Show HN: I built an Android game after work with a friend in 6 months
play.google.com
play.google.com
Take additional $0.99s and give me boosters, like clock extenders, wild letters, and hints.
Leaderboards. OMG. Leaderboards...
Let me grow your user base by inviting my FB friends in exchange for said boosters.
Relevant leaderboards (because people i know are on them)
Spend half of those $0.99s and hire a designer to create a design that caters to the middle aged women crowd. Spend the other half of the $0.99s on advertising. Web / Fb of course, but late night TV seems to do exceptionally well for that demo.
Recoup those $0.99s by running your own ads for said ad free version and boosters with a larger audience.
Unless THOSE people are kept in separate leader boards.
.99 for add free version would be much appreciated.
OTOH, perhaps I'm a strange minority, and these annoying, unbalancing devices are loved by many.
I'd certainly pay for ad free, even a buck or so s month (Google Play has subscriptions).
But the middle aged women demo does not think like your typical HN reader. And that demo is orders of magntude larger than the HN community.
At best, OP should pray to monetize 2% of their audience. Of that, only maybe 15% end up being repeat customers.
and remember, 37% of all stats quoted on the internet are made up. but you get my point ;)
The thing about free to play games with in app purchase is that there are a few "whales" who spend so much money they dominated all revenue statistics. Here's a video from Kongregate talking about this phenomenon on their platform (which has since broadened to include android games):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ekz466sDprg&feature=youtu.be...
Recently people have been saying they built the entire app in a single "hackathon" (basically one day).
If you really look at almost all of these claims they're false. Often times people would have built three similar apps and for their "new" one they just combine elements of the three and call it done.
Now looks like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SANFF5FYYHE
https://outland-live.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/media/downlo...
your art work looks amazingggg ! Few quick questions ... Do you have sprites in the iOS world too ? Is your player , coins and enemies all sprites ?
And one more thing is , are you blitting a scene graph ? I am having a hard time thinking about this data structure. Would love to hear you explanation.
Thank you!
The simple 2d sidescroller you see is surprisingly complex. The characters and obstacles are full 3d models. The animations are authored in 3dsmax and have something like 20 bones. The course environment is flat polygons with clever UV mappings to get the most out of texture sheets. The background is a flat 2d image. It's all rendered orthographically with careful depth values to make sure it layers properly.
Maybe I should do a rewrite..
I'm busy building the sequel right now - hope to have it ready for December this year.
Congrats to the developer and his friend. I'm inspired to create my own applications one day.
Unfortunately, google banned the free version of my latest masterpiece yesterday. I even called it Bikinis vs Zombies rather than Strippers vs Zombies to make it less inflammatory. I designed it to be compliant with the sex and nudity guidelines but it got banned anyway. The paid version will get banned shortly I'm sure! Currently looking at other distribution routes - anyone got any suggestions?
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.neddiejam....
Have you considered that the name is not the bulk of the problem?
Just change the art assets a little. Turn one side into nurses, and the other into infected patients, and call it "Ebola Nation". You're welcome.
Some quick feedback.
First the Play Store listing. I installed Tiny Words on a Nexus 7, and it shows the first 3 screenshots for a 7 inch tablet. Then it shows the same screenshots but on a phone. It is only by scrolling to see the other screenshots that you finally see the 4th and following screenshots "The best score after 3 rounds wins!", etc.
After installing I chose the FB option, but it opened a FB login web page which would require typing in username+login. I have the FB app installed and logged in, so this shouldn't happen. You'll lose a lot of users at this stage unless you fix this.
Good luck. It's hard, but it can be a rolling ball, getting a few people playing can help things take off slowly.
Although maybe he prefers doing one-offs? I'm not super-familiar with the game scene.
Wow. $58K is a lot of money for an android game.
Another thing that I really like about game development is that it really challenges all of the sensors on a device. It pushes the limits of animation and sound which a lot of utility apps don't really embrace.
It asks for my email, then it says "Do you want to create an account with this email ?", I press "Yes" then it asks for my password and whatever I type it's wrong. If I click recover password it says my account is not yet created.
Do you have any planned (or potential) revenue streams other than ads?
I'm in the midst of building a single-player word game, so anything you have to say on this would at least give me something to think about.
Did you write up anything about your experiences making it? Would be interested to hear.
"1.5 minutes" "One and a half minutes" "one minute and thirty seconds"
The use of the colon to separate hours/minutes and minutes/seconds means that you need to supply units to tell which it is, but "1:30 minutes" seems wrong.
I thinks those details would be very good to have!
Good luck with your success!
Most of the gameplay was developed locally, without any backend. By the game I was sure I could get the gameplay right, I asked my friend to join me and work on the backend. So for the past 3 months more or less, we've been working on getting all of the endpoints right, and testing, testing, testing and more testing to make sure we could catch as many bugs as possible.
In terms of hours, we probably put in about 2 hours per day on weekdays and about an average of 5-10 hours during the weekends. In hindsight it looks like a LOT of time, but if you've ever done Android development, you probably know that the amount of time and effort that goes into testing the app on several devices, probably surpasses the actual development time.
Very nice design and animation. Well done.
But that's just my opinion.