Show HN: My First 3D Android Game Using Unity3D – Dragon Slayer: Reign of Fire | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: My First 3D Android Game Using Unity3D – Dragon Slayer: Reign of Fire

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62 pointsbharatparikh40 comments

I admire your ambition! My own Android game development is intentionally limited to 2D for various reasons.

Unfortunately, and I hope this is not your experience, the way I understand the state of affairs in gaming in general is that if it's not as gorgeous as Mass Effect or as addictive as Candy Crush you're not likely to see many people caring.

Really, though, good on you for releasing a game! If making games is what you love, keep going; I just hope the monetization you're doing is more experimental than an attempt at making a living. People are cheap, cheap bastards, and your prices aren't even attempting to hit the whales that support most (if not all) profitable F2P games.

Edit: Also, please note that as many of us found out the hard way, Google Play does indeed show your freaking address as part of your listing, so you may want to remove it from the relevant part of your profile. It's not required but it's also not made clear that it'll be shown publicly if you enter it.

Thanks for your comment. I can relate and agree to whatever you have mentioned. The chances of Indie game succeeding are very slim.

My motivation for making games is two folds - one the psychological satisfaction of "creation" and second the ability to reach out to global audience with whom otherwise I would never had any connect. See, we two are talking right now :) I am hoping to reach a level where I can make a living through my games. I am far away from that goal right now :)

Regarding the developer address part - Isn't it mandatory in Play Store for every developer to list their address? Can the address be just a city and country instead of a detailed one?

These are well known issues, anyone who has spent more than 10 minutes ever on /r/androiddev is well aware. Suffice to say its almost understood these days that any dev with any sense understands all caveats when doing mobile development period.

Has anyone here successfully made money off of mobile games?

Lacking feedback directly from anyone who has done it: I get the impression that the secret is to throw lots of things against the wall and see what sticks. It paid off handsomely for Rovio, for example.

If you can crank out a new game every couple months, it might be possible to make a living that way. Unfortunately, nobody goes into games wanting to crank one out every couple months.

>Has anyone here successfully made money off of mobile games?

Here's a guy who has over 600 apps (mostly games) on the iOS appstore, all outsourced, and is making money off of them: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2shhgj/iama_25_year_ol...

>Unfortunately, and I hope this is not your experience, the way I understand the state of affairs in gaming in general is that if it's not as gorgeous as Mass Effect or as addictive as Candy Crush you're not likely to see many people caring.

This is only true for games on mobile platforms. The Skinner box horseshit you find in the App Store and on Google Play, will not translate into success on PC or console, because people who play games on PC or console actually want good games and are willing to pay for them.

Basically, don't make games for mobile, is my takeaway. Or, at least, don't target that platform exclusively or even primarily.

Congratulations on the release. I am currently a deep shade of green as I am a devops engineer who has a pipe dream of creating and releasing a game really just for the pleasure of just doing it and learning a language (and hopefully a personally successful future as a freelance dev). I have been looking at C# and Unity. I started digging into c# but I am a weak python guy so it's frustrating :)

You are a great motivator! Your work is appreciated. Congrats again.

Thank you for your appreciation. Coming from Java, adapting to c# was easier for me since syntax-wise these are very similar languages. I am now learning Objective C and I can understand and relate to your frustation about moving to a new language altogether :)

Why not use Boo? Serious question and if there is some reason to avoid taking advantage of the Boo support in Unity, I'd really like to know about it.

Had never heard about it before. Will give it a try. Thanks for suggesting!

Suggestion for your description: "High Quality 3D graphics" comes across like you're scraping the barrel for bullet points to put on the back of the box. To boot, I can say from experience that the ones that put that on the back are usually the shovelware games with graphics that always look like they're one or two generations of consoles behind (i.e early-PS2 graphics on a PS3 game, etc.) Now obviously you're doing this all on your own and I'm not going to hold you to the same standards as a multi-million dollar project. I guess my point is, that kind of blurb invites criticism. It's like a chef bringing you a steak that he proclaims "perfectly cooked" when it's clearly overdone.

Thanks for your suggestion. The title and description of the game in Play Store plays a big part in ranking the game against keyword searches. Hence, a lot of Indie developers like me go a little over-the-board in describing the game :)

Oh really?

Let me quote what Google is saying in their promotional materials: "When you publish on Google Play, you put your app in front of over 2 billion active Android users...".

If they can lie, than he can exaggerate.

Congrats for the game.

Unity3D makes me shudder though. People are publishing Unity3D games on the internet, but on Linux you can't play them because unity refuses to make a webplugin for Linux. One for Mac or one for Windows they of course have.

At least because of that bad experience I have with them (some game on newgrounds looks like good, but oh no, after opening it it turns out it's a unity one instead of flash) makes me HATE the name Unity3D and everything that has to do with it, no matter how good they try to be for the rest.

Them refusing to do the effort of making a Linux webplugin, smears their name.

I think they announced that they are going to allow publishing to web via HTML and CrapGL at some stage. So you might have something eventually.

What would that publishing method do to the already published things though? If they can make a unity webplugin for Windows and Mac, two completely different systems, it should be possible to make one for Linux as well.

Also, "CrapGL" sounds not so good... not a fan of WebGL?

> If they can make a unity webplugin for Windows and Mac, two completely different systems, it should be possible to make one for Linux as well.

Please share your estimates how much money you can make on a linux plugin vs how much you have to spend to create it?

First word-combination on this page is "cross-language":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenGL

Taking that goodness and making it CrapScript-only is an abomination:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebGL

Great first attempt! Kudos!

I feel you should blog your experience on developing this game. I'm sure it'll be an interesting read and an inspiration for many of us who wish to get involved in game development.

Thanks for your encouraging feedback. Thats a very good suggestion. I will start putting together something once I port this game to iOS.

Bit of unrelated advice; in one of your other games ( https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.thoughtsha... ) , you address people in Dutch with 'U' (capital u), which in Dutch is only used to refer to God.

Thanks for pointing that out. I will make the necessary correction. I don't remember if I got help in getting the text translated or if I had used Google Translator. In either case I will get it corrected.

That's one hell of a first try. Good job!

You should post it to r/Android as well with a similar headline.

Thanks a lot for your encouraging feedback and the suggestion! Posted to /r/Android.

Congratulations! I see you have a couple of other games. One with 100k-500k installs, one with 50k-100k installs, and one with 10k-50k installs. All of them have in-app purchases. Could you share with us how much you are making with each game?

Thank you! I can't share the exact numbers. All I can say is the earnings are not enough to make a living (even in a low cost country like India) :) Probably, the numbers are not even worth sharing :)

I will be trying my hands with iOS by porting this game to see if its any different on that platform.

Seems impressive, congrats!

How long did it take from start to finish ?

How many people were involved ?

Thanks for your encouraging feedback!

I was the sole game developer / designer working on it. It took about 2 person months of effort. I have prior experience in Java and Libgdx engine. But this is my first in Unity3D and C#. Along with Unity3D, Google Game Services and OpenIAB plugins have been used. I used Blender for 3D modeling and animation and GIMP for 2D image editing.

Why did you ditch libgdx?

For the lack of a visual editor to visualize how the scene would look like. In Unity3D you can play a game, pause it, make necessary changes to find out how would it effect your scene, and every thing is updated real-time in the scene (the changes are not saved though, so you need to remember what was changed and redo once you come out of Play mode). In short its a what-you-see-what-you get kind of tool.

"The skies have turned red"

First screenshots show a blue sky

The first screenshot displayed to the user in Play Store depends upon the platform that you are using to view the Play Store entry. Check out within your Play Store app on Android phone and it would display a screenshot with red sky. For tablets and desktops I chose the blue one to be displayed first.

Corrected the sentence in Play Store. Thanks for the input!

Very nice!

How come you went with Unity3D instead of Unreal Engine 4?

Thanks for your feedback. While there are couple of reasons for choosing Unity3D over Unreal more than anything else it has been the cost factor. Unity3D basic version is free (for organizations that make annual revenue lesser than some threshold value) versus Unreal Engine which is paid. Since I am still a novice Indie developer not making any money from games I am trying to keep my cost to a minimum :)

How about the design part? Did you use free graphics? Some of the Unity bundles? Did it yourself?

I often have the feeling, that games are the only type of "Software" that has enough developers but never enough designers...

Yes, I have used free graphics and optimized them to reduce the vertex count and size and also created custom animations. All the arenas / level have been modeled by me though.

I agree that games, especially indie games, need more designers. Since indie games usually don't end up making enough money its difficult to find designers who are ready to work on profit sharing basis rather than upfront money.

Also not having to deal with C++ or visual scripting could be a major plus.

Wasnt battle tank 3D your first 3D game?

Battle of Tanks was using Libgdx. This one is using Unity3D. Knowing Java and Libgdx engine helped a little but it was still a very different experience using Unity3D and C#.

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