#debating whether to preorder for pc or switch but i think i want switch for that seductive 'gaming whilst lying down' experience š¤
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HOLY SHIT IT'S REAL
@windor-truffle graces remaster!!!!!!!!
#tales of graces f#i picked a good time to get back into graces i guess š this is surreal#this is huge gonna get new fans gonna bring out old ones holy shit holy shit this is terrifying (positvie)#my unhinged screams might actually be heard by more people and i can't tell if that's a good thing or not š
still excited regardless#debating whether to preorder for pc or switch but i think i want switch for that seductive 'gaming whilst lying down' experience š¤#i'll probably buy another copy once it's on sale tho š
if i like a game i'll get it on as many consoles as i can so it's always accessibleš#it looks really good too since ive playing the original i can see the upgrade in art quality! it's cleaner like a fresh coat of paint#though admittedly i have very low standards for game graphics n64/gamecube games look fine too me they're charming š
#it looks they're even adding some quality of life stuff like the desitnation icon on the map!#that'd be nice for me rn trying to find all of the parasites inside the rockgagong while the goal overlay just says 'keep moving :)'#the encounter skip is cool too ig but like. isnt that what holy bottles are for š
also i thought ppl loved the battle system more than plot#the DLC though!!!!! that's been inaccessible since the ps3 store closed so im excited to get the legacy costumes!!#does this mean i can finally have lelouch and hatusne miku in the party š#the list of the L&L arc as a bonus feature is kind of funny tho. no offense to bamco but i should THINK it's included it better stay free š¤#aaaaaaa man what should i do to celebrate i gotta make art for january and also the anniversary in december ššššš#ecxuse me while i blast white wishes and cry a little š
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Sheeping Around Retrospective: By The Numbers
tl;dr: Scroll all the way down for the numbers.
Sheeping Around has been live on the App Store for a little over ten days now. I think it is about time I look back at the development cycle, the good parts, the bad parts and also share some sales figures while Iām at it. Iām following the trend of transparency to help other indie game developers know and understand the market of premium games, for which I gained inspiration from Eric @ Slothwerks and Arnold @ Tiny Touch Tales. Iām also inspired by the way they work: solo devs working with talented people across the world on a contract basis, and I follow the same pattern.
While Iāve worked on games in the past, this is my first official release on the App Store, and Iām really glad to have been able to reach that goal. My previous games got stuck in infinite iteration loops and never got to see the light of the day.Ā
Inception
I have written in one of my previous posts how the idea of Sheeping Around was born. The idea began as a turn based (asymmetric) strategy game, and eventually turned into a card game that it is today. You can read more about it in the below two posts:
Sheeping Around Inception
Inspired by Card Thief and More
Inspirations of Sheeping Around and its inception as a physical card game
Development
I have around 8 years of experience as a Javascript developer. While I am familiar with other languages like Java and Objective-C/C++, my core expertise and speed of development is still in Javascript. Also, I had begun using TypeScript at work since mid 2017 and had loved it. Reminded me of the good olā Flash and Actionscript days.
When the physical version of Sheeping Around card game was proven to be fun enough, I began working on a web-based prototype version of it using Angular.js on the front-end and Node.js on the backend in the first week of November 2017. I deployed the system on Heroku on its free plan, and used Heroku Postgres as database of choice. (It was free upto 9000 rows, more than sufficient for a prototype.)
Initial prototype version of Sheeping Around
For the native mobile version of the game, I used cocos2d-x JS with TypeScript.
I pushed the code to GitHub as private repositories. I maintained separate repos for client and the server.
Multiplayer
Initially I had planned on Sheeping Around to be a solitaire card game, but it ended up being too similar to Card Thief. It wasnāt much fun anyway either. I decided to prototype a two player dueling game on paper, and it proved to be a lot of fun. I figured it would be much more challenging to handle a multiplayer game, but given my full-stack experience, I was confident Iād be able to do it anyway.
Architecture of Sheeping Around
Sketch, GraphicRiver and GUI
Around March 2018, I began working on the GUI of the game. I had recently switched my role to Product Design at my company Sumo Logic and had begun learning Sketch and loved it. I bought some assets off GraphicRiver and heavily modified a lot of them and put them together in Sketch.
All screen designs in Sketch
I wasnāt very happy with the initial designs, but towards the end of April things had started looking much better and professional.
Initial designs
Final designs
Google Indie Games Accelerator
The progress in the initial few months was somewhat slow. I spent time refining the balance of the game and tweaking the progression. Meanwhile I was also designing some UI for the native mobile version of the game.
By the end of June 2018, Google announced the first ever Indie Games Accelerator for games made in South East Asia. The submission deadline was July, so I started rapidly working on the mobile version for Android and iterating it really fast. By mid of July, I had the gameplay fully functional. By the end of it, I had the entire progression system and marketplace fully set up.Ā
Some charts from the progression and reward system of the game inspired mainly by Pokemon
While I was not selected for the accelerator program, it did help me accelerate the game development process anyway and I am thankful to the accelerator program for that.
Art and Animation
I discuss a lot about art style with Rashi, and we had finalized that the characters would be anthro. Check out some concept art and final artwork for some of the characters below:
I really loved the idea of in-card animations in Card Thief, and wanted to have something similar in my game as well. I was fortunate enough to run into Robinson Millaguin in the Indie Game Developers Facebook group. He began his work on animating some of the initial cards in Spine and my mind was blown already. Check out the video below:
vimeo
You can see more of the animation GIFs on the official website for Sheeping Around.
Tragicomic Theme and Music
I had contracted someone for music, but it did not sound so fitting. It was very difficult to decide what kind of music would fit this game because it was such a unique premise. I started scouting out for tracks on AudioJungle. Farms are usually associated with country music, but I had ruled it out completely. Western style music with gut guitars and ukuleles are a close second choice associated with farm themes. Somehow that style didnāt fit either, and sounded rather cowboy-ish.Ā
I explored all kinds of genres of music and tried to see if they fit in the game. Finally, I found that the music in Comedy genre seemed to be the most fitting. I stumbled upon the profile of AudioAgent, who had an amazing portfolio of comedy tracks. His tracks are tragicomic themed, and coincidentally, he kept adding more tracks in the genre as the game progressed.
The game now features a total of 9 comedy audio tracks by AudioAgent. (The tracks change every 10 levels.)
You can check out the tracks in the below Youtube playlists:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1Ajh9Cn23k&list=PLnTakDx63B8L0pBpjPD10VB3NJEcXj2l4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXeq713R444&list=PLnTakDx63B8IS3hr4Sd-tnZXgu5vCIoi6
Sound
I had already made a list of suitable sounds from AudioJungle, but it was from a variety of artists and didnāt seem to fit together. I was not sure if I should hire a sound designer for the project. I figured it would be a good idea to ask around anyway.
I am active on Twitter in the gamedev community, and I found Elise Katesā profile there. She had done some amazing work in the past for games like Moss, and I thought sheād be a good candidate to help me out with the sound. And it was a great decision afterall. The sound effects added the finishing touches to the polish in the game and really brought the characters to life!
Putting It All Together
Iām glad Iāve been able to put all of this together in a single package. The pun in the name, gameplay mechanics, art, animation, sound and music all come together really well. It would be perhaps be one of my proudest achievement since it is an important skillset to have.
Translation, Screenshots, Trailer and Preview Videos
In December, I took help from the Indie Game Localization community to get the game translated in 12 languages. It was an overwhelming amount of work, about 5000 words. I maintained separate Google Sheets for each language.
But what was harder was designing screenshots and preview videos and localizing them into all languages. But it did pay off eventually because it got the game featured in most of the regions that I had localized for.
Check out the preview video below:
youtube
Robinson helped in creating a landscape trailer for the game as well, since Android needs a landscape video regardless of whether the game is landscape or not. it was more of a theatrical trailer that served as an introduction to the premise of Sheeping Around and dab a little bit into its gameplay:
youtube
Freemium, Premium or Paymium?
The hardest decision for me to take was whether to go premium or freemium (or paymium), and if premium, what would be the price point of the game. Early on I had decided that the game would be premium on iOS and free-to-play on Android, given how easy piracy is on Android (more on piracy in the Piracy section below). I had thought of keeping the gameās price to $4.99, as I had read that Card Crawl had recently upped its price to $4.99 from $2.99 and it increased their month-on-month sales by more than 2x. Turns out, it wonāt work very well during release when both developer and the game are new to the market and there are no ratings and reviews. This is also why my day 2 sales were more than day 1 sales, when I dropped the price to $2.99.
My game also has in-app purchases, and most people object to the idea of IAPs in a premium game. But if you look at the top paid charts in the card game category (or even any other category for that matter), you will find that more than 70% of the games have IAPs. This model is called paymium on mobile platforms, and has only recently entered the debate alongside freemium and premium. In the PC world, most games are paid, and the concept of DLCs is fairly normal and accepted, so I donāt understand what the issue with IAPs in premium mobile games is about.
Besides, the IAPs in Sheeping Around arenāt your typical in-your-face popups that appear at the end of every game to give you a reward or to increase your life. They are subtle, just two coin packs that you can buy if need be. You probably wonāt need to though.
Pre-orders and the Coming Soon Feature
I set the game to be available for preorder on 31st December 2018. That would make my first new yearsā resolution to be to release this game. I set Thursday, 17th Jan as the release date. That is because App Store refreshes every Thursday and it would get greater number of days in visibility if it gets featured then. (Most features last at least a week.)
That is also when I also submitted my game and my story to Apple via App Storeās promote link, hoping to get featured.
On January 5, the game got featured in the Coming Soon section, and it started getting a little spike in pre-orders. From 1-2 per day to around 25-30 per day. On January 20, the game got featured in a lot more territories, including US, UK, South Africa, Middle East, Australia and New Zealand. I netted about 250 pre-orders from this feature. But it turns out that in some places, since Apple lets you preorder without having a linked credit card, they would fail to be billed on release of the game. Because of this, only about 200 pre-orders went through successfully. App store still shows -1/-2 net preorders days after the gameās release.
New Games We Love & Top Charts
Upon release, the game was featured inĀ āNew Games We Loveā in US, China and the Greater China Area (HK, Macau, Taiwan), South-East Asia, India, UK, Europe, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand. It also went on to become #3 card game in US (iPhone) during launch and stayed between #3-#5 during the first week. In China, which is the second biggest market for me, the highest it went was #9 in card games. (Competition is quite high in that category there, with most paid games priced at Ā„1 ($0.15).)
I especially love the words UK editorial team used to describe the game in Games We Love.
Reception
The reviews so far have been positive, with occasional negative reviews talking about some bugs, most of which I have fixed in the week after release. Here are the current reviews and ratings stats for the game so far:
US: 4.6 / 5 (56 ratings, 32 reviews) China: 4.3 / 5 (41 ratings, 23 reviews) Thailand: 4.7 / 5 (15 ratings, 11 reviews) Germany: 4.0 / 5 (11 ratings, 6 reviews) Russia: 4.6 / 5 (8 ratings, 7 reviews) UK: 3.7 / 5 (6 ratings, 4 reviews)
Some encouraging reviews:
āIāve only played this game for 20 minutes, and I love it already. The creativity, the idea, everything about this game is just beyond my expectations, and I can only assume how addicting this game will be.ā
āIt a really good game. You should make a physical card game for this game. I really like it and itās definitely worth buying it.ā
āDonāt really review apps, let alone end up playing one a day or two after I started. But this one... this one got me hooked! Itās fairly simple gameplay but sometimes it gets pretty exciting.ā
āPre-ordered it, I've played Card Monsters since release & Hearthstone for 4 years & this game is very solid & entertaining.ā
āI think this game is another new twist to a card game, I can definitely see potential for this game. I canāt wait for the next update, hopefully with some new cards to use.ā
āThis game is family oriented and so easy to play. It has the simplicity of UNO yet with enough strategy to keep you engage but not overwhelmed. This is highly addictive and fun to play. The element of luck is always a factor but how to use the cards given is the key. The games are short but competitive. Those who love card/card battle games should download this without hesitation! Kudos! Look forward to updates to see what you guys come up with next!ā
DAUs, Screen Time and Retention Rate
I use Tableau for my data visualization needs, and have custom graphs and dashboards created for all kinds of metrics. 27% of the players have played the game for at least one hour, which is quite encouraging. 4.5% of the players have been addicted and have played for more than 5 hours. Iāve been seeing an average DAU of around 750 and average total session time of over 450 hours. Not that it matters much for a premium game, but Iām tracking it anyway. In terms of retention, my day 7 retention is about 10%, which isnāt so bad. I will give it more time to see what my day 30 retention is.
Press Coverage and Critic Reviews
I had mailed a lot of media sites and YouTubers to review the game. A lot of them covered the game. Thanks to the localization effort, the game was featured in a lot of foreign language blogs.Ā
Specifically Pocket Gamer and Pocket Tactics wrote about the game.Ā The review from Pocket Tactics was negative with a 2.0 / 5 rating, and from Pocket Gamer was somewhat above average at 3.5 / 5 rating. Pocket Tactics review, though negative, gave me a chuckle because of their words of choice.
You can check them out here:
Pocket Gamer: A surprisingly tense, exciting and fun card battler that doesnāt quite have the tactical depth for the long haul.
Pocket Tactics:Ā Sheeping Around looks the part, but sadly the game turns out to be as dull as you would expect for a game based on an animal that stands around in a field all day chewing grass.
The criticism though has been pretty good in these reviews, and I will add more content and depth in the future updates to address the weaknesses they have mentioned.
Piracy
One thing I wanted to point out was that about 25% of the users of Sheeping Around are using a pirated version. I was under the impression that it would be very hard to pirate an iOS game, because it would need jailbreaking and it isnāt very easy to jailbreak your iOS device. Turns out I was very wrong. There are pirated App Stores like AppEven that you can install on your device, and you can install premium iOS games for free using those stores. You donāt need to jailbreak your phone and the whole process is dead simple. Turns out these folks are abusing Enterprise App certificates for ad-hoc app distribution, and Apple hasnāt been paying much attention to them.Ā
Within about two minutes, I was able to download a pirated version of my own game from AppEven. It even added its own ads that pop up once every few minutes that bring revenue to the owners of the pirated app store. It made me a little sad, but thatās the way it is. No matter how many attempts you make to prevent piracy in your app, the hackers will have a workaround to bypass it. They can remove the code in your app that prevents piracy, replace your ads with their own. It is their daily business.
Promotional Artwork
For games that Apple finds worthy of promotion using a banner feature or on the Today page, Apple requests developers for promotional artwork. I got this request last Monday and I submitted the artwork by Wednesday. The game hasnāt gotten a banner feature or Game of the Day yet, so I can only hope it will happen one day in the future.
By The Numbers
And finally, the moment youād been waiting for. Sales. Sheeping Around was able to break even about 50% of its outsourcing costs (art, animation and sfx) in 10 days since launch.Ā
The top 2 territories where the game made some decent revenue are US and China, followed by Germany and UK.
Whatās next?
Iām already working on some new cards that add more variety to the gameplay. These include:
Bonus cards
Peek - Look at the opponentās hand.Ā
Undo - Undo the opponentās last move.ļæ½ļæ½It can also potentially undo a stolen or whistled sheep.
Lucky Pendant - Draw half the number of cards in your hand (rounded off).
Shepherd cards
Fence N (N = 2, 3, 4) - Build a fence around all sheep preventing any of them from being stolen for N turns.
Electric Fence N (N = 2, 3) - Build an electric fence around all sheep preventing any of them from being lured or stolen for N turns.
Quarantine N (N = 1, 2, 3) - Cure all sheep of Infestation or Intoxication by N turns.
Vaccinate N (N = 3, 4) - Prevent Infestation or Intoxication on all sheep for the next N turns.
Thief cards
Infest N (N = 2, 3, 4) - Infest all sheep with pests to prevent them from being whistled for N turns.
Intoxicate N (N = 2, 3) - Intoxicate sheep to prevent them from being grazed or whistled for N turns.
Thrash N (N = 1, 2, 3) - Damage a Fence or an Electric Fence and reduce its value by N turns.
Termites (N = 3, 4) - Spread termites to prevent building a Fence or an Electric Fence for the next N turns.
Changes to existing cards
Rescue N (N = 1, 2, 3) - Reduce the effect of Trap, Infestation or Intoxication by N turns on one sheep.
Distract N (N = 1, 2, 3) - Reduce the effect of Guard, Fence or Electric Fence by N turns on one sheep.
You can already add an ally that unlocks at Lv. 20 to the game. Future updates may include upto 5 allies in total:
Shepherdās side
Beaver - Jack Kim (Lv. 10)
Llama - Fuzzy Wumpkins (Lv. 20)
Sheepdog - Casper Cloud (Lv. 30)
Emu - Emily McCoy (Lv. 40)
Donkey - Muriel Miller (Lv. 50)
Thiefās side
Raven - Merlin Kook (Lv. 10)
Eagle - Cradoc McClaw (Lv. 20)
Coyote - Roxy Fang (Lv. 30)
Badger - Agent Chaos (Lv. 40)
Bear - Boris Rockpaw (Lv. 50)
Additional Features Iāll also be working on some features like: - Expressions and dialogs - Offline mode vs AI - Pass and play multiplayer - Quests
Conclusion
Sheeping Around was a fun project, and unlike my other shelved projects, it saw the light of the day, and it is a proud achievement for me in that regard. For the past 14 months, Iāve worked part-time at a consistent pace on this project (and full time for a few months). Especially as a solo developer being able to develop a PvP multiplayer game where people in US can battle people in China with servers located in London, I think it is a great feat.
Look forward to more updates in the future on this blog. Follow the blog on Tumblr or me on Twitter to keep yourself up to date on the progress of the game.
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