After 6 months of developing, time has come to present my creation "the Sequence" to the world.
I decided to start off with publishing game on Google Play, since getting a game published there felt the most easy to accomplish.
Forward to the Sequence release, I've read multiple articles, that gave me tips on how to get your
game released correctly, avoid rough mistakes etc., and I tried to follow given instructions.
I made a little game trailer illustrating a few aspects of the game. It took me 3 or 4 days to do a video.
Then I focused on creating a nice letter template (a form letter) including animated gif screenshots
of the game, urls to the game trailer on YouTube and a demo version of the game in an apk file. When the letter was finished, I've sent it to about 60 various web resources.
A week passed, and I still haven't got a single response. It was exactly a moment when game was released on Google Play, I have sent the letter to few major gaming sites (droidgamer, pocketgamer, gamezebo, androidpolice etc.) for the second time, and made a few posts on Android forums.
I dropped a link to a /r/AndroidGaming subreddit which boosted downloads somewhat (50-70 dls per day).
A few days later droidgamer site posted a small news article about the game which led to a small boost in downloads, too.
After approximately a week gamezeebo and androidpolice (weekly round) posted articles about the game.
After a month that I had 25-40 sales per day and they have been reduced to 10-15 per day later.
After two months I've sent the game to AppStore to get Apple's approval and repeated the sending mail process once again.
The result was the same as with an Android, none of these sites I've sent a letter to wrote about
the game.
The important thing I did is that I started a game's thread on Toucharcade forums in "Upcoming
games" and later "iPhone/iPad games" subforums.
The game on App Store released after about a week after App Store approval. In the meantime one of the
pocketgamer editors contacted me, he said that he learned about the game from the Toucharcade forum thread and now he wants to write a news article. I couldn't contain my happiness!
A first week after game was released the number of installs were about 150-200 per day. Game was assigned to "puzzle" category and its position was slowly falling downwards.
After a week another miracle had happened and the game has hit the AppStore front page in "Best New Games" which, in its turn, gave about 500 downloads per day throughout a week.
I did send more letters to AppAdvice, Toucharcade, Pockettacktics. After a while, to my greatest
surprise, they all wrote and posted reviews. Some of these reviews got instantly reposted by smaller gaming resources.
At the moment, after 4 months, the game has reached approximately 9000 installs on both Google Play and App Store markets, while user rating is holding still at the level of 5 starts.
On US AppStore the game is included in a collection "Pay Once and Play".
It is worth noting, that I spent no more than $20 on ads (reddit ads), and the reason for that is
that I was curious to know how the ads thingy works on the reddit (It didn't work out for me).
I decided that it would be foolish not to try to get released on Steam, so I made Steam Greenlight entry.
I don't even know if my game will ever pass a Greenlight phase, I would be happy if someone could help me out with that.
I hope that this little story is going to help or maybe it will inspire somebody.
