It's been about a year since I released Tiltz for iOS and Android, and this write-up is well overdue. I don't like writing post-mortems about my games; toma paraphrase Leonardo da Vinci: "Games are never finished, only abandoned." Yet I hope this proves educational for other developers out there.
Here are the download links for those of you interested:
YouTube Trailer: Youtube.com
Tiltz Deluxe on the App Store (pay): Itunes.apple.com
Tiltz Lite on the App Store (Free, ad-supported): Itunes.apple.com
Tiltz Deluxe on Google Play (Free, ad-supported): Market.android.com
Motivation
Tiltz is my first mobile game. I designed and developed it; and did all the work but for the legal/tax stuff on my own. It initially debuted before November 2010, but I pulled it from the App Store due to issues that I will later describe in detail. I wrote it to get the first-hand experience of writing a mobile game using the Unity Engine, and I made it a point to keep it as simple as possible. At the time I was taking a break from writing my mega-physics-simulator game Dominoze, and I wanted to write a physics game that I thought was original.
Game Play
The premise is simple: Guide falling marbles into a barrel while spilling as few as possible. My original design only called for finger gestures; but everyone who play tested it instead tried to tilt the device. The final version supported both gestures and tilting. I also added support for the player moving the barrel, and even spinning wheels that the marbles would fall along. Based on feedback from friends, other people who played it, and my opinions about its replay value; I think it was not bad for a first try. I give it a B rating all in all; fun and unique, but not addictingly fun.
Art and Thematics
I have no talent for art direction; and I went with a semi-photo-realistic theme. I made everything with wooden textures; and later used stock photography as backgrounds. There are no characters or funny monsters. I give myself a C here; it's passable for a first-time project and it looks bright and clean, but cartoony art and characters could have made it so much better. Can you imagine Bubble Bobble without Bub or Bob? What if Angry Birds had no birds and you just slung rocks around? What if the marbles were bombs that monkeys threw, and the barrel was a bucket of water (ala the old game "Kaboom")...that would have been much more cool.
Efficiency
The initial release in 2010 was 80 MB. Yes, 80 MB. I had no clue how to shrink assets in Unity...every level had a full-bodied 6+ MB texture background in it...and don't even get me started on the wooden textures used in the game objects. It required Wi-Fi to download, too...so say good-bye to hundreds of thousands of potential players who didn't want to take the effort to find a hotspot. Not only that, but because it was using OpenGL ES 2.0, it ran dog slow on an iPhone 4. It was so bad, I pulled the game from the app store after a few days.
Eventually I bought a full Unity iOS license (and later full Android), got the game down to under 20 MB, switched to OpenGL 1.x, and released it over again. It did much better the second time. I still give it a C- because you can get so much more out of a game that's 3 MB, and Tiltz does not render super-smoothly on older devices (which is a huge, huge plus for any good mobile game).
...The 80 MB release was clearly an F-, so let us never speak of it again.
Testing
Tiltz was tested by my co-workers at my full time job when we were at restaurants, and I found about a dozen testers on iBetaTest. All the feedback was very helpful; the lack of bug and feature requests would have easily brought the app rating down by a full star I think. Adding every new tester was a tedious process because of how app provisioning works. A friend helped me test the Android version. I used Trac to maintain bug lists at the time.
Pricing
The 2010 Tiltz release was a single game where you got one level, and unlocked all the other levels with a 99 cent in-app purchase. I made a few mistakes here: First I offered far too little for free. You could get hundreds of hours of fun with other free games without ever spending anything, so why do it here? Even if you bought it, you only got 12 levels. That's like an hour worth of game play if you don't repeat levels. Second, there's only a single app to rate. People who don't buy it have just as much voting power as those who do buy it; and you can't know if people rated the full or the free content....of course the initial release had so many problems it got 1.5 stars anyway.
I did the re-release in October 2011 with a free w/ ads version, and full version. I made 3x more money on 99 cent sales than ad revenue. Eventually they both plateaued this past April.
Marketing
iOS: Apple was my initial release marketing tool. Free app giveaway sites also boosted sales. I had no luck getting it reviewed for free that I can remember. I also had HeyZap social networking integration, and I would coordinate releases with them because they'd help with press coverage. I really don't know how much it helped since I didn't have another similar game without HeyZap to compare with. Google was also my marketing tool; I found a number of mobile game sites and e-mailed all of them news of the release. Nobody seemed interested.
Android: Aside from the aforementioned Googling of and e-mailing mobile game news sites, I really had no marketing to speak of. I also had a few complaints about HeyZap's intrusive "Check-In!" notifications that begged players to go to their portal. I'm still in the dark over how to market an Android game short of e-mailing news outlets and posting news on my social networking accounts. Tiltz is really not worth word-of-mouth marketing; there's nothing to say about it that would excite a lot of people over many other better games.
Income and Downloads since October 2011
Tiltz has a fully featured version for 99 cents, and an ad-supported free version with less levels. On Google Play is a fully featured ad-supported version. All versions combined brought in a grand total under $500. For iOS, there were approximately 300 full downloads, and 11,200 free downloads. For Android, a total of 3,600 downloads.
Rating
Tiltz had a 4 star rating on the App Store and 3.5 stars on Google Play, which I'm happy with for a first release.
Costs
The costs for Unity licenses, some of the art content, music and sound effects, membership as an Apple developer, and necessary hardware (cheap Macbook) came to several times what I earned from sales. However, I consider Unity and the hardware to be a long-term investment.
As far as actual development time, I threw in a few hours here and there in my free time every day. I didn't keep count; but if game development were a full time 40 hr/week job, then I would estimate this took three months to do. A lot of it was just the learning curve of Unity and the basics of mobile game development.
Overall
All in all I think it was a good start. Despite its flaws, I don't think it's a bad app to pass the time with. I just wanted to see if I could write and release a mobile game in less than a year of development in my spare time (keep in mind I wasn't working non-stop on this game). It would be cool to have a 2.0 version with cartoon characters and other features, but I'm not interested in making the time investment. I'd like to work on other games.
EDIT: I actually did the initial release in late 2010, not March 2011. However, the big cleanup and remake did take place the following October.
Check out my homepage and news feeds
And my projects!
