Hey folks. Some of you have already heard about my personal project for the last couple of years. Well, it is out. If you have an Android and want to check out, click here.
Here's a gameplay trailer:
This is a workshop thread, because I want to share my experience of publishing and selling on google play store with other RPG developers. feel free to ask anything here. Of course I am no "authority", but I've done a few dumb things and wasted a lot of time wondering how X worked or if Y would be a good idea.
EK from a development perspective, in a nutshell
I am really happy with how the game release is turning out. After 12 days, it is ranked #19 in "top new RPGs", #312 in "Top RPGs". 3K downloads, rates are very positive, and yes, it is selling. I will still wake up early and go to the office every morning, but I am getting some cash out of my hobby, writing adventures and encounters for thousands of people, and getting crazy praise in the proccess, so HELL YES, I am satisfied. VERRY.
The Battlefield: Play Store RPG category
I'll use a metaphor. It is a turbulent sea of liquid shit. You think I mean "this is codex everything is shit"-Shit? No, I mean "pregnant pony wedding surgery simulator" kind of games that, for some reason, fill about 40% of the RPG listings. There is no enforcement from google as to "What is an RPG", so currently my game is ranked right below "Mall shopping fashion store", and a few positions above, you see "high School pranks" and other crap. The actual RPGs are mostly asian MMO, only a few are actual single player RPGs.
From what I gather, your game will be labeled 30 days as "new", so you better make sure to be ranked among the top, because other top charts are much harder to access. By the time you're out, you better have a decent number of downloads and a good rating, so you end up in a decent position in the "Top RPG" chart, and Google has data to index you as a recommended download under other titles. It may be a good idea to invest a bit in Adwords because of this. but FIND A COUPON. Sometimes there are 100 bucks adwords coupons for new accounts only, so make sure NOT to create the adwords account ahead of time.
As I mentioned adwords: the clicks you get from adwords are not good clicks regarding purchases. My conversion rate from a normal install (i.e, percentage of people that buys) is way, way worse if the click comes from an ad.
Most of your downloads will come from the organic search in the play store. This works much like web google search; they index your store entry, and extract keywords from it. But no, you can't specify keywords. And careful with trademarks, even with the proper disclaimer: I once tried to sneak one and got an ugly warning email.
So just like with a website, what makes your webpage come out higher in searches is being linked. this means, internet links to your play store page, like the one I posted in the first paragraph. Unfortunately, forum links don't count much. You want blogs, articles, reviews.
You need to know what's going on
Information is power, so don't plan to release a game, ever, without building in some analytics. You can actually use Google Analytics API, or, like I did, build your own tool and system based on http calls and a serverside small logging system. You absolutely NEED to know what the players are doing, because PEOPLE DON'T REPORT BUGS, they just uninstall and, maybe, give you a one star rating. A very small fraction of them will be nice enough to tell you why your game sucks.
And yes, in android there is a small "report" button when there is a crash, and you get a nice stacktrace in the Developer Console telling you the exception and even the line number. But people don't click it. And even if they do, it will probably not be enough to know "nullpointer exception in Player.takeitem()". You need to know where the player was to fix that.
This is useful not only for bugs. Some things obvious for you as developer, look very different for players. I have an uber-reward at the end of a hidden dungeon that people didn't even see, even if it was, I believed, in plain sight in the final room. People thought it was just scenery. It is also very valuable for balancing classes, or enemies.
Oh, and to detect exploits. It's so funny to see guys finding a script error that allows to repeat a quest turn-in, and then spend four hours doing it.
In sum, if you have a complex RPG in the making, you NEED some kind of remote analytics built in, so plan accordingly.
Enough babble for one day, more as I have time.
Other guys in the play store, post here, let's make a stand together against the pregnancy SIMS and other shit!
Here's a gameplay trailer:
This is a workshop thread, because I want to share my experience of publishing and selling on google play store with other RPG developers. feel free to ask anything here. Of course I am no "authority", but I've done a few dumb things and wasted a lot of time wondering how X worked or if Y would be a good idea.
EK from a development perspective, in a nutshell
- Isometric, action-RPG, in an open world. Story and dialogue heavy. C&Cs. Combat is diablolike; but world structure, quests, etc is more like Morrowind or Baldur's Gate 1.
- Java project, based on LibGDX libraries. While I wasn't a Java expert when I started, I chose this because it is lightweight, free, opensource and it would allow me to write once, then release on Android/iOS/Windows/Mac/Linux. The game engine is almost finished, and is (almost) independent from the game data, with nothing hardcoded; in other words, I could just change the game files and make another game with it, without (for the most part) touching the code.
- Since April 2014, I've spent over 2,600 hours on this.
- I have no artists, but I have either used open assets(full credits here), or purchased 3D models and worked them into sprites (even modeled /drawn a few myself, lol).
- The early access beta has around 60 areas, 36 hand-made quests, 60 "semi-procedural" quests, over 100 dialogues. That is roughly 45% of what the 1.0 version will have. I give myself 3-4 months to do that (there's also some development to do, but nothing engine-changing)
I am really happy with how the game release is turning out. After 12 days, it is ranked #19 in "top new RPGs", #312 in "Top RPGs". 3K downloads, rates are very positive, and yes, it is selling. I will still wake up early and go to the office every morning, but I am getting some cash out of my hobby, writing adventures and encounters for thousands of people, and getting crazy praise in the proccess, so HELL YES, I am satisfied. VERRY.
The Battlefield: Play Store RPG category
I'll use a metaphor. It is a turbulent sea of liquid shit. You think I mean "this is codex everything is shit"-Shit? No, I mean "pregnant pony wedding surgery simulator" kind of games that, for some reason, fill about 40% of the RPG listings. There is no enforcement from google as to "What is an RPG", so currently my game is ranked right below "Mall shopping fashion store", and a few positions above, you see "high School pranks" and other crap. The actual RPGs are mostly asian MMO, only a few are actual single player RPGs.
From what I gather, your game will be labeled 30 days as "new", so you better make sure to be ranked among the top, because other top charts are much harder to access. By the time you're out, you better have a decent number of downloads and a good rating, so you end up in a decent position in the "Top RPG" chart, and Google has data to index you as a recommended download under other titles. It may be a good idea to invest a bit in Adwords because of this. but FIND A COUPON. Sometimes there are 100 bucks adwords coupons for new accounts only, so make sure NOT to create the adwords account ahead of time.
As I mentioned adwords: the clicks you get from adwords are not good clicks regarding purchases. My conversion rate from a normal install (i.e, percentage of people that buys) is way, way worse if the click comes from an ad.
Most of your downloads will come from the organic search in the play store. This works much like web google search; they index your store entry, and extract keywords from it. But no, you can't specify keywords. And careful with trademarks, even with the proper disclaimer: I once tried to sneak one and got an ugly warning email.
So just like with a website, what makes your webpage come out higher in searches is being linked. this means, internet links to your play store page, like the one I posted in the first paragraph. Unfortunately, forum links don't count much. You want blogs, articles, reviews.
You need to know what's going on
Information is power, so don't plan to release a game, ever, without building in some analytics. You can actually use Google Analytics API, or, like I did, build your own tool and system based on http calls and a serverside small logging system. You absolutely NEED to know what the players are doing, because PEOPLE DON'T REPORT BUGS, they just uninstall and, maybe, give you a one star rating. A very small fraction of them will be nice enough to tell you why your game sucks.
And yes, in android there is a small "report" button when there is a crash, and you get a nice stacktrace in the Developer Console telling you the exception and even the line number. But people don't click it. And even if they do, it will probably not be enough to know "nullpointer exception in Player.takeitem()". You need to know where the player was to fix that.
This is useful not only for bugs. Some things obvious for you as developer, look very different for players. I have an uber-reward at the end of a hidden dungeon that people didn't even see, even if it was, I believed, in plain sight in the final room. People thought it was just scenery. It is also very valuable for balancing classes, or enemies.
Oh, and to detect exploits. It's so funny to see guys finding a script error that allows to repeat a quest turn-in, and then spend four hours doing it.
In sum, if you have a complex RPG in the making, you NEED some kind of remote analytics built in, so plan accordingly.
Enough babble for one day, more as I have time.
Other guys in the play store, post here, let's make a stand together against the pregnancy SIMS and other shit!
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