android – WAYOFF

I released my game, what now? | upigo Devlog #4

Raphael Baumann — Wed, 11 Dec 2019 09:28:58 +0000

I released upigo on the 19th of November not knowing what to expect. I had been holding out on release with the thought of making it as good as possible before launching it. This is something that sounds pretty obvious but goes against a lot of people’s opinion especially when it come to a first game. The rational is that you have to get it out of the way and move on to your second one where you can apply what you’ve learned through the process.

I don’t disagree with this idea but I ignored it for a long time. That was until 3 weeks ago. I had gotten to a point where upigo finally felt like a game. Not perfect, and there were many things I wanted to add/change, but at least I had something I could call a game. In the end what pushed me to release the game was my sanity. I was going a bit crazy working full time on the same project for more than a year with no idea what to expect. I had to get it out of the way.

upigo on the App Store

On release there was no big celebration. 14 months of work led to a Tuesday morning with my video trailer, a few social media posts and 100 mail sent. Over the year I had imagined all kinds of outcomes but in my case it was the most likely outcome. A very tame release. About 200 players in the 3 weeks after launch.

Looking at the revenue from apple and google, all this work is currently worth about $5. That is $0.24 from people clicking on ads, and $5 from some someone who purchased a micro-transaction. I feel it might be a friend or family doing it out of pity. or by accident.. But thank you.

I can’t make any conclusion yet as it is a work in progress and to tell you the truth, I stopped marketing the game quickly after release. Not because I gave up, but the release itself has gotten me a lot more attention from people around me with some friends spending a significant amount of time in my game and giving me some valuable feedback. The release turned out to be a success in a way I did not anticipate.

The plan now is straight forward. Keep doing what I was doing, but with a new outside perspective. I will be adding minor features and polishing existing ones. I hope to lock down most feature in the next couple of months to slowly focus on creating content.

I don’t like promising things due to my shady record of keeping deadlines, but I will try to update monthly with improvements and at least one new world. To show I’m committed, I’m releasing my first update today. It fixes a few things, adds language support and most importantly adds a new world called Snowfall.

Temporary icon for the holiday season.

Give it a try and let me know what you think.

Letting go | upigo Devlog #3

Raphael Baumann — Wed, 06 Nov 2019 09:11:50 +0000

It’s not always easy to see what the final game will looks like. There are tools and techniques that can help visualize the final product and the more of them you implement in your workflow the better off you are but let’s be honest. Unless you have a big team with a huge budget and many years of experience you’re probably only using a few at best. Sadly in my case this lead me to a point where a core mechanic was just not working with the rest of the game and I had to give up on it and face the consequences.

I had an original concept I had not seen in any other game. I wanted to create an endless runner with re-playable levels. Most endless runner’s use procedural generation to give the player a unique level every time you play. In upigo I wanted to use procedural generation to create millions of different levels that are re-playable at will. technically speaking it’s pretty much the same thing, but this concept would opened up a lot of possibilities like different themes spread around for the player to discover and many other I wont get into for a good reason (It didn’t work out.)

As I had no example of a game that implemented this concept I had to think of everything, and through development I worked with it, solving problems after problems, figuring out a way of balancing the game, explaining this unfamiliar mechanics to player and many other small inherent link that I had not imagined. At no point did I doubt this mechanics. I was in too deep because as time went on, more and more features were balanced and developed with this in mind.

It went on and on for a year, believing I’ll be able to figure it all out when I have a more finalized version of my game. Eventually I decided to start working on a press kit for my game. As I was writing the description I realized the benefits of this mechanic were hard to put into words. This was the moment I realized that this idea I came up with before even writing a line of code had been molding the rest of my game.

Removing this core feature which I felt defined my game was a tough decision. The idea of having to rework a lot of the features and rebalance the whole game was very daunting, but at least taking a more traditional route, I had other games to get inspiration from.

New level selection window showing 3 out of the 5 launch levels

upigo is now a more classical endless runner. There may be less innovation in my game than I initially planned for, but I got so caught up in creating a unique game I had forgotten that the core mechanic was the bouncing ball. I already had something original and as a one-man band I may have been taking on more than I could handle.

upigo is 1 year old | upigo Devlog #2

Raphael Baumann — Thu, 19 Sep 2019 08:55:47 +0000

Looking at my first and only post about upigo on this website, one thing that was a surprise to me was how similar that game looked 7 month ago. I had spent less time getting it to where it was than to where it is now.

February

September

Back in February, I was presenting what felt like a good chunk of a game. At the time with my lack of experience, I thought a month or two of polish should be enough. Little did I know, it was only the beginning. The tasks ahead of me was essentially turning a proof of concept into a real game.

Going though this experience taught me that there is a lot more to making a game than what meets the eye. In this article I want to share some my biggest surprises.

Teaching the player

upigo is not a very complicated game. You’re a bouncing ball that can go left or right by pressing either side of the screen. The goal is to go as far as possible. Seems pretty straight forward, and I’m sure if anyone spend a little time on it, they will figure it out on their own.

But since this is also a free mobile game, the competition on the Play store and App Store is huge. If the game is a little too complicated, it’s only a few seconds away from quick and simple uninstall at no cost to them other than the 30 seconds it took to install.

While ideally the game would make sense to everyone from the start, after watching a few of my friends and family play, I very quickly realized the auto-bounce can be disorienting, and unlocking new level are an advance feature for some. So i figured, since i’m in so deep, the game is going to need some guidance.

In upigo, the guidance takes 4 forms:

A tutorial level with tip box you can hit to display tips. (see image 1)
A tip panel that shows useful information depending on what level you are playing.
A notification arrows pointing a relevant information.
A notification circle to guide the player in the menus.

image 1 – Tutorial level with tipbox

image 2 – Red circle notifying an unclaimed reward, tip box in the center with an arrow pointing at the progress menu where upgrades are

These features stood out to me because unlike most of the others they are a sort of overlays, affecting most other part of the game. That means they are triggered at different times by different source, they clash with each other and can become a very big mess, very quickly. To be honest, I feel I still have a lot of work to do in this area because there will always be someone who finds a way to get confused, and I’m a firm believer in the client is right. (As hard as it may be sometimes)

Giving the player a Purpose

While good level design goes a long way in making game fun. Giving the player a clear progression to a goal and and multiple ways to achieve it will help you keep some of the more distracted players.

In February the game was just a bunch of levels. A little like an infinity runner where the goal is to go as far as possible. While in my head it sounded fun, it got repetitive very quickly and being a free game I had to extend the games life with some progression.

Upgrades was the first mechanic that was added. Affecting the gameplay directly, it allow the player the bounce higher, go faster and even touch enemy objects and recover from it. It gives the player a tangible progress by allowing player to reach further in the harder levels.

What is progressing without some good old XP’s. For a long time I was fighting the idea of adding levels/ranks in favor of a more creative approach. But the known won over creativity in this area. I felt the game needed a clear gauge of the players overall progress, and XP’s were the way to go. It turns out the experience system is also a great currency and rewards dispenser.

Talking about currency, that was implemented to give the player a bit of freedom on his strategy to the top rank. Known as Tokens in upigo, they allow two main style of gameplay. It allows completionist to finish every level with the second chance feature, or just breeze through all of them not being too worried about 100% them. They are not mutually exclusive as there are plenty of ways to gain tokens. Either pick them up, complete challenges, or just level up.

Challenges and daily challenges are in place as a short term goal rewarding players with tokens when completed. Similarly you have milestones which are cumulative goals that reward the player with experience.

The social aspect is a big one when talking about extending a games life. If I was crazy I would have implemented live multiplayer, but I don’t hate myself that much yet. For now you’ll have to settle with a simple online leaderboards for your online competitive fix.

Adding mechanics to game is a known slippery slope. There is a clear trade off between number of mechanics and complexity. The danger lays in the implementation. If not done right, this extra complexity is past right on to the player. So here’s to hoping I did it right. Only time will tell.

Balance

With all these features working with each, there comes a balancing challenge. For the game to be fun, the progression needs to be just right. The players can’t get stuck on early levels, or breeze through all of them because that’s just no fun.

I play tested upigo to death. It has allowed me to balance my game to a certain point. But due to circumstances, I’m probably the best upigo player to date, and therefore not a good test subject. People playing this game for the first time won’t have 100 of hours under their belt and definitely won’t know all the little quirks of the physics engine.

This is where analytics comes in. Touchy subject in this day and age where privacy is a hot topic. But know that most, if not all apps on your phone track you to a certain extent, but not necessarily with a bad intent. (upigo is one of them)

In my case I use firebase analytics to understand how people are playing my game. I have added event tracker logging players in-game behavior. This information will help me make decision on difficulty, balancing the economy and also level specific difficulty and general trend on the flow of player.

All very important information to make a game fun and balanced. But, of course, to get that valuable information, I need people to play my game.

So this is where you come in.

If you in search of a fun little game to play on your free time, why don’t you try upigo.

It is currently still in beta so if you have IOS you’ll need to get Testflight.

The Beta | upigo Devlog #1

WAYOFFprod — Fri, 15 Feb 2019 09:11:06 +0000

upIgo: Infiniy is a game that let’s you take control of ever-bouncing ball with a simple objective. Go as far right as you can. At the core it is an infinity runner with procedural generated levels, but unlike most most game in it’s genre, levels are repayable at will. The trick is collecting seeds that are laying around to buy new unique levels or upgrades allowing you to reach new limits.

I had given myself 1.5 month to make that game. Having heard that you should always double your initial plan I was willing to give it 3 month to complete. here we are 5 month later, ready to release a beta of my game and wondering what went wrong during the development that it took so much longer to get a playable version.

This is not my first development project but it is the first one where I did not have a client on my back. This lack of serious deadline may seem like a blessing, as it allows you to make the best game ever. At least this is what it felt like at first but very quickly I started feeling that this project was never going to end.

Art is never finished, only abandoned.

I have heard many versions of this quote, replacing art with with more specific fields. But the original is apparently attributed to Leonardo da Vinci and right now it never felt more relevant.

Luckily with the advance of the gaming industry, unfinished games are cool now. So here is the beta for Android and IOS.

Look out for updates