The first real money I ever made from game development was on Android. It was in 2013, when Android was still the underdog compared to the iPhone, and was being touted as a great platform for developers. I’d taken two weeks to build Patchy, a retro arcade game revamped for touch controls, and published it on the Google Play Store without any hassle. Since then, I’ve also published Twistago, Rocket Mail, Bigcanvas, Radio Nul and Papageno.
This weekend, November 5th and 6th (and actually yesterday as well), Twistago has a stand at one of Germany’s largest board game fairs, Spielwies’n, in the MOC in München. Come visit us if you’re in the area!
As I alluded to in a previous post, Mystery Game No. 1 is no longer a mystery. It is called Twistago and it’s the best thing since… well… the second best thing! I actually pushed the button for global launch almost two weeks ago, but didn’t have time for a proper announcement until now.
Rocket Mail was the first game in which I’m tracking metrics, using Google Analytics. Adding Analytics support to your app is fairly straightforward, but using it well isn’t. I’ve learned a thing or two from Rocket Mail, so with Mystery Game No. 1, I’m taking a different approach, as documented in this post.
Put your spatial insight and worldly knowledge to the test! Rocket Mail is a company that delivers packages to anywhere in the world – by rocket! Use your phone’s compass and accelerometer to launch your delivery rocket to cities throughout the world. The closer you get, the higher your score!
I recently did an interview with Robert of Tornadic Dev Studio from Melbourne, Australia. He noticed my recent announcement about starting as a fulltime indie developer, and got inspired:
After thinking this through over and over and over again, I’ve finally decided to take the plunge, quit my day job and become a fulltime indie game developer!
After a weekend of toil with GRPC, ProGuard, dex, Netty, Maven, Gradle and IntelliJ, I finally managed to build a release APK of the first public version of the Bigcanvas app. Add some screenshots (inspired by – well, hopefully you can tell), and we have a publication!
Remember Bigcanvas? The infinite online canvas that anyone can draw on, which I launched in 2013? I didn’t do anything with it since, but the idea has always been at the back of my mind, biding its time. The most fun games for me are always those which give you creative freedom (RollerCoaster Tycoon, Minecraft, Kerbal Space Program, SimCity) so even though Bigcanvas is not strictly a game, this is something I would love to work on. Recently, I bought the domain bigcanvas.io and started working on a second version.
It’s been two weeks since I announced that Patchy was to be featured in the Play Store. This happened roughly a week ago, and it looks like it was taken down around yesterday, so it’s time for a postmortem.
I’m proud to announce that Frozen Fractal’s first Android release, Patchy, will soon be featured in the Google Play Store! I guess that means it’ll get a big banner at the top of this page, which is sure to drive some eyeballs my way. I don’t know what it is exactly that I did to make this happen, so I’m going to document what I did, in the hope that it’s useful for other developers out there.
Yes indeed, Frozen Fractal’s first officially released game is there! It’s called Patchy, and it’s a retro arcade-style land-grabbing game for Android. This post is about its inception and also describes some bits of the technical implementation.
Well then, since last Monday, the Frozen Fractal website is unofficially up. And since today, it’s official, because now there’s a blog post announcing it!
Today, I’m really getting started. I quit my job last Friday so that I can work on this project full-time. I have some financial reserves to keep me alive during the period of development.