My Indie Game — Minirl Launched! (Part 12)

This is an on-going series where I document my transition from a full-time career to becoming an indie game developer. In case you missed it, you can catch the last segment here:

Well here it is everyone, the culmination of all the hard work demonstrated on this blog over the last few months. That’s right, Minirl has now LAUNCHED! You can pick up your very own copy on a variety of platforms and services below:

Windows, Mac and Linux are covered via Humble Bundle and Itch.IO and the Android edition is available on the Google Play Store and Amazon App Store. I haven’t forgot about you iOS users, the game has been submitted to Apple and will (hopefully) be available sometime this week! Assuming the gatekeepers deem me worthy.

Additionally you can help get the game on Steam by voting on the Steam Greenlight below:

Whew, and with that I can take a breath! Needless to say, last week was insanely busy. I was working pretty much day and night to get the game out the door. Seriously, when people ask me what I’ve been up to I should just show them my Github profile activity graph:

Last week’s focus was on delivering the last few content features, bug fixes, as well as testing the game on Linux. Which I’m happy to report went really well:

Store Launches

Getting the game into stores was more or less than what I expected. I launched on Steam Greenlight page the moment the video trailer was available, which helped drum up some attention. I’d say the comments were as mixed as I’d expected, with some folks arguing whether the game was better suited on PC or Mobile. However, we’re making good progress towards the Top 100. I’d expect that to continue to trend upwards as I begin my marketing assault!

I’ve also reached out to Humble Bundle with the hope of having the game added to their store soon. They should get back to me over the next couple days. So fingers crossed on that.

Not being able to sell on Steam or Humble Bundle left me in a bit of a pickle when it came to how I was going to distribute the desktop version of the game. Thankfully two great options were recommended to me.

The Humble Bundle Widget, which you host on your website. You’ve probably seen it on various other indie titles such as Gone Home and Undertale. It only took a couple minutes to setup and was fairly customizable. Even better they only takes a 5% cut of sales, which is great for a struggling indie like myself.

The other great suggestion was itch.io, which is a awesome indie-focused game store. They even have a new desktop app similar to Steam. The service was a pleasure to use, with robust controls, great customization, and useful documentation. I think the store page turned out great, even allowing me to promote mobile versions of the game:

Creating an Android build from Unity is a breeze, but this was the first time I’d ever “signed” a project for production. If you’re not familiar with how to do this in Unity check out this great tutorial below:

To bring things down for a moment, I have to talk briefly about how terrible my iOS experience has been. Not just for export, but for testing in general. The process for exporting to other platforms takes mere minutes. Here’s what that looks like for, say, Android:

• Open my project in Unity
• Got to File > Build Settings and select Android
• Tap the Player Settings (verify the logo and other details are in place)
• Tap build, and a couple moments later an APK file is generated for me
• I can then send that APK file to any Android device and install and run.

I’m not sure if the fault lies on Apple, Unity, or some combination of both — but the experience for iOS is nothing short of a nightmare. This it not a joke, here’s the steps it takes:

• Follow the same steps above, but select iOS obviously.
• There’s no option to generate an executable file (IPA is iOS’s version of APK in this case) but rather you are forced to export a full Xcode project.
• I must then switch from my Windows PC over to my Mac. Since Xcode is Mac-only.
• Before you even open the project you’re required to setup a developer account ($99 a year), then setup various profiles and provisioning certificates. None of which I fully understand yet.
• Then, you finally get to open the project in Xcode and start adjusting various settings to ensure it’ll build properly (which is not intuitively organized I might add. I was searching Google frequently at this part)
• You must then create an “archive” build (takes upwards of 5–10 minutes)
• Once the archive is ready, you are given an option to upload to iTunes Connect, assuming your account and provisioning is setup (this takes another 5–10 minutes)
• Once the build reaches their servers it has to process (another 5–10 minutes)
• I would then typically receive a “push notification enabled” warning email from iTunes Connect, suggesting that I had enabled this feature in the build. Though in reality, I had not. Searching Google this seems to be common and won’t actually affect deployment or approval.
• Finally, about 10 minutes later the build is finally available and can be downloaded on devices loaded with TestFlight.

Tired yet? I don’t blame you. The process takes upwards of an hour. Every. Single. Time. Perhaps I’m doing something wrong, but there’s really no way to know. Unity themselves only provide a video tutorial that’s years out of date. Instead, my only help came from this awesome gentleman on YouTube:

I’m not here to bash anyone but this is simply unacceptable. I understand Apple is the market leader for apps sales, but that doesn’t give them the right to put anyone through this. Seriously!

Ok, rant concluded :)

Marketing

With the game out, the next step is to let everyone know about it obviously. This means marketing is top priority week. I’ve spent a lot of time combing various best practices and guides for reaching out to the press, YouTubers, Twitch streamers and the like. The long and short of it is basically this:

• Keep your targets relevant (Rock, Paper, Shotgun is not going to cover your mobile game)
• Be informal and personal
• Keep it short! (people don’t have time to read a wall of text)
• Include a short description of what the game is
• Link a playable copy of the game
• Cross your fingers and hope for the best.

The truth is most folks you contact won’t ever respond, and if they do that doesn’t mean they be interested in covering your game. So far I’ve contacted about half the sites/people on my list, with the rest going out once the iOS version drops.

It’s worth noting that you, the reader can help here too. All it takes is sharing the website with your friends or showing them a copy of the game running on your device. I personally prefer that approach because I know the game is being shared by the folks that actually enjoy it the most — which is awesome!

Celebration

In closing I’d love to share a couple shots from the big Minirl Launch Party me and my girlfriend, Toni, put on this weekend. A small affair that included a few friends at our apartment. Toni went all out, including an custom made poster and theme snack foods! Plus my friend (and tester) Cameron created some really badass Minirl stickers. I’d love to find a way to send these out as some kind of promotion. Feel free to leave a comment if you have any suggestions there.

View the Gallery Here

The Hank-ables were definitely a hit.

Up Next

As I mentioned above, marketing is a big part of my week. I’d like to follow up with another post detailing sales of the game, which may be part of detailed post-mortem I have planned. This would cover what’s went right, and what’s went wrong with the game, start to finish.

I’m also going to try my best to try to communicate with the influx of new players. I was actually just alerted to the fact someone made a Let’s Play here:

So if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go watch this right now!

Thanks again for all the support, and I look forward to hearing what everyone thinks about the game! Have fun!