Yep, I've done it again, I promised that I wouldn't but I did. That's right, I've gone and released yet another mobile game, despite giving it up countless times. Don't get me wrong, I love the entire game development process, its fun, its exciting, but marketing (now a swear word in my internal dictionary) and trying to persuade millions of punters that the very thing you have spent months of your life on is worth taking a look at is soul destroying. This is a picture of me now:
Note the lack of hair, lack sanity in the eyes and the shock on my face after checking my downloads on an almost daily basis!
So why do I put myself through this? Well, I love creating games, its as simple as that.
What dragged me back to creating a mobile game after my many past failures? Well, I have two young daughters that love to play Minecraft and of course they rope me into playing too. Minecraft is great and all but it soon gets boring, so we do what millions of other crafters do and start downloading custom maps. One particular style of map that we all enjoy playing together is the dropper map. This entails throwing yourself from a great height and landing in a puddle of water at the end of the fall, meanwhile dodging platforms on the way down. Sounds easy, but some of these maps are absolutely huge and you can be falling for a good few minutes.
Anyway, I decided to reproduce this affect on mobile as it was great fun, so I set about creating a dropper map (I was re-learning Unity 3D at the time so it seemed like an ideal opportunity to have fun learning something newish). The game quickly turned from using blocks to using tunnels and struts, asteroids, bombs and so on. I also threw multiplayer in there to make my daughters happy.
Technically the game is quite simple, the tunnel is auto generated before the game begins and cross traffic, pickups and hazards are spawned based on the distance you are down the tunnel. I was quite shocked to discover that Unity could handle the tunnels, the longest of them takes 8-10 minutes to complete and that's dropping at some serious speed.
I'm bust right now replacing Google Play Services with Game Centre so I can release the iOS version, hopefully that will be done soon the I can put this game to bed.
Here's a video of the game in question, Rage Quit Racer:
This looks awesome and I love your back story. I also have two daughters though they are too young for minecraft yet- I'll enjoy making games for them when they are a bit older ;)
I can empathise re the marketing as well. That decaying installs curve is the bane of my life ;)
Thanks, glad you like the game and back story. My youngest was struggling at school, but then became interested in gaming and computers in general, now she's top of the class; games are an amazing learning tool (although the only thing anyone will ever learn from Rage Quit Racer is cat like reflexes and how to properly rage :)).
Marketing makes me want to cry if I'm 100% honest. I was reading an article a couple of days back about how much it costs to push a game into the top 10 (100k installs), on average $330k, which means if you don't get featured or have some crazy kind of cult following / extreme luck, the game just doesn't stand a chance against the big developers with 6 figure marketing budgets. Its a pity because I can bet that there are some incredible games floating around out there that very few people will get to play.