Lessons learned from building a game featured in the App Store top charts
I’m a freelance iOS developer in Officina31. I started to develop apps in 2008 and never stopped… A while back I was in Pragma Mark attending one great speech from Marin Todorov a senior member of RayWenderlich.com (if you are into iOS development you know what i’m talking about…). The speech was talking about game development with SpriteKit and it was really fun. Marin gave me a free copy of iOS Game by tutorials. Before that moment I wasn’t really into game development, but after that I decided to give it a try. It turned out to start developing games I didn’t need any other software or library because Xcode has this built-in game framework called SpriteKit. It also did include few built-in tools to help me create levels and visual effects.
So I dived into the book and started to read and learn.
SpriteKit is so simple and fun to use that I wanted to try building a real game!
The story of my game
Nowadays developing a game as an indie developer and trying to make money with it is really difficult. Big game companies with huge budgets are taking the firsts places in the stores and users expect very high quality games at no charge.
So I decided to develop a game just for fun and for learning a new skill. I admit I was a little curious about users reaction to it too.
The challenge
I wanted to do a game but it had to have:
- Short development time
- No external costs like music or graphics
The concept
Besides i’m good at drawing and in graphic, i’m not a professional game designer. Drawing or designing a cool graphic for a game could be very difficult and time consuming. You can find many resources for games online, but for good ones you need to spend money.
So I came out with a very simple concept game using just spheres.
The basic idea is a space shooter with some new game mechanics. The player controls an energy sphere. I decided to create a space scenery because it’s a perfect environment for particle effects. Also I’m nostalgic about old arcade games and I wanted to take back that spirit (I’m sure you all remember Asteroids)
While holding the finger on the screen an energy sphere revolves around the player. That energy sphere protects the player from enemies. Drag to move around or use the accelerometer (so old school!). When you lift your finger you shoot the sphere to be more aggressive.
Thanks to the particle creator of Xcode I could create a nice game without particular graphic skills. That is awesome!
Now that I had a player and basic concept I needed enemies. Making enemies can be difficult, because they need to have a sort of intelligence. That was the fun and interesting part!
I used physics to make enemies movements look real.
In SpriteKit you can use physics simulation with a lot of parameters. So basically I set up a function to make the enemies hunt the player. To make different kind of enemiesI just changed the color and physics parameters like body weight, friction, gravity, ecc.
The result is a very smooth and addictive gameplay.
The crazy experiment
In few days I developed my first game. It had all basic elements for a casual arcade game: music, sounds effects, points, enemies, pause menu, game center, rankings and score sharing. It turns out to be very popular between my coworkers in Officina31 so I decided to give it a name and put on the store. I named it Flare Invasion.
I didn’t expect to make a lot of downloads or to make money with that, so I came out with a crazy experiment…
I wanted to try what’s the users reaction to a very simple and casual game without any marketing or ASO.
So I put on the Apple Store with only one screenshot and with a short description: “A simple and addictive arcade game”. For those who are ASO and marketing expert this is crazy. If you are planning to have some downloads with a mobile app nowadays, you need a strong launch strategy, good ASO (App Store Optimization) and terrific marketing.
I did the opposite!
- no launch strategy
- no marketing
- no ASO or keywords description
From mobile marketing experts point of view this is a suicide…
Of course the first 3 days I came out with 2 download per days as expected… but then something very unexpected happened. Apple put me in second position between arcade games in the italian store!
In less than 15 days it went from 0 to 1000 downloads. This is not enough to call it a success or to make real money with it, but it’s pretty interesting in my opinion. The reason why Apple reward my game with the second place is because it was a really simple and new game concept at the same time. But mostly because I was using SpriteKit and Apple encourages developers to use new libraries and technologies.
A funny story
One guy gave me a 1 star review complaining about the fact that Flare Invasion was a stupid and nonsense game and it’s not worth to be in second position in arcade games. I take every criticism as an opportunity to do better, so I wrote to that guy asking what exactly he didn’t like. Here’s the funny part: he liked the game, but he was very envious of my little “success”. He spent months developing a 3d platform game in a big team and they never entered in the featured list. They put a lot of effort doing 3d models and graphic but the game hadn’t any original concept. It was a normal platform with different graphics. So his team were frustrated and they didn’t understand what they did wrong. The point is that to compete in the game market you need to invent something new or be prepared to spend lots of money in marketing.
PS. After that he apologize for the bad review and we became friends (if you face your haters in a polite way most of the time they will change their minds :) )
In conclusion this is what I learned:
- Game concept is more important than graphic
If you are an indie game developer an innovative and addictive gameplay is more important than a beautiful graphic. Of course if you have both it will be much better.
- Being on top of Apple charts is the best marketing
This is obvious, of course. But I was surprised of the huge download boost when my game was in top of the charts. If you don’t have much money to invest in marketing, it’s better to be creative and try to be noticed by Apple in order to be in the “best apps” list.
- Using new technology is always worth it
Apple is always looking for new apps using their new technologies. When I released my game I used SpriteKit and at that time there were very few games using it. I’m sure Apple noticed that and decided to reward me and put me in top of the featured list.
My advice
If you are an indie developer and you want to try to make a game, be original. Invest your time thinking something new instead of making a Flappy Bird clone.
So if all that sounds like fun why don’t you give SpriteKit and developing games a try? If you know some Swift and can generally make your way around Xcode you have all the skills necessary! Start with a weekend project and some day you might end up featured by Apple like I did.
Stay hungry, but most of it… stay foolish!
MAY THE FLARE BE WITH YOU
Article by Erik Peruzzi
iOS developer
