Rock Milk Progress Report #002 (2017 Oct-2018 Jan)
Vacations were great, with lots of traveling and family time. But now, we are back home and ready for another year of game development.
Picking up where Progress Report #001 (2017 Apr-Sep) left off, in this post I sum up our 2017 learnings and achievements and talk about some big strategy changes we plan for 2018.
Last year retrospective
A good thing we did last year was set clear goals so we could keep track of our progress. Checking in seems like a good place to start:
For the end of 2017 we had planned (and did):
- Launch 3 games (We launched Reakt)
- 10000 downloads across all games (We got close to 1300 downloads)
- Produce 10 long form content pieces (we wrote 6 here on Medium)
- Earn $1000 in revenue (revenue was irrelevant)
At first glance, it might seem that we underdelivered in all fronts. That is because we did. Now, we can explain: Those goals were defined with little to no thinking process (Lean Startup style), serving mostly as a North Star to keep us focused during the year. If we reached them, a viable conclusion would be that they were just too easy.
Nonetheless, while pursuing our bogus goals, we had some cool achievements and stumbled on interesting challenges. Here are some of them:
- We only launched Reakt but made 4 playable games: That’s a game every 2 months starting April. Montezuma 51 for the Elder Berry jam was the other polished game. The other two were playable prototypes, one of which will be our next working project.
- Building a game to work as a laboratory of mobile game dev technologies and biz tools worked really well: Even though there still a lot to learn, Reakt did a good job at enabling us to experiment mobile development. Some examples are: three in-game ad formats, ad campaigns in Adwords and miserable failure with Google Play’s Store Listing Experiments. The biggest lowlight is the lack of iOS version :(.
- Godot Engine still awesome: We say that a lot. Mostly because it’s is true.
- Writing was a good fit and proved fun after all: We discussed many content formats before arriving on Medium and we made a good choice. It’s a great balance between reach, production time and ability to express our thoughts and ideas.
- If we had set consumption instead of production metrics for our writing we would have met any imaginable goal: Our post Why we choose Godot Engine is one of the biggest available introduction texts for the engine. In 2017, it had as many views as 2 times the size the Godot community. And Google search indexing just picked up.
- Game jams are great but we have no idea how to work them: Should we just sit and make the game? Do we dev log? Do we try to go for the 24h push? Is energy drink more effective than coffee? I have the feeling that without all those questions we could make 5 games per jam.
- Finding a good work process is as hard as expected: finding time to work together between formal jobs, family events and bio breaks was and is a working area for us.
- We know nothing about managing social media: I have the feeling we will need help.
It was a very busy first year and the plan is to keep up in 2018.
New Year, New Goals
Since Diego and I first defined our strategy, we had many heated discussions over how specific parts of it were (or not) the right path for Rock Milk. Early this year, we challenged the idea that we should be doing Free to Play games. Even though there is clear reach increase on selling for nothing, there is also a big burden on trying to monetize during gameplay. Being two 90s kids, we were never comfortable with any of the commonly used monetization shenanigans, as we fell they pollute game design and reduce innovation space.
With that, we decided to shift our focus to premium/hardcore/paid games. We know it will bring new challenges and might even be a harder path, but it’s is the best fit for us.
With that out of the way, it was time for new goals. After some thought (not much), we arrived at this for 2018’s first half:
- [Games] Launch 1 new premium/hardcore/paid game
- [Games] Reach 5000 players on all games (current: 1300)
- [Community] Produce 10 new long form content pieces
- [Community] Reach 2000 people on our community (current: 200)
- [Games/Community] Participate 2 game jams
Even though, it all might look pretty similar to last year’s, dropping the downloads for players is as much exciting as demanding. Changing to a premium model will consume a lot of energy so we decided to keep it humble.
The addition of community size leaves us a bit more open to try new content paths and Game Jams show up as a priority as we feel there is a lot for us to learn in that space.
If you read so far, thank you! We plan on writing more and more so feel free to follow us here on Medium or on Twitter. Also, play our games ☺
Matheus Almeida, Best Half and Head of Sorting Algorithms @ Rock Milk
