Day 2

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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

Minigames Universe released!

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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!

Distractions

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Distractions can be devastating.  Distractions can turn a whole day with a clear schedule for getting a lot of work done into a day wasted on Reddit. One downside to being your own boss is that you have to be your own boss… If you’re not a good self motivator, not having someone nagging constantly to get back to work or direct concentration can cause wasted days. A few wasted days here and there can quickly stack to make for wasted weeks, and weeks can turn to months.

At times I have the attention span of a goldfish. Just after writing that I got distracted and looked up the attention span of goldfish, apparently goldfish have a longer attention span than me.
Even when I write about not getting distracted about something I get distracted. I’m honestly surprised I ever get anything done, no matter how small. I can get distracted by anything, the paperclips next to me are distracting, it’s crazy. Alas, I do have some tips to stay on track.

For me, music selection can be a huge distraction. If it’s too interesting, It makes me lose focus because I end up thinking about the music more than the task at hand. Music that works for me seems to be something I can put on and forget about. A pair of headphones with Infected Mushroom on seems to work wonders for me. Podcasts or tv shows are the worst for productivity. At best you get some of what needs to be done and have partial knowledge of what’s happening on Game of Thrones. At worst you spend all day watching tv and get nothing done.

Before I saw the light I would scoff at making to do lists, but they really do work. They work for me because I’m forgetful and constantly need reminding. I can start working on something and completely forget what I was doing and end up staring at a screwdriver for 5 minutes. Lists are also helpful because they show progress. Even if you get only get a couple of little things done, just the act of crossing the items off the list can boost morale. Having lists help direct the important work that needs to be done instead of aimless, non important work.

Having scheduled forced breaks help clear the mind. Often time’s I can be stuck on a problem that I’ve been working on for hours. After  taking a break and coming back I fix the problem in minutes. Even if I’m focused and in the zone, if I’ve been working 8-10 hours my brain will be fried and any progress I make will be trash. My brain could be fried and I wouldn’t even realize it.

These are a few ways to stay focused and I’m sure there are many more, but I just found a video on how floss is made.

Starting a Game Company

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So you want to start a game company and you think you have what it takes?  Great! I will be going over just some of the skills involved.

Assuming you are starting from scratch(like me) and you are planning on being a one person dev team, here are some many jobs that go into making just one game:

  • Programmer
  • Graphical artist
  • Audio engineer
  • Game design
  • Level design
  • Producer

And that’s just to name a few. That’s a LOT of work to put in for just one person and one game. There are also other things involved many might not consider:

  • Social media
  • Accounting
  • Advertising
  • Web design, web hosting, SEO,ETC.
  • Setting company up/legal info

Every one of these categories one could spend hours upon hours upon hours in a rabbit of of research and work. For example, to set up this website I had to buy a domain, pay for web hosting, learn how to set all of it up, learn WordPress and set it up. Just the website alone could be a full time job by itself, but It’s just one small aspect of the company for me right now. Once I start bringing in money I can probably afford to pay other people to do the work for me(if I choose). As of right most of my skills aren’t where I want them to be(this site included) but they are already much better than they were even a year ago.  I believe it’s a “jack of all trades, master of none” deal, But I honestly believe will make me a valuable asset now/in the future.

One good thing about all the work involved is that if i get burned out one one aspect of the company, I can switch gears and work on something else. There are a lot of things involved that I can obsess over. For example, if I get tired of trying to perfect the UI, I can get on the website and try  and figure out how to get more than -7 people a day to view it. I like the freedom involved knowing I can work on what I choose. So far the extra work seems worth it.

I’m not trying to discourage anyone to try their hand at game making, just trying to give a realistic view. That being said, this is a great time to be in the “game” (heh). Most things you will have to learn already have established communities meaning there are plenty of people wanting to help you through your problems.  I am always amazed that how weird or obscure my problem seems to be, I can almost always find a solution by making a quick google search. And if I can’t find what I need, asking a question in my community of choice will land me a quick solution.

While I currently feel pretty burdened with everything involved in creating a company I think it will get much easier because one only has to start a company once and overcome the hurdles involved once. After that, it’s just using the knowledge already gained.

 

 

Under Construction

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This site is admittedly pretty terrible right now but I’m working on it. I’m not good at web design but WordPress is pretty easy to use and I have coffee so the site should shape to to the level of “not terrible”. All this SEO and analytics and site performance it interesting to me so it gives me something to do.

Testing

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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.

Home

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GameBorgs is a one man game development studio dedicated to making mobile games  that have a user friendly experience. Using original content  and offbeat humor Gameborgs aims to make fun games with high replay value..