Fledgling Videogame Developer

Now it is about 7 weeks since I started an ASO trial for one of my apps at Google Play. The target was to improve the visibility of " Del Gibbon's Mad Maths " Android game and get more downloads for it. I have no previous experience on ASO, so this really was the first try to do something for it. I did some keyword research, used a commercial tool for finding primary keyword(s), optimized app description with the findings, and so on. No idea if any of my methods were correct, but I was trying to follow the guidelines obtained from one ASO course from Udemy's collection. Unfortunately it seems that there were just few new downloads for the app for last 7 weeks, so I guess I was not able to do ASO properly at this time. Another option would be that my app is so bad (or looks so boring) that no-one wants to install it and give it a try. :) Anyways, I believe ASO alone is not enough to make your app successful. First of all your app should be interesting enough to ...

Since there has not been too many downloads for " Del Gibbon's Mad Maths " for Android, I started to investigate if there is something to improve app visibility at Play Store. To begin with something, I decided to get familiar with App Store Optimization (ASO). That is a process to improve app visibility at app store in a similar way than SEO for webpages. This was just to see if that helps at all in this case. In reality it might be that no one wants to play this game, but at least I have to try. :) After taking a short ASO training from Udemy course selection, I used a keyword tool (whose name I will not mention here) to find out primary keyword for my app. This keyword is now used as my app title at Google Play. Also, I tried to tune app description using the secondary keywords to maximize visibility. I am not too sure how I succeeded, but I guess the result can be seen during next weeks (or months). Who knows. My plan is to report the result of this ASO trial...

Edit 20.5.2020: Del Gibbon's Mad Math was suspended from Google Play Store about one year because of outdated API. However, just about a month ago we uploaded new version created with Unity3D to Play Store. So original Construct2/Crosswalk version does now exist anymore.  Greetings after a long time! This blog has been quiet for a long time and there has been only few updates during this year. I have been extremely busy in my day job, so I have not been able to use enough time for my game development activities. Anyways, during my summer vacation I started two totally new mobile game projects. The first one was released to Google Play couple of days ago, and it is called " Del Gibbon's Mad Maths ". This game is aimed to test and develop player's mental calculation skills. Concept is very simple: the answer is shown on top of the screen, and player has to select two or more numbers that totals are same than the answer shown on screen. There is a time lim...

Perhaps no one has noticed, but I have had couple of months break in writing this blog. I've been extremely busy with my day job, so my leisure time projects have got less attention. Anyways, there has been some progress in my game development projects. Our second mobile game (SortOut!) was published at Google Play Store for some weeks ago. Game itself is very simple and easy to play: you just have to use your finger to swipe boxes to the corners with matching colors. Sounds easy, but I promise this no-brainer game is more challenging you first would imagine. :) We have been looking for game concepts that would suit well to the mobile devices. SortOut! is one of them, and we have couple of others under development. Let's see what comes out next... Please check video below to get an idea about the SortOut! gameplay and visual look. And of course we would appreciate if you spend couple of minutes your valuable time to install this application to your device. Just give it a ...

Our first Android game "Swing Rocket Dash" was developed using Construct 2 and the Android native build was done with Crosswalk. As promised in the previous article, I listed some experiences using Crosswalk to build Android application from Construct 2 HTML5 export. There is a great  tutorial for using Crosswalk flow  at Scirra's webpage. However, there are few things I'd like to add: On Build Settings (under Cordova 3.x settings) you have to define App ID field. That is used as package name at Google Play, and it is using reverse domain name notation, e.g.  com.myhost.myappname.  This name is unique for each app, and for "Swing Rocket Dash" we were using com.gamaan.swingrockets (gamaan.com is our own domain).  It is important to increment App Version Code field every time you create new version. Google Play wont't accept you new APK if it has same version number than any previously loaded package of your game You should also check the Plugins...

I am happy to tell that our first mobile game called "Swing Rocket Dash" was published at Google Play for ten days ago. Since we had no previous experience on creating Android applications, there was all kinds of a problems to be solved along the way. But anyways we got it somehow working. Game was developed using Construct 2, exported as HTML5, and finally built to Android native app using Crosswalk (Intel XDK). I will later provide separate article on this to clarify technical details and issues we met during the process.  Game was also published as HTML5 at Newgrounds . Basically, is was quite easy to make the release: HTML5 export was zipped so that index.html was on top level hierarchy, and zip package was uploaded to Newgrounds. I tried to add Newgrounds HTML5 API to this game, but for some reason it did not work as expected. So there are no medals in the game at the moment. Sorry! :) BTW, Docteur Pi did a video review of HTML5 version and it can be foun...

It's quite long time from my latest blog article, so I try to catch up what has happened lately.  First of all, we got "Dualball" flash game released to both Newgrounds and Kongregate . For some unkonwn reason, this game was extremely hard to get ready and published. And to be honest, there were some planned features we dropped out from the released version. We just had no motivation to implement those. Also, at summertime we planned to have Android version too, but that is not on our plans at the moment. There has been some queries from flash version players for us to create mobile version, but at this point I don't promise anything. Another change has been the slow migration from Stencyl to Construct 2. The reason for this has simply been the HTML5 capability of the latter one. Exported game can be played on almost any platform you can imagine, and the HTML5 output can be converted to some kind of "native" application e.g. for Android, iOS, WP, etc....