Sorry if this comes across as boastful but I just wanted to share something cool. I was surprised a few days ago to see that Pocket Tactics had crowned my Unity / Indie RPG, Demon’s Rise 2, as 2016’s RPG of the year. The second runner up to the award was Banner Saga 2 … a very respectable RPG by a proper gaming studio.
I did Demon’s Rise 2 in about 9 months leveraging the asset store and code from Demon’s Rise 1 (which is based on TBTK). I did the game part time while working a full time job and by myself. It’s a tactical, turn-based RPG similar to XCOM but set in a medieval fantasy setting.
The game also won a Golden Poncho award for 2016 from Touch Arcade. The Golden Poncho means it is one of the top 5 original RPG’s of 2016 according to their main RPG review guy, Shaun Musgrave. So I’m really happy with these results and look forward to doing better with my upcoming games.
Here’s a link to the game if you’d like to check it out. It should be out on Android by the end of the month, if not earlier.
I’ll be uploading an update that fixes a couple of bugs and rebalances based on feedback of a few broken late-game strategies. It will also feature better screenshots as I finally figured out how to take high res pictures from the Unity Editor.
Sure … so the first game (Demon’s Rise1) took about 3 years but that was basically time spent learning Unity. This game took about 9 months in total leveraging the core code in Demon’s Rise 1 and enhancing it a lot.
This year, I’ve made around 18,000 USD from game development. Most of that was during the launch of Demon’s Rise 2 on November 10th, 2016. I’ve only launched on the iOS platform so far. So far just done premium games but learning Unity IAP to see if I can make the next game free with ads / IAP to see if that’s more profitable or not.
I didn’t have any direct help … just the asset store. However, the Asset Store is a HUGE help to a one-man outfit so saying “just the asset store” seems disingenuous. Truth is, I couldn’t do anything without the asset store.
Biggest help was starting out with the asset store kit TBTK by Song Tan. It and his other assets are amazing starting points.
Sure … what exactly would you like to know? Off the top of my head, I think it went well despite not getting featured by Apple. The launch was fairly smooth and without major bugs upon release. I did a lot more playtesting of the game than I did my previous game and that helped a lot. Playtesting was all internal … by myself. I missed out on sending promo codes to news outlets so I didn’t have any reviews on release. Instead I got a couple of reviews by major outlets but only several weeks after launch.
Still have a lot to learn and develop on the marketing side. I have good contacts now in two of the major outlets (TouchArcade & Pocket Tactics) and a couple of contacts in the other ones (148 apps, etc.). I still feel I need to break into this inner circle a lot more and try to find better ways to promote my game. There are a lot of people that just don’t know this game exists.
One of the main things I like to know about people’s projects is how they formed their team and how you’ve managed keeping things together during the development process. Also do’s and don’ts and what went well and what went bad. I wish you luck with the game!
Yeah, it’s not too bad. Around $50 to $250 a day at the moment from both Demon’s Rise 1 and 2. Will see how it goes and what effect adding a couple more games of the same genre will do. Also, it will be interesting to see what launching on Android, Mac and Steam / PC / Win 10 will do.
So I didn’t really form a team. Just me and the Asset Store.
Main assets I use are TBTK from Song Tan and NGUI from Tasharen. THen it’s just to individual 3d model assets (PROTOFACTOR, 3Dfoin, Arteria 3D and Mr. Necturus mostly) and sound / audio assets.
Kept scope very tight unlike Demon’s Rise 1, which had way too many playable character classes and way too little testing before launch. DR1 launched with 20 very lightly tested character classes so (1) new players were paralyzed by choice from the beginning and (2) the characters had loads of bugs and were not balanced.
DR2 launched with 10 much better balanced and playtested character classes. Overall much less effort and better reception from users.
Adding regular updates to the games on IOS is very good. One of my updates on DR2 actually got to the #1 Feature Slot on the US App Store for Best New Updates category. I try to actively respond to user requests, fix bugs quickly and add extra content for free. Since launch, I have added 5 new character classes to the roster for DR2 bringing the roster to 15 playable character classes.
What could be done better is possibly:
1 - Hire a proper artist to do a better icon for the app. I still think there’s lots of room for improvement there. The only problem is I’m not sure the best place to hire. I’ve not seen anything that impressive from most of the artists in the job wanted section of this forum. Anyone have any ideas?
2 - Need to use promo codes properly and send them out to more review sites. I was trying to solicit reviews by adding reviewers to Test Flight but I don’t think that’s the approach. I think promo codes are much more useful and designed for that purpose.
On the review side, I did get woken up in the middle of the night to a twitter notification from a French review site (KickMyGeek.com). They gave the game 9/10 and a very nice review.
That’s my plan. I actually used an LOD switcher script and left the LOD0 as more or less uncompressed. That way, I just adjust the quality setting on PC to High and the LOD switcher will automatically show the uncompressed version of the 3d model. So hopefully there should be very little work involved in making the graphically enhanced PC version.
Love this! I like to see games successful using asset store models and tools! Too often we see people here warning folks off using asset store models and now we see someone that made them work for him.
Congratulations! Nice work and use of quality asset store content.
Did you solicit for these GoTY awards? Did you sign up or submit your game, or did they just pick your game from all the games released?
Same for the App Store best update, did Apple just pick your game from the recently updated games that week/month?
