/agdg/ - Amateur Game Development General

obligatory

In these games, you find ways to incentivize playing daily.

Then you make tiers of achievement from simple to no-life-ever. People will choose their own goals to achieve. Some guy might want to see how far he gets without spending a cent, one guy might be like "I WANT TO GET INTO THIS RANKING" so he plays and plays, he spends money on stuff that will help him win and because he's now invested, he has to continue the uphill play until he achieves his goal.

Then when he achieves his goal, he looks at how much he's invested and starts striving for higher. He has to play constantly because if he's complacent for even half a day, he loses days of work. The alternative is to spend money to keep your streak.

This is how these games work. It exploits people's fear of loss (in time or earned in-game stuff), and continuously asks them to set higher goals (where even more tiers can be added with DLC).

The best part about making them is the word of mouth. If someone can download it for free, they almost certainly will if it looks at least moderately entertaining. And once it's there, the players themselves advertise for you.

Take Flappy Birds for instance. Every single person that I asked where they'd heard of it from said that a friend had told them about it, a friend had challenged them to beat their high score, a friend had been playing it on their break at work or between classes. No one said they'd seen it in the app store. Your best bet is making something that's easy enough to understand that it can be explained in one sentence, and with a high score or progression system so people can talk shit to their friends. The classic, "You're only on level 374? That's pussy shit. Wait until you hit the 500s," sort of banter prints money.

>>16586

> how to popular

The mobile app markets are completely gamed, as demonstrated by the Flappy Birds demonstration.

How does a game that's a shitty ripoff of another game with stolen assets make it to the top of the app market? Through paying a botnet for downloads.

http://www.bluecloudsolutions.com/blog/flappy-birds-smoke-mirrors-scamming-app-store/

Released, no D/Ls. Month or so later, out of nowhere skyrocketing D/Ls. No trans-game advertising, yet other older released games also see a boost at the same time. The reviews for the game include a huge amount of similar reviews with repeated words, like "satan", and "life destroying", apparently a basic Markov Chain sentence generator.

The app was removed once inquiry began because the "dev" didn't want the marketing secret outed. Why put out shit and get it on top? Serves as "advertising" for said botnet.

The app stores know how gamed their rankings are, but they don't want devs or users to know, so they remain tight lipped on the whole thing. Meanwhile, people in the know (esp. guerrilla marketing gurus) make bank helping the rich get richer and ensure you honest devs don't get a fair shake in the app rankings.

Now you know, and knowing is half the battle.

>>16608

Well shit. I guess I better pay for a botnet.

>>16608

And the other half...

...is violence.

>>16598

Is free games really the best way to break into the market? Then where is the money coming from? In-game purchasing, or advertising? I have looked into Amazon Kindle advertising and it seems pretty easy to get into... but I could be wrong...

>>16608

Is this in any way illegal? Because if not, I'm doing it, fuck it. Mobile is a dirty place, so I'll play dirty.

>>16614

Advertising, mainly. A little banner ad and a short video ad that comes up between rounds is usually plenty to make dosh. Flappy Birds only had the banner and the dev made some obscene bank.

>>16614

Free game with ads, paid option to get rid of said ads, and preferably some in-game currency you can buy with real cash. Then it's a fine balance between making the paid currency increase fun a lot and not making the free game shit.

That said, the mobile market is pretty much dominated by a small group of games. They make 1/3rd of the entire game industry's income, but make up a single percent of the mobile market at best. Partially because there's a lot of shit out there, but also because your average non-shit game is going to make $5 a month most likely.

>>16621

I did make a bit of a generalisation. The android app store pretty much only gets you cash of you make it free with paid ad removal. The iOS store does sell things for actual money. So your best bet is probably paying $200 to Apple once and releasing on that, then praying to whatever deity you may believe in that you can earn part of your rent with it.

Another problem with paid apps is that you can't use botnets effectively. Those 5k indian IPs all need to have a copy of your game before they can review it, after all.

>>16622

What do you think about amazon and the kindle app store?

I went there first because they don't charge anything to release an app on their platform...

>>16616

I don't think its illegal, just ethical and a massive headache if the media finds out.

>>16608

God damn are those comments salty as fuck.

It is so obviously he used a botnet and yet all these blue pilled fucks are like "hurr durr, he dindu nuffin".

>>16614

>Is free games really the best way to break into the market?

If you're as unethical as a casino owner, sure.

>>16623

FireTV has some promise as it has a standard gamepad, but release it as a full game, one payment. Don't do this stupid freemium whaling shit to exploit only a few dumb asses with too much money.

>>16639

>>16608

I get how shady the whole thing is, but if you look at it from the perspective of "I pay $x.xx and get my app more exposure" how is it different to the user/dev from traditional advertising?

>>16644

My point is so many of them are saying that he didn't do anything to manipulate his app store rankings. They actually believe that he skyrocketed out from obsolescence purely through organic means.

Personally, I have zero problems with what he did and would do it myself in a heart beat. If I had my own iphone botnet, I'd chart apps all day.

>>16643

>release it as a full game, one payment.

That's what I did, but I don't think I included support for FireTV... I'll look into it and consider it for my next project. I think in-game purchasing is a horrible marketing strategy and generally just an unethical way to do business. I know there are some games that have managed to make money with just a flat one-time fee and that is what I would like to do, but I will probably experiment with a free app that has ads just to see how it works.

bump

>>16586

Analytics.

They release a game in Canada and then spy on everything the users do and continually tweak everything in the game to maximize revenue. Then they release it in other regions. They continue to spy on those people and then use that data for making the next shitty soulless game.

>>16647

>so many of them are saying that he didn't do anything to manipulate his app store rankings

If a dev buys fake downloads, surely they'd be willing to buy fake article comments

>>16639

>tfw you realize that those are botnet comments

>>18689

That was my first thought. Botnet comments defending botnet games.

Some heavy Skynet shit right over there.

>>16622

You really think Android AppStore can't make you money with paid apps? One dollar apps even?

The "top" free games are utter, complete shit. 13 year old with Game Maker do better than that. Is my only option to join those ranks and hope a non-shitty game will survive there?

>>18801

They seem too creative.

"Are you an anti-acne company, and want to sell more cream? Flappy bird is the app for you, recommend it to your customers and also new people and they'll be breaking into acne in no time. And with all that acne they'll need some cream from you. The next thing you know, you'll be a billion dollar company."

That's a very complex chain of sentences to generate with near-perfect English, especially if that pattern never repeats. (Hemorrhoid cream company, etc.)

To me it seems like a lot of people were paid next to nothing to grind fake reviews. Probably can bust one of those out every 5 minutes. There are people who will work for a fraction of minimum wage on shit like Mechanical Turk. This isn't much different.

I used to work for about minimum wage for TextBroker. Basically you are paid to write descriptions of things on the web. Sometimes it's SEO sites trying to game Google. Sometimes it's weird shit like someone wants a Minecraft server description. A lot of the time you just do a bunch of product descriptions. It's not difficult but it requires a human. These comments really seem to me like a small group of desperate people were hired for a month making poverty wages to game Apple's app store. My guess, from the high quality of English, is Indians.

So gentlemen..

What engines and mechanics would you recommend for a Candy Crush, Flappy Bird, bullshit puzzle game?

>>18849

I would strongly suggest not using any engines at all. Android does everything you need for you already - unless you wanna make a 3D game.

Also, please no more Candy Crushes - have you seen the Play market recently? It's gagful of shitty clones of clones. Mostly of Candy Crush Saga or 2048.

If you really wanna clone something, clone something else please.

>>18857

Android might have everything you need for a 2D game, but its tools are less than optimal.

I would recommend libGDX instead. It's fairly powerful and flexible, but still easy to use as long as you are just using their basic classes (otherwise, prepare for a wild ride through the JavaDocs).

In addition, it's multiplatform, so if you ever want to make a non-bullshit game it will come in handy.

I remember this forum called TCGApp (it's probably still around) I used to visit to check news about Ayakashi Ghost Guild, a shitty collectible non-trading card game made by Zynga.

The game is basically Button Clicker Simulator 2012. You recruit cards by paying in-game coins, extremely expensive real money coins or by winning events (which used to be possible before Zynga went full Jew with it and made impossible winning unless you paid money to click a button more times).

The game was boring as fuck. All you did was clicking a button until you found something, then "battled" with an enemy by clicking another button a single time. That's it, there was no strategy whatsoever outside of team building.

Programming-wise, it was a fucking webapp with horrible performance that crashed constantly. It was as shitty as you could imagine.

Thing is, the artworks were pretty cute. It was the only redeeming quality of the game, which is why it managed to become successful, I guess.

I remember reading that forum during Christmas' events. There were around four users claiming they spent around $2500 that month, but apparently they spent $1000 monthly on that game.

These same people complained about the Asian cash cows. It was a known fact that they got far more offers than the rest of the world necause they spent much more money on the game.

So there is how a game makes money. Put in some feature that can attract autists with too much money on their hands, like cute 2D girls, and you will be set for life.

>>18883

Can't imagine what could an engine do for you other than forcing you to learn how to use it and place restrictions upon you based on what the engine's creator thought will be good.

You have the Bitmap class for working with sprites, Matrix class to do all the rotations, transformations etc. and the Paint class to make do color overlays, transparency and such.

What else do you need? Really, tell me, I am not claiming to know everything. Like some example scenario where you need more than this. And of course, 3D not involved.

>>18883

What about Cocos2D-x? Once you get through it's incommensurable shit docs, you have a bretty good framework at your disposal.

>>18895

libGDX is actually a pretty complete library, not an engine. What's really nice about it is that it allows you to use all their fancy (and wacky, since some classes are pretty weird) abstractions while also allowing you to go pretty low level.

If you want to use only the classes you said, you can use their equivalents (which are pretty clear and straightforward) in libGDX, but you could also use their particle generator classes, the tilemap loading/saving tools, the retard-proof spritebatch and framebuffer classes, multiplatform compilation, etc.

It's more or less like saying "why learn C++ when you can program similar features in C already"? The answer is obviously "because someone has already done it for me", and like with C++, you can choose to ignore some of its most obscure stdlib classes and program C with a few extra functions.

I have also seen some benchmarks and libGDX achieved much better results than the Android libraries executing the same program (~300 sprites moving in random directions). Some years ago libGDX even scored better results than SFML, so go figure.

>>16586

I don't know man, I made a small game last month and made 20 cents. I'm not sure how it works.

PS: this one https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nervosogames.reverseasteroid

>>16586

Having around 20 small puzzle freemium games could give you a nice avenue per year.

Of course it matters how often they get featured on the front page of Steam and how many people browse your website, search your games.

>>21196

I'm not trying to be mean but there is nothing special about this game, it's one of the 400+ generic games released on that particular day

how about if we have so many great ideas?

You know, I actually think it'd be fun and maybe even productive to work on a premium game. Something like DomiNations or a twin stick shooter with upgrades and shit.

I mean it's dirty in a way, I'm someone who's all about doing things ethically and about producing a good game..

But the truth is money is power. Money is money that can to go a project that you care about.

Artistic integrity doesn't matter when the normies shower all the unethical companies with money while the good people get nowhere.

I'd like to make something like this as an experiment. Not even go full jew, just have some microtransactions. Mainly I think it'd be fun to make stuff like this and have an actual result, that is then put out there. I don't care if it doesn't make money, it'd be good experience.

Its insane to think some games want $10 just to quick-build something. Or maybe its just insane from an RTS players viewpoint, knowing that mechanics didn't used to be this artificially slow.

>>23978

I wouldn't mind F2P nearly as much if the prices were reasonable

But like you said. 10$ just to make a building finish instantly instead of waiting 4 days. Insane.

I'd throw 50 cents here or there, MAYBE, if it was a game I really liked.

But obviously their strategy is working, since lots of companies stay in business. My understanding is very few people pay, but the people who do pay, will pay a lot, which is why the prices are so high.