Aspiring App Author Adventure - Update #1 [Game dev]

Hi All,

My name is Travis Millott, I am a 30 year old software developer and an aspiring solo indie game developer. I don't know anyone in the industry, and I started with very little knowledge about game dev.

The purpose of this blog is to share the interesting things I learn as I move towards releasing my first few games. I have been working on games for about 4 years as a hobby, but I've decided to take it to the next level by actually releasing my creations into the wild. This blog will detail that journey!

I am currently working on releasing a game called Frosted Factory- the code is 99% complete. I'm at the point where the entirety of my work is geared towards actually releasing the game. I have just finished up glamorizing the promotional images and I should be able to start actively advertising it sometime soon. I am still undecided about whether to pay someone to make a trailer... I might see if some student will do it for free on reddit. Sometimes students advertise their free services there in exchange for the experience.

Things I have learned

• I recently learned how important light is in promotional images, I've included some before/after screen shots below. With just some barely visible light, it really makes the image look more professional:
  

I did all the art for Frosted Factory in GIMP. I am not an artist, but GIMP is working very well for me. I just added some default effects to create the above lighting effects.

• I suck at social media. I have about 20 followers on my twitter, and around the same amount on a facebook group for my other game. I need to figure out how to make numbers like these go up. One thing I can do is start a blog to start a following (hence this blog hehe). Throughout the next couple weeks I will be making these numbers go up, and learning along the way.

• Android studio's webview sucks. My game is fairly simple and it is written in javascript so I need to emulate a browser to display my game. I get about 8fps on my olde (5 years old) android, which I'm fairly sure can do much better. So I've decided to try building the apk using crosswalk or cocoonjs. I've heard you need to do some sort of revenue sharing for cocoonjs so I'm steering clear of that until I fail to get crosswalk to work :p

Still to do:

• Get crosswalk packaging working (as mentioned above)

• Setup the android store purchase for the game (it's a freemium game, with 1 purchase to unlock more levels)

• Investigate getting a free trailer done.

• Make sure my social media accounts are looking up to date

• Get better acquainted with the analytics I'm using

• Make sure analytics is logging when the game shows ads.

• Get the description text for the game hammered out and copy/pasted throughout the various social media accounts.

• Enter all the details in the google play store for the dev account and frosted factory.

• Seeing if it's allowable in the play store and google/twitter to reward players for sharing the game on those platforms

Goals for next week:

• Make several social media posts, and NOT just advertising frosted factory.

• Acquire 5 new followers.

• Knock off a few of the above todos.

Maybe I'll talk more about the games in a future blog post, I'd like to keep this as a blog rather than an advertising arm!

Thanks for reading !