So let’s go.
Chapter 1. The pain and agony of development.
It all started with generating ideas in my head. I, as the main idiot who came up with the idea for the game, actually decided to make everything trivial. There’s a guy who wants to become a crime boss. But it was necessary to figure out what he would do in order to achieve success in this and determine the basic mechanics. And then I remembered the wonderful series – Breaking Bad (yes, there were already a lot of games with meth cooking, but I decided that we would diversify it with everything we could). As a result, we have an idea – the main character (our.) is engaged in making candy, attracts his homies there, and in addition fights with homeless people, other bandits, police, drug addicts and all the scum that can come to mind. This is how the basic mechanics of the game were born.
As a result, after working on the basic idea, I began to develop various mechanics – the combat system, a little role-playing pinch, all sorts of ways to level up the hero and business, mini-games and quests. We decided to name this creation Chelopundriya (well, simply because all the heroes in the game are small, stubborn Chelopundriks). All this resulted in what we have now.
Then we started to assemble a team. I already had an artist in my wife and a coder in myself, so we started looking for people who would help with the interface (which we eventually purchased on the Internet), voice acting, sounds, etc.d. As a result, we assembled a team of 10 people (not including various freelancers), purchased a bunch of content and started creating.
The problems started when we realized that our game was more than just a clicker (it was a pity to make a regular clicker game with such good voice acting and graphics) and I simply drowned in a ton of code.
In general, if you https://gododds.uk/login/ don’t go into details of various hemorrhagic situations, we spent three months (most of the work, of course, went into graphics) developing the early access version of the game, which is now on Google Play. If we talk about the budget, it was minimal – something in the region of 300 thousand rubles.
Chapter 2. Early Access Release and ChSV
And now we’ve reached early access. We love the game (to the point of madness) and want to continue developing it, but we needed to make sure that other people liked it too. That’s why we followed in the footsteps of early access – releasing the game on Google Play for free download and without any advertising. At first everything was fine (except for bugs, which we promptly corrected), but then, when it came to advertising and traffic, we really sat down, even having the experience of an application with 700K installations behind us.
Our game took off and we scattered a couple of links among friends and people who were waiting for it from us. The first installations went well and the feedback helped us fix a lot of bugs. And then everything is simple – we started an advertising campaign, but not in the usual way, but in a non-standard way.
Chapter 3. Non-standard approach to advertising
First of all, we printed flyers (not many, 50 pieces just to see the conversion) with promo codes and simply handed them out on the street. For 50 leaflets there were approximately 10 installations. This means that the method works if you hit the target audience.
Next, we placed advertisements in local “overheard” pages and launched two competitions. The winner of one of them was a 15-year-old modest schoolboy, who received his 1200 rubles in pocket money from us. And the second competition will end only on August 30th (we are also giving away cash prizes, XBox One S and souvenirs there). However, these methods of attracting the audience practically do not work. About 40,000 rubles were spent on advertising, and 60 installations were received. It turns out very funny and that’s our problem. Relying too much on popular support.
Chapter 4. How did Google knock ChSV from the header 😀
Well, the last point is to drive traffic from our old game (which has about 700K installations) to the new one. But dear Google changed the search algorithms on Google Play in July and our traffic dropped to almost zero, which completely cut off all our possibilities of driving people from game to game. As a result, we are now sitting, nervously smoking on the sidelines and cursing Google 😀 I hope that when we finalize the game to 100% readiness and take it out of early access, the result will be much better than 100 installations in a few days.
Conclusion. Why did I write all this? Yes, just out of despair. Self-publishing an early version of the game with ill-conceived marketing was a bad idea, but I still believe that other people will be able to appreciate our work and love Chelopundria as much as we do.
P.S. If you want to play the game, you can find it yourself on Google Play. However, I warn you, there are scenes of a sexual nature and a lot of stubbornness.