may you can help me with a big problem of my. Currently i lost a bit of motivating cause developed 6 apps with a lot of love they may look like a beginner but thats a fact of my apps i’m a beginner.
Do you have any kind of tricks how do generated just a few downloads for increase motivating. I’ve already tried social-media but got no shares, i’ve tried the Showcase also no downloads.
Hope for good answers and tricks, may they are free and not mean to buy banners.
I would recommend looking through the blogs archives from Gamasutra. I’ve seen quite a few articles on getting your game noticed in the mobile space. They’ve covered everything from keywords and how to present your game on its app page to ways to use social media and advertising.
Good luck and don’t get discouraged. From what I’ve read, most developers get very little attention on their first games. When we see the big successes, we forget that those people had five, ten, twenty games under their belts first.
You can find a short description on the google-play-site.
Would be happy to hear your opinion about the functions-graphic on the top, and about the ui and how its change over time.
Well best feedback is honest feedback and cause you have chosen to make games out of game types that won’t interest many players your apps really need to shine out of others so you can even get the minority of the possible users to download them:
never have ads visible in screenshots, people hate ads and if they already see them before downloading its goodbye, next app
where are the videos of gameplay? its hard to see how the gameplay is like when half of the screenshots are nearly duplicates of each other and many people skip the description. Only show the pictures that have value to the user. If you did not make videos cause you think theres not much to show then it already answers you something
half of the app have graphics with very bland themes and don’t look attractive, for example the number games could have colorful gradients as backgrounds, fonts could have better outlines or drop shadows. Gray is one of the most neutral and depressing colors
playing for score alone is boring so you could add more attraction to gameplay by adding something unique, like for the math game which has a lot of unused screen space: as simple example have a knight and a dragon on scenery above the question and correct answer makes the knight hit the dragon, wrong or slow answer makes the dragon attack. It could also be spaceship vs something or at least something like get 10 stars in row
generally all the games look very flat in terms of graphics. You could ie. make the hexagon one have all elements to look more 3d with simple painted shading techniques (inkscape tutorials), or even better would be to make the whole game in 3d as the hexagon is easy to model and texture and balls could roll with nice (fakes) pinball like reflections from the ground. Finalize with nice particle and sound effects.
If each app is supposed to stand alone, then it’s important to make their pages stand alone as well. I looked at the page for ‘Hexagon Point Black Edition’ because it was top of your list, and have basically no idea what the game is except ‘a black version of Hexagon Point’ which I’ve not looked at. So at that point I have a choice: go and research this other app to understand what you’re talking about, or give up and move on to something else. I’ll do the latter every time because I have no reason to care about your app.
Related: Why have you made two entirely separate apps - Hexagon Point and Hexagon Point Black Edition - when you could have made one app with a user option for colour scheme?
I would thank you to for honest feedback. Yes the problem with the ads was told me already i need to fix it the days
same screenshot multiple times is caused by taking screenshot from my tablet, which i inserted in the 7 and 10 inch tablet resolution cause it works for boths.
does anyone knows source for fancy graphics cause i’m a alone developer have no designer for me, may this is a problem, the graphics need to be royality free for commercial and personal usage.
i’ve tried to make the app looks flat inspired by other apps and the modern metro-theme but i think it is time for try something new.
in the future i’ve choosed to make a small site for every app, which make it more standalonable and try to write better and more information below.
is there a good software for taking video’s of my apps, cause filming my smartphone with a other smartphone or my camera is not the best idea or am i wrong?
Hexagon Point and the Blackedtion are in this point other, then in hexagon point you play only the game without any effects and the black edition has first an other design and the speical effect which means random bubbles make the game harder and it is faster.
Thanks for the feedback i’m open for more and would be happy to show you more of my apps in the future
I clicked on the newest game on your list, which got me to “Hexagon Point Black Edition”. Based on what I saw, I’m afraid I would not download it.
Sell your game with its images. Try and convey what the game is about with those same images. Your images are mostly the same and tell me nothing about the game. Am I catching orange balls in a hexagon maybe? I really don’t know.
Have someone review and edit your Description text. Each sentence had at least one error in it. While I realize not everyone has perfect English, if you’re selling your product in English, the text presented needs to be solid.
As has been mentioned above: Don’t show the ads in the screenshots.
There are quite a number of places to get free art on the web. Kenny and Open Game Art are two that come immediately to mind. Just make sure to pay attention to which license each item is using and follow it appropriately. (I recommend keeping a log of the page you downloaded each item from and what the listed license was just in case there’s an issue at a later time.)
I will try to offer some thoughts on your last game “SuperMath”.
Your main target demographic for this app is kids around 7-12 years old, give or take.
Have a look at your apps screenshot. Tell me how many kids that age, who are playing minecraft whenever their parents will let them, are going to download that app. None. You couldn’t even pay a kid to download that. Perhaps you hope studious parents will download it and force their kids to play it. Perhaps. This is the math fact app market. Your target is really parents (of a certain kind) and teachers.
And ask yourself honestly “Why does anyone want to download my app instead of Operation Math?” I really mean it. Think long and hard about what you are offering that other successful apps in your market are not offering, and communicate that to your potential buyers.
Just because it’s math, doesn’t mean it has to look ugly. In fact that’s precisely the stereotype that we don’t want to be reinforcing.
Lastly, I think that without playing your app I’m going to guess it is a spaced-repetition kind of learning paradigm. If you are really interested in helping kids learn math, this kind of learning is a red herring. It works in theory but not in practice. If you are interested in research in this area I could point you to some, but basically it focuses on one small part of psychology (the forgetting curve) while ignoring pretty much everything else, to it’s own peril.
I really thank all of you for your helpful messages. I’ll work more on the app-presentation and not just release them in 1 day on the market. Now i’m knowing then it is not about how good is a game to get new downloads. Its about how the first impression is. How the app is, if good or bad only decide if the user will keep the app.
I’ll also post my newest creation here when it is done, so you can compare it with the old one, and give more tricks and criticisms.
I could tell you to make a more substantial game with higher production values but theres no guarantee that it will do any better anyway. The mobile market is such a crapshoot.
I would consider investing some money in getting some decent artwork. When I look at those screenshots nothing really stands out to me or even makes me consider wanting to download the game.
Now i’ve found with the help of the forum a source for free work. My personal goal was, to only invest this money i make into my new apps so i got a win/loss of 0,00$.
If someone has special examples which are really good in design etc. i’ll be happy about that.
I’ll make the design of every app new befor i develop a new one to make them more attractiv
Now i got an other question. I know the designs are not attractive for downloading the app, which will cause then no one will try it, but when i’ve worked at the design and there is a chance for getting people to download the games. Can anyone give me some tricks about the content and gameplay of the apps. If you like it, if it need to be harder/easier faster/slower or if you have expierence if the people like harder/easier apps more/less and why.
Would be happy to hear from more feeedback about the content/gameplay and still hope for feedback if i’ve make the design of the apps better.
Sometimes you need to hire a expertise that you didn’t have but you won’t want to invest money.
A good workaround is take a freelancer job exclusive to hire/buy stuff to improve your games. Instead of wasting 4 hours painting a dirt texture, invest your 4 hours in a job that you know (programing or washing cars) and buy an asset.
There are no tricks! There’s hard work, and more hard work. You start with friends and family, then you branch out to social media/forums/facebook/websites/tweets, until maybe one day, you work your way toward advertising/paid-exposure. Gaining customers is a LONG, slow journey, that requires many iterations of try, fail, and improve.
Now that you have 6 products and have explored how hard it is to get downloads. Figure out how to make better products that people WANT to download.
It was not a win/loss of $0.
How many hours did you invest into your games? Find your hourly rate and multiply that by hours of time invested.
That is your true win/loss value.
Arguably, if you invest money into securing decent artwork, your game gets more downloads, and you make more money. But if you want to make a return on investment, you need to bring a product that looks just as good, if not better than most of the crap out there. I’m talking about solid artwork, gameplay and audio design. Those are the fundamentals of a good game. If you keep overlooking any of those aspects, don’t expect to create anything successful.
The app stores need more high quality, well produced games.