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.
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.
With work full steam ahead on Mystery Game No. 1, it’s easy to forget that I’ve got another baby to care about. Rocket Mail was launched two months ago, but of course the story doesn’t end at launch. In a sense, it only begins.
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!
At the core, Rocket Mail is a very simple game. I made the early prototype (Doomsray) in less than a day. There are no complicated physics, no advanced graphics, and very little in the way of performance requirements. Of course there’s a long way to go from a prototype to a finished game, but even after the game looked, felt and sounded polished, I still found that I needed several weeks to get it ready for beta testing.
Just a short post to share something I’ve been working on that mightily pleases the Kerbal Space Program player in me. In testing Orbital Express, it became clear that having three controls (compass direction, inclination, and launch speed) is too much for beginning players. So I decided to simplify the first two levels:
For my game Orbital Express, I need a list of cities that can serve as targets for the player to aim at. We’re trying to select cities that…
After Ludum Dare, it’s back to working on the game I blogged about last week. Name clashes notwithstanding, I’ve decided to call it Orbital Express after all. As I mentioned, there is work to be done on progression, balancing and scoring.
I’ve been working on and off on this project for almost two months now, so it’s time I blogged something about it. Here’s the elevator pitch: