This diary tells the story of how we are trying to make our first videogame.We are not expert in doing that, we have never done it before, and we don’t know what will happen in the next future. It’s an experiment we want to share with you and we think could be interesting, either it turns out to be a success or a failure.

Previous Episode: Cel shading or not cel shading?

The relevance of numbers. And sounds.

Here we are again! It has been a while since the last episode, but things have been quite busy for us in the last weeks.

Anyway, we have done good improvements and the game is on its way to be published. Before talking about getting ready to launch a game on the app stores, I wanna talk about a couple of things I’ve learned along the way.

Analytics matters

There’s no need to stress out that analytics are essential for your game. They help understand how people behave and react to your software.

What are we looking for?

We are interested in three kinds of data:

1. Users data: amount of installations, active users, retention rate, acquisition data, number of games
2. Game experience data: last trap completed, number of victories, average score, average FPS, graphic quality level, number of game per session, number of score shared, game status at the exit
3. Purchase behavior: incomes, conversion rate, number of customers, daily active customers, number of clicks on the banners, CTR of the ads

As you can see we had some kind of idea of what we needed, even before starting. The problem was: which analytics platform will meet our need at best?

There are a lot of choices out there: Google Analytics, Unity Analytics, Woopra, Gamasutra, Mix Panel Game Analytics, and so on.
Considering that there’s no perfect platform, our choice was for Game Analytics.

We chose it because it's completely free and it's an incredibly powerful and complete tool, nonetheless free. It is also well integrated with Unity, with a lot of auto-generated events. This platform, in fact, is intended for games. It's full of meaningful presets that help you saving a lot of time.

Game Analytics it’s not perfect. Its bigger limits is the inability to combine events together. It is possible to use query, but it’s not the same thing.

A game should have sounds

The next thing we realized was that a mute game is a boring game.

A lot of people do play without sounds, but we thought it was important to take care of the sound aspect anyway.

Are we good in making sounds and music? No, we make a lot of noise, but that’s not useful in this case, as we discovered.

So, as we always do when we recognise we are not good at something, we asked for some help. We contacted 93steps, a great audio production studio. Not sure how (for me it is something magic) but in less than 2 weeks we had a bunch of sounds and a OST.

This was a smooth part of the project, we asked for about 10 sounds — like the winning sound, the click sound, etc — and we iterate on the proposal a couple of time.
For the music we planned a meeting in which to explain our vision and in a few days we had a proposal. It was great as it was, so no iteration at all.

We decided to integrate the sounds in Unity by ourselves, but we struggled a bit on mixing the volumes. We achieved a pretty good result but maybe we should have asked our 93steps friends to also take care of that part of the job.

In the end, the takeaway about finding something that sounds good for your game is to ask someone professional. It is not that expensive and it can deeply change the game experience.

Up next: Adjusting game mechanics and getting ready for the final release!

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