you fall into a larger weight category and you are no longer a champion
If you wanna pray for orgranics, if that's your business plan, then you're right.

But don't forget that it's already 2020. It's not 2010 anymore. Not even 2015.
Such business plan (praing for organics) absolutely sucks in 2020.

Now studios either buy traffic themselves (mainly from Facebook).
Or work with publishers.

You're wrong!
, the market depends on the devices on which the game will run
The market will only change when the power of the devices changes

Apollo14 · February 2020

oleg said:

You're wrong!
, the market depends on the devices on which the game will run
The market will only change when the power of the devices changes

What are you talking about? Even hyper-casual games are 70-80mb nowadays.

Actually you guys have no idea where the market goes.

You stick to archaic stereotypes that one can upload small game to appstore and pray for organics. No publishers, no analytics, nothing is needed in your archaic world.
Such business plan went to shit years ago. Nobody relies on organics these days.

I know something about keywords, I used to do keyword research for many years when I was doing SEO. What I see now in appstores is that it's extremely difficult to find golden keywords.

Honestly, I'm starting feeling detached from this community. Gideros is lacking very essential stuff, unfortunately, and you guys are saying that everything is cool, nothing is needed, no facebook, no gameanalytics, no nothing.

hgy29 · February 2020

Gideros HAS analytics support! And it had Facebook until Facebook changed its api in such a way that existing plugin would have to be rewritten from scratch for all platforms. I tried two times to do it, but didn’t succeed, and finally gave up. I might well give it another try, throwing away existing API, though.

oleg · February 2020

Apollo14 said:

oleg said:

You're wrong!
, the market depends on the devices on which the game will run
The market will only change when the power of the devices changes
What are you talking about? Even hyper-casual games are 70-80mb nowadays.

Actually you guys have no idea where the market goes.

There is a bunch of statistics from google and other analytics companies - statistics says 25mb is now the optimal size.

There are games weighing 80mb - but they are downloaded by units, and users' expectations will be higher and quality requirements will be higher and the monetization of such games will not make sense by advertising but only by sales. And the meaning in such games will be only if they are made under the market of PCs and consoles and for mobile phones in parallel(Not as the main platform).

oleg · February 2020

@Apollo14 -Let's run an experiment:
What are the last 2 games you bought at google store?

Apollo14 · February 2020

oleg said:
@Apollo14 -Let's run an experiment:
What are the last 2 games you bought at google store?

I never bought one

oleg · February 2020

Apollo14 said:

oleg said:
@Apollo14 -Let's run an experiment:
What are the last 2 games you bought at google store?
I never bought one

Here is the answer to your question about the market ..

The last games i bought is minecraft & rayman are games i played on my pc - and the mobile version is in addition to the main game ..

Apollo14 · February 2020

oleg said:

Apollo14 said:

oleg said:
@Apollo14 -Let's run an experiment:
What are the last 2 games you bought at google store?
I never bought one
Here is the answer to your question about the market ..

The last games i bought is minecraft & rayman are games i played on my pc - and the mobile version is in addition to the main game ..

I don't get what you are saying.
I agree that game should be "free-to-play", I'm not planning to release paid mobile game.

oleg · February 2020

Apollo14 said:

oleg said:

Apollo14 said:

oleg said:
@Apollo14 -Let's run an experiment:
What are the last 2 games you bought at google store?
I never bought one
Here is the answer to your question about the market ..

The last games i bought is minecraft & rayman are games i played on my pc - and the mobile version is in addition to the main game ..
I don't get what you are saying.
I agree that game should be "free-to-play", I'm not planning to release paid mobile game.

If the game is free, then profit depends on the number of downloads. \\
Statistics say that most players download files of ~ 25mb in size, this is considering the advertising of the game, not just organic traffic ..

plicatibu · February 2020

@Apollo14 My personal experience is that people in Brazil prefer smaller games due to cost of Internet.

Revenue based on ads don't bring enough money IMHO. You need a lot of people using your game and clicking on the ads (the rule nowadays is the CPC)

Brazilians usually don't pay for games, but many buy virtual goods from games.

And no, usually they don't pay for removing ads. They just turn Internet off prior starting playing.

I don't have data to prove it, but my guess is that the situation is the same in many countries.

Apollo14 · August 2020

Chapter 4: Matured enough to create framework

My lesson #1 this summer is that the only sane way for indie-developer to exist is to stick to one genre and to heavily use frameworks (either third-party or one's own). To release one game, then another, then another... (using familiar toolkit, and constantly enhancing it). For example if one likes shoot'em ups genre, he can become pretty good at them after releasing couple of titles.

After months of researching other people's high-level frameworks in unreal engine, I've finally figured out basic principles of how to create my own. Now I'm in the process of creating one for myself.

I'll continue to use gideros for smaller stuff where there's no need for gui monkey-coding, I hate stupid gui monkey-coding.

Lesson #2 is that idle game genre that I used to love, instantly got oversaturated, mostly with stupid quickly made template-based games designed to squeeze money from user in the first 3-4 days, then get deleted from the phone.
Probably it makes no sense to do something complicated in this genre, it'll take hell of time, just not worth it. With such amounts of time and monkey-coding, regular decent game can be made.

But the chances are high that I'll still finish and release my bodybuilding idle game. Most likely I'll have to simplify it, because it's not worth it to do lots of polishing. Didn't touch it for many months, unreal ate my life.

Lesson #3 is that I'm not as stupid as I thought (learned that from one local gamedev chat that I use sometimes). I came to know that all guys experience all sorts of problems and obstacles in gamedev, whatever background they have, whatever engine they use. I'm not alone there. Game industry is one of the toughest. Much tougher than web-development for example. Sometimes it takes many months and years to learn some stuff that I thought could be learned quicker. Even by guys who already have 5-7 years of gamedev experience. For example this guy described probably 1/10 of initial obstacles that have to be overcomed just to start with ue4 3d games development:

Dafb · August 2020

Wow, I am really impressed by this dev log! I love the humor and all the behind the scene thoughts.

Please keep writing. I stay tuned

PS: your first meme is exactly me too. While I am programming my current project I have multiple concurrent ideas, and it is very hard to be focused and to not be distracted.

jdbc · August 2020

JUST DO IT

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No Pain, No Gain! [Devlog]

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Chapter 3.3: Dude, Where's My Game??

Industry has changed. It's 2020, nobody gives a shit about apk size anymore.

Chapter 4: Matured enough to create framework

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No Pain, No Gain! [Devlog]

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Chapter 3.3: Dude, Where's My Game??

Industry has changed. It's 2020, nobody gives a shit about apk size anymore.

Chapter 4: Matured enough to create framework