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.
Careful, it sounds like you're proposing a pay to win model. Maybe that's good financially, but it ruins the game. If "boosters" (sounds like cheats) are allowed, somehow compensate in game. Maybe by offering pure matches, or by giving the boost to both players (kinda defeats the point).
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).
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):
Honestly and the claims seem to be getting shorter and shorter all the time. First it was "we built this in a month," then a week, and on to just a weekend.
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.
I've actually build the first version of Planets Multiplayer game and looks like in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fAwL1Pv48A in 2 weeks. The code was a mess and took me another 2 weeks only to refactor properly.
Eh I don't know, I've been on HN for years and feel like people have stopped posting articles like this. The look-at-my-app-I-built-in-24hrs is definitely past it's heyday. The programming languages, design frameworks, and PaaS infrastructure that allowed people to start making apps quickly has been around for a very long time now (2007?).
I've done a couple of apps as a hobbyist - I find they take about 6 months from idea to deployed with a couple of updates. I try and do everything myself for the interest and challenge of it.
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?
Yeah I'd thought about that, but I figured it's no worse than gta - which you can get on google play. Lots of good fun ideas there, unfortunately the Christmas edition's going to have to wait
I built a game with a few other people that took... 30 weeks! We built an infographic to show progress that I'm quite proud of. (This is ~2 years old now)
Your game is awesome ! I just took part in a GAME Jam this weekend and it was my first time attempting a serious game. I had written some mock side scrollers in pygame before.
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.
The art is amazing. I can say this because I'm just the programmer. Eka did most of the art. The end of the 30 weeks image shows who worked on it and for how long.
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.
Agreed. Its realistic, and something that can be achieved in that time frame. People who claim to build applications in 3 days, I'm wary of them. Sure you can hack your way to an application in a couple of days, but I think it will be bug prone and not fully optimized.
Congrats to the developer and his friend. I'm inspired to create my own applications one day.
Congrats on finishing and publishing a side project. I know how hard that is!
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.
Ditto, but inviting friends doesn't seem to work - I see a "facebook" window pop up, then it disappears, and I don't see a list of friends to challenge. :/
That's not a bad idea, maybe in the signup screen have that option. I know a lot of people really hate downloading and app and having to signup before using it. Thanks for the feedback.
Definitely worth doing. I've noticed in some of my apps where i haven't had this as an option that people really drop off after downloading, but if people have the option to play without signing up they usually at least give it a try.
Hi, I'm New to hacker news, but I also built an android app on the side and have 20ish downloads. I built it all myself and it cost only a couple hundred dollars. However I can't get users to stay. Most of the 20ish users installed it and then didn't play. So my question is what is your plan to get users to download and keep them interested? My app took about 4 months and I build it using Xamarin.Android. I don't want to break any forum rules by adding a link to my app, but I would be interested in getting some direction for marketing and feedback.
It's hard to tell with only 20 downloads. Some people will just download it and not use it, it just happens sometimes. Is it a free app or paid for? If it's free then this will happen more often. I'd suggest finding out where they stop, is there a signup screen that stops them or is it something to do with the setup? I imagine you don't have any information for them if no one has started playing it, but if you do, contact them and ask why they stopped. Be friendly to them about it, people will help you out.
Good luck. It's hard, but it can be a rolling ball, getting a few people playing can help things take off slowly.
Nice! It's funny, but I was just reading about a similar game being built, but this guy took 16 months and spent $58K building the app. Here's the post http://forums.makingmoneywithandroid.com/income-reports/1635... where he talks about it. His game isn't exactly the same, and definitely has a lot more going on, but there are some similarities for sure.
It seems like this is sort of a "hail mary" for him. He's hoping to make $600K over the next 3 years and he's planning on spending a ton of money on ads.
That's awesome. I spent 12 full weeks last year and built a game for iOS without using a game engine as well. It really gives you an appreciation for understanding the OS, Memory constraints and trying to model concurrent actions.
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.
Oh, if it asks for your password than it's because that email is already registered. If password recovery is not working in this case, the it's definitely a bug. I'll look into it, but meanwhile can you maybe use another email address to signup?
I'm also unable to register with my email (then it says "welcome back" and asks for a password) or recover my password (says that my email address is not registered).
When trying to use FB login I get "Whoops! We could not log you in using Facebook. Please try signing up using your email".
We actually just released the app yesterday. We don't really have a formal plan, just this sort of stuff, like posting to HN, game and android related subreddits, twitter, etc. Right now we only offer ads (and very few actually) since the goal is to attract users. In terms of revenue, our plan is to get some metrics and user feedback, figure out how users use the app, what they like, don't like, etc, and use that to add some relevant in-app purchasable items.
Haven't really setup a dev blog yet, but I will soon. In the development side there isn't anything overly complex actually. The app doesn't use any graphics/gaming library, it's developed in native Android targeting versions 4.0+, mainly to avoid spending a lot of time testing and adding patches for older devices. The backend is done in ruby but it will probably be rewritten in erlang/elixir in the near future if the game gains traction. The main reason being that my friend which developed the backend works full time as an erlang developer and is eager to try out elixir on a real project :)
"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.
Yeah, it requires Android 4.0 or newer to run. It was a decision we made at the beginning since we don't own Android devices running those versions and didn't want to spend all of our time making the app compatible with all android versions (or at least starting at froyo).
Your phone version is in the lowest 12%-tile. No offense to you, but as an Android developer, I'm content making my minimum required version Ice Cream Sandwich if it means avoiding any complexities.
Great game, just a few silly nitpicks, the UI looks a lot like Etermax games, I hope you do ad free versions, I didn't liked so much the Spanish name (Apuraditos), also I don't know if that word is used in all the Spanish speaking word. Saludos desde México.
Looks good. Can you give more details to us? Like what was biggest issue for you, did you do it full time or part time. How many hours average a week you would spend on it and how many downloads did you got thanks to HN?
I thinks those details would be very good to have!
Sure. The app actually went through several iterations. The first thing I developed was the main board of the game and it was definitely the hardest part (at least at the development side) since it needs to detect valid words. If you play around with it, you'll notice that you can form combinations of words that are linked together, so you basically have paths of words that might be connected to one of the fixed words through this path, and are thus valid combinations (hard to explain, but I think it makes more sense when you see the gameplay). Getting this logic right involved a couple of weeks of trial and error. On the bright side, it increase my vocabulary skills :).
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.
Awesome! Congrats on getting it out there. I just started getting into mobile development as a hobby this year (after 6+ years of mostly systems programming/scientific computing). I'm hoping to have something released within the next few weeks as well.
I just played a few rounds, it is really fun. I did not understand what to do the first two times though. I kept looking for a way to submit a word similar to what you would do in a scrabble game.
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.