🐏 🤠 📠 Indie developer hell or how to bring your project to release and not shoot yourself in the process 🐁 💺 🌿

When my friends / acquaintances / drinking companions find out that I am a game developer, they are in a wild delight mixed with white envy. “Oh, sho, when will the new Assassin be released? ”-“ Wow, this is high. Such a cool job! ”And so on. Immediately I immediately lower them to the ground, because the game developer sounds cool, but there is a lot of work behind it. Often, not the most fun. Routine, monotonous and, frankly, tiring. However, very, very necessary.

Experienced developers will understand what I mean, and those naive dreamers who are just thinking about moving into game dev - take my word for it. Well, or read the entire article from start to finish. A little about the author - 4 years in game dev. I managed to work with such projects as Iratus: Lord of the Dead, Utopia Syndrome, a couple of VR projects. At the moment I work in CrispApp studio, the main direction of which is Hidden Object games.

The development of the Into the Dungeon project, probably began, like any indie game with a simple dialogue:

- “Arturchik, go make your own game! ”
-“ Go! “

If I knew what I had to go through during the year that went into developing the game, I would ... agree without hesitation. Self-realization is a demanding lady and her demands are great. And I won’t trade it for anything.

Development start

The start went briskly enough. The concept of the game was taken from an old electronic (Yes, and there are) board game by Dungeons & Dragons. Core gameplay is as simple as a Kojima game (no) - you have a square box divided into cells. You select any starting cell, after which a maze is randomly created around it. One caveat - the walls of the maze are not visible. Next, the player will explore the maze (we walk only in a straight line), stumble upon the walls (the collision completes the move) and look for treasure under the protection of a ghost (dragon in the original). You become a cage near the treasure - a ghost wakes up and hunts for the player, wanting to prevent him from stealing pennies honestly earned during his life.

Box of the game

We just didn’t want to copy the gameplay, so we started adding new features to the game. The main task then was to diversify the gameplay, but not to overdo it with a bunch of content that would only ruin the game. There were many ideas, many of them went to the update list for better times (would be enough for 4 major updates, no less!). In the bottom line, we got 6 heroes (1 basic and 5 unique, with their own characteristics and abilities) and 4 types of traps with their bonuses counterweights. Stuck on the web? It doesn’t matter, hold the torch and burn it to hell! Poisoned by poisonous fumes? Look for the antidote faster! I think you get the point.

At this moment, we were faced with the first problem, but we will see it only after the release (I’ll tell you later, we go in chronology).

Implementation went briskly, Sanka the programmer figs the code, Arthurchik prefabs the environment, sets the animation, sets the particles - beautiful, I can’t.

As a result, it turned out somehow like this. It’s not a prototype anymore, but it’s still far

from the final version . It was fun to play, it caused an ass to burn on the next wall / trap, what is needed. We understood that the game was not casual, from the word at all, but the understanding of the audience of geeks / nerds / desktops / role players assured us that everything was going as it should. At this stage, the second problem happened (I remind you that we will discuss the problems separately, just bend your fingers).

File polishing

Grinding to a pre-release state has spent a bunch of our nerves. Bugs climbed like hooks from the jungle of Vietnam, the UI was constantly overgrown with new elements, the new gameplay was tested, changed, tested again, changed, repeat all points 10 times in 3 sets. Even your memes went!

Initially, the Portal sent the player to the starting cell, but after such a case, the Portal started sending just to a random cell on the field.

There were also enough sufferers. The battle between the DG and the programmer is still ongoing, there are victories and defeats on both sides, but as for me this interaction has never yielded a negative result. For example, I often drove into the complication of the gameplay, I wanted to make heroes pumping, everyone should register their talents, to which they told me “Wow, wow, Palekhche! "It's hard to implement, let's try it easier - and it worked. Although we wanted to position it as an RPG, but the game remained, in fact, a puzzle and all of the above elements were useless. This, by the way, is the third problem.

After six months of work on weekends / evenings, the game began to look something like this

Main menu in person The

dungeon and the lone magician

Showgames on Devgamm and file polishing again

In this state, we showed the game in CrispApp, where we work, we agreed on the publication of the game. The next 3 months were simply unforgettable. If you ever decide that localizing a game in 11 languages is a good idea - hit yourself in the head. Objectively - this certainly benefits the application, the game is loyal to an audience from different corners of the Earth, but subjectively make perpetual changes to the translation table, check the game in all languages, select fonts for them and upload 220 screenshots to the AppStore \ Google play ... Just be prepared for this, but I digress from the topic.

Refinement took our last strength and a breath of fresh air was a trip to Devgamm in Minsk. By the time of the trip to the exhibition, we wanted to release a game (Haha, why so funny, Lord I can’t stop laughing). Of course, nothing came of it, the game was damp, we had to put it out on low heat a little more and we went with the beta version. We printed business cards with a QR code for the jump, prepared a beautiful poster (no) and flew.

Devgamm gave a very good feedback. We accelerated the game 2 times (now on the old version it seems that everything is moving in slow-mo), finalized the tutorial, improved the graphics, fixed bugs (the list can be extended for a long time). We arrived with a positive attitude, since in general the game went to people, it was visible involvement, emotions. Players received the main thing from our product - fun, which means we were on the right track. I've never been so wrong (4 problems).

And so, that day has come. December 13, Friday. Symbolic release date for the dark-dark Dungeon game. Submit and the game flew to the shops.

Release and Advertising

If you think that after the release we exhaled, sat down to a beer and waited for millions of races - you think badly, ladies and gentlemen. Immediately after the release, I began to actively advertise the application. For this, a resource plate was preliminarily assembled, where our potential audience sits.

The resources on which the post was made are highlighted in green, the failures / frosts are red, the white one is not written yet

. We had one trump card up our sleeve - an RPG humor public with an audience of 80k + subscribers, which my friend Boris allowed to use for advertising. The scheme is simple - we write to different bloggers, media, publics, we offer barter (your post is with us, our post is with you) and we get mutual profit.

In general, this is an ungrateful thing, and that's why. Public, site and blog editors are generally divided into three types:

— , (1‑3 ), , — . , , . .
— , , — «, , — » « , ». , , .
— «». , , . 50% .

Firstly, they freeze. Freeze hard and boring. You write to them - after 3 days silence. You write again - after 2 days silence again. For some, I spent 2 weeks of my time reminding myself and trying to get any answer. Silence. Okay, well, maybe they are armless and cannot answer me in writing, sometimes I understand. Secondly - they are greedy and there is a great example. I contacted one gaming Telegram channel to advertise the game. They unsubscribed to me on the same day, saying - "Yes, we could make a post on our channel." I joyfully sprinkle with questions about publication, what is needed, what materials. What I get 5 days of silence.

Another reminder of himself stirred the correspondence. "Throw off the advertising text, screenshots, make a post." While the fish is on the hook, I throw off everything necessary for publication and ... they put up a price list for me. What for? Unclear. I always mentioned that we are indie, there is no money, but we hold on, let's barter, but they decided to pickle me for a week and set the price. Well played guys. The funny thing is even that it was a channel with 5k subscribers. I understand a gigantic audience, multi-million dollar contracts. Where are we, indie, to them.

The main thing that I realized during this small advertising campaign is that you need to bang your head until your forehead is broken. There was a wild feeling of importance when it was possible to get a post on IGN, a pair of publics for 200k subscribers.

A month later, the advertisement paid off, albeit modestly. ~ 6000 downloads on two platforms, a couple of times getting into the top 150 in the Board games category in the Appstore, the first in ‑ Apps, but, unfortunately, the expectations were completely not met. Application retention is too low, people do not stay in the application at all and I have 5 reasons for this! (generally 4, but the song is good). Actually, now we are moving on to the problems that I have so persistently pointed out above.

Problems and their solution

The first problem is too much randomness. Initially, the gameplay emphasized miscalculation. You explored the dungeon, calculated the possible position of the ghost, took the treasure and left the dungeon. An element of chance was brought by invisible walls, but they could also be fought. Having understood the tactics of preliminary exploration of the area around the starting point and unhurried progress along the Underground, the player gave a partial vision of the structure of the maze and an understanding of where and how to move it.

Adding traps made the dungeon more random dozens of times. The miscalculation of moves was pointless, since circular saws could cut you on any cell. Yes, we had the hero Thief, who informed the player that there was a trap in the next cell, but the player already erased the application after 2 levels. It was decided to transfer the thief's talent to all the heroes, which greatly improved the gameplay. The player received the treasured information about the traps, circumvented them and could see dangerous moves for him. Plus, we made more emphasis specifically on exploring the dungeon - a little more scattered bonuses, added the selection of additional gold in the form of bags of money in random cells, and most importantly now passing the level of 3 stars depended not on the least number of steps taken, but on the number deaths.If before the game pushed the player to the fastest possible passage and therefore choose the shortest, albeit dangerous, way, now the player can safely explore every corner of the dungeon before meeting with the Phantom.

The second problem is complexity. Our blind belief that if we make games for geeks / nerds, then the game should be quite complicated, it was fundamentally wrong. Yes, this is not a hypercool, but the player is not a telepath. Neither the tutorial, which essentially dumped a bunch of text on the player, nor the first levels that dumped a bunch of obscure entities on the player, helped to understand the game. “Sit yourself, mortal! "The Ghost would say, if it were real. I had to redo all levels in order to introduce game entities gradually. We play first in the core gameplay - you, the ghost and the walls. Even the ghost’s location has been made visible to the player. Then we enter 1 type of traps, play 3-4 levels with this, then 2 type of traps and so on. The wider the reach of your audience, the more likely it is that your application will not go to the cemetery of forgotten projects.The idea is obvious, but it didn’t come to this immediately, but it’s a pity.

The third problem is the positioning of the game. Initially, we present the application as a turn-based tactical RPG. And all would be nothing, but this is not RPG. The role-playing element with the heroes does not help the players at all to agree that Into the Dungeon is an RPG. From this, many people become indignant, even put a rating of 1-2 stars. Most simply fell off, realizing that they had been cheated. Moving to the Puzzle category and positioning the game as a tactical Puzzle should improve things. I say it should, since we only find out with the release of the update, and it, at the time of writing the article, is about to come out.

The fourth problem is me and only me. As I wrote there - the player gets fun from the game, so is everything okay? Forget it. If a person, while testing the game, is having fun with you in the application, this is NOT equal to a good application. A person plays here and now, he can always ask the developer what is wrong with this game. And who said that tomorrow he will return to play again? Testing and show cases are undoubtedly important for understanding the application and how the player perceives it, but it is important to look at things objectively. Watch, talk, get feedback, and even if it’s purely positive - analyze it again. Maybe the person didn’t understand anything at all and was glad to just play his game with the developer?

After update

A new wave of advertising and weekly statistics paid off - the indicators improved slightly, the other day even came in-game purchase (so rare and so desirable).

Unfortunately, a large influx of new players has not yet arrived (I never left my wet dreams). There is an increase only in the daily number of players + the average duration of the game session has increased. The problem with the tutorial has remained the main problem, there are already ideas on how to make the game even easier and more accessible. We are moving in the right direction and further it should only get better (ha ha, well, again, it's too funny, stop!).

Subtotal

Phew, there was a lot of text, but I believe that those who read to the end brought out something for themselves. I think no one will find big revelations here, but it’s very useful to look from the side at your own mistakes. For Into the Dungeon , this is not the last update. Belief in the project does not die. A little success is also success, and even if everything goes to hell, it was a great experience. In the meantime, you can evaluate the game yourself. Only 5 stars do not forget to put!

Indie developer hell or how to bring your project to release and not shoot yourself in the process