Day 2

So I’m one day out from the accidental release. The problem I’m having is visibility. The only way to get the page seen seems to  be by linking the game directly to people or typing the exact name in. I think if I would have done more advertising and I was established this wouldn’t be as much of a problem. As it stands the game doesn’t show up at all in the play store search. No one can play it if they don’t know about it. My ultimate goal is to have it be the top result when searched. Being on the front page would be huge. I’m learning SEO and marketing on the fly and I’m throwing out tags left and right.

I’m trying to get people playing it to get reviews in. Even bad reviews would be nice so I could get feedback. I got one of my friends to play it so I’m going to go over with pen and paper to take notes.

The screen recording app I used left stuttering in the video which looks terrible in the trailer. It makes it look like the game isn’t optimized well. My phone is “old” so maybe if i record in 720p it will perform better.

Play here now

Testing

Minigame Universe is in the open beta stage now, which means it’s mostly complete.  While it’s almost complete, there  are still a bunch of things to finish.

  • Tighten up the graphics
  • Add in adds(heh)
  • Add in more acheivements
  • Possibly add a leaderboard
  • get more suitable music

I can keep finding more and more things to add and change though, and considering it’s my  first published game I’m nervous to release my baby to the world. I won’t get anywhere if it never gets released though.

I’m testing on my daily driver LG G2 and it seems to work work fine. It’s pretty “Old” as far as android phones go being released in 2013 but it’s still pretty good. It’s on the low end of the scale for  good phones now but it works for testing purposes. It’s got a 1080p screen and  Snapdragon 800 processor so I think most people will have a device at least that good. My logic is most people keep a phone about 2 years so they will have a phone newer than my 3 year old phone.

I have the rooms at 1280 x 768 and it seems to scale pretty well to my 1080p screen. I had a 7″ tablet that a friend bought for me for $30 brand new for testing that was terrible and it still ran fine and scaled down to the 1024 x 600 screen. One thing I noticed  was the accelerometer was wonky and it destroyed some of the game levels so I took them out. I’m not sure if it was a problem with that tablet specifically or tablets in general but i took the levels out anyway because  I didn’t want to risk users giving me a bad  rating because it didn’t work. Hopefully the levels that still use the sensors work fine with tablets.

 

The Google Play Developer Console is pretty neat, it allows you to see all kind of stats.for example you can see  install count by devices

Install stats 5_27_16

Or Android version:

android version

 

Previously I only had the beta open to my friends but now it’s open to anyone so hopefully I can get more input before launch.