So I released my first game today(on accident). I’m both excited and nervous. After 8 months It’s finally out to for the world to see. I’m hopeful but I don’t expect too much because everyone always says that the your first game is never successful.
It took about 8 months to start and release but a couple months of that I was just sitting on it and making tiny changes and working on the company itself. I had a game before this one that took about a year to make and I didn’t even finish. It’s just collecting dust. I’m thinking I can drastically reduce the time it takes to pump out games, maybe bring it down to a month or 2.
I didn’t even plan on releasing Minigames Universe now but I accidentally took it out of beta and put it into production.(whoops)
Some things I’ve learned are:
1.Start the game with barebones features and add them in later. If you get bored down the line and don’t want to work on it anymore it’s easier to release it with a couple features than it is to try and mush together a bunch of unfinished features.
2.Start advertising right away. Tweet everything, make gameplay videos. Do anything to get your game/brand out. My mistake was waiting until the very last minute.
3. Backup EVERYTHING. I had everything backed up and I reinstalled my OS. Lo and behold I missed one thing.. the keystore file. Without the keystore It’s impossible to update the app on the playstore so I had to create a new playstore listing and delete the old one. Luckily It was only in beta so I didn’t lose too much.
4. If you have a good idea, prototype it first. It’s much easier spend a little time protyping to see if an idea sucks than it is to spend months working on it just to find out you wasted all those manhours
5.Pre-plan ad placement. Instead of making the game first then putting ads in at the end, plan to make ads part of the game so their not thrown in to make them feel more natural and organic
Get it here!