After being an indie game developer I begin to doubt myself

Marketing, marketing, marketing!

The game is actually really fun, but just needs a tiny bit of polishing

I'm certainly no expert, but my thoughts are this:

Lets start with your description and video in the stores.

The Video:

The video is pretty cool, it's way longer than most games (30-60 seconds is the norm), but that's OK. I will say it makes the game look really repetitive and doesn't tell me what I need to do..

A simple animated finger tapping overlay onto the video, or even test "tap to shoot, activate abilities, swipe to move and move" would help a lot. Stating how many levels, etc etc would be cool too.

Description

This is pretty good actually... although it is broken English.

Suggested corrections:

The Icon

I would do some A/B testing. With games we publish, we find we can significantly increase installs by simply changing the icon. Give it a try, it doesn't take long and google play offers an A/B testing system with easy to read results.

The Game

I would say your first load having to download extra assets etc is fine, but do say what it's doing on screen. If people think it's going to take 2 minutes to boot EVERY time they play, they might instantly uninstall.

The intro is nice, good job on that. I would take another look at the spelling and phrasing though.

"The story begins at a beautiful country! It has been very peaceful here , since the invasion of the dark force."

This doesn't make a lot of sense and has a few typos. I know your complaint is about not enough installs, but a lot of installs come from word of mouth, so this stuff is important too.

Perhaps: "Welcome Alweiss, we're so glad you could come in our hour of need! Our beautiful, peaceful world is being destroyed by an invasion of a dark force. Our informants tell us of an evil lord arriving at our shores who is leading an army of monsters to destroy everything in his path!"

"Our bravest warrior has already fallen in battle, but before he died he instilled his power into his familial dragon, 'Billy'. Join with Billy to awaken his dragon ancestors and fight back against this scourge! First scout through the Green Forest, we haven't heard anything from their outpost in days and we fear the worst..."

From there, I think that's enough to make the description read more fluidly and perhaps increase your conversion rate of people who see your app... The only game play thing I'd note is that the game doesn't pause while a player is in the shop. This does deter people from making In App purchases. Just a thing to note


Feel free to chop and change anything I've written above, they're just my thoughts and observations

 

Also, are you making money purely from those in app purchases? You could add rewarded videos to "double coins earned on the next level", etc. Very popular approach, easy to implement and gives people a taste of why they should buy rewards. They can always choose no, if they don't want to!

 

thanks a lot!

In your description, be sure to use as much markup as you can. For headings, bold text, italics, colours etc. With the thousands of games we release we did a bit of an internal study and found using a variety of markup text can increase installs by a silly amount (as much as 50%!).

This SO has quite a lot of info regarding html you can use, etc:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11071127/google-play-app-description-formatting

 

@Aqualien

I know that feel. Since 2010, I had been making and releasing my own games while working a full time job, earlier this year I had just gone full time indie for 8 months now and had put out 10 games by now. My first few games had 2 digits daily downloads as well, but I had always treated them as learning experiences. The blow came when a game (Causality) I was working on for almost a year still flopped as bad as the games I took a few months to develop, but I carried on making more games.

When I was going to release my next game (Run White Mouse Run), I took Causality off the store, and re-released it as Singularity, all the same content, but monetisation was changed as well as the title. And Guess what, Singularity got a front page feature in the US, and for some reason Apple took notice of White Mouse and got me a contact person. Since then, every game I release I would give this Apple personnel a heads up, and I had had better chances at getting my games featured, 4 games got front page featured so far, although not for all countries' stores.

Getting front page featured (especially in US or China's store), means a considerable download amount for your first week, your feature week, how your game perform download wise boils down to how much further marketing, media exposure and generally how good your game is. If it is going nowhere, or simply not a good game, after the feature ends, you will see download counts fall dead flat from the second week on.

So what I'm trying to say is, for us nobodies, our games success' depends on how good it is, whether it attracts any media attention pre-release, and then lots of luck getting noticed by Apple. I have seen and played many good games that never got featured and eventually I see the developer fade off somewhere. Indie survival is possible, but it's not easy.

And here's a good read by the dev of Dark Room. Ignore their ranking or the revenue they are making, but read the Do's and don'ts list, many useful takeaways.

https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/4f74dv/quit_my_full_time_corporate_job_built_an_ios_game/

And on a more realistic and personal note, I am a Chinese in Singapore (and I'm assuming you are a Chinese as well), I understand there are traditions and culture for us to meet many financial commitments, unless you have a wealthy family or strong financial backings, you may still want to consider have some kind of income from side jobs. The stress over money on daily basis can have a strong negative impact on your game design and your overall mental and emotional welfare, I know, because I have reached that stage. 努力不敌富老爸，天资难胜好运气

 

That's cheering unexpect3rd! Looking for ways as an indie and seeing this post of yours is really inspiring. And I have to say, here's my respect to you and aqualien, and to all those on the forums who went full-time indie and is still going on. Is passion that make you this far? Really impressive.

btw, I was pretty obsessed with ThinkShift that time, didn't think would be hearing the story behind it now ;p

 

Hey Aqualien, I checked your game on both stores. Don't know when you released the first version, but getting nearly 100 reviews on PlayStore is not bad, actually not bad at all as an indie studio! But the situation you mentioned about raising a family and other life stuff, that is not easy indeed. I'm in an indie studio as well, the games we make are not like yours, they're more light & casual and like what unexpect3rd style. I'm not very sure how the situation are with those heavy games with IAPs, but guess the patterns must not be with huge difference.

The two games of ours reviewed the most by Chinese medias are 10Solo and 44Chairs, that gives out the credits to us. Although they were featured by those sites way out of the first feature month, but still, it's a huge step for us. Now I'm learning all those stuff about pre-launching, and other marketing stuff like Sam said. To me, helping each others out and try every possible ways out are the lease we can do, and are what we should do as indies. And add on what unexpect3rd mentioned, luck is the one of the keys as well.

 

Could you use your substantial player base to cross promote your new games?

Using an interstitial or video of your new game inside your more successful games as an 'advert'. The ad network Heyzap has this built in nicely, if you wanted to install their SDK, you can split your cross promotion with regular advertising using their website back end. Check 'em out!

Also, I love the video ads you just added to Dragon Tap, great job doing them so fast! A couple of games we manage in the similar clicker/idle game offer "double the coins you just earned on that stage" or "watch a video for 2x coin value for 10 minutes!". It works really well. Check out Zombidle for a game that does this well.

Sam

 

Thanks @unexpect3rd for candidly sharing your story. I've only published one game thus far that I'm trying to revitalize with a big version update and hearing your story really put some wind in my sails. I, unfortunately don't have much to contribute to the OP, as I share their feelings at this point in my indie journey, but I needed to throw a thanks to you for sharing. Cheers!

 

It's a shame that didn't work out for you! Sounds like you went to a lot of effort too.

I really hope you keep at it and keep doing all you can, it really is a good game. I've played through a couple of prestiges now and really think you have a great game and it's executed well. Keep polishing and doing what you're doing, I've mentioned the game internally and others like it too.

I think someone from another team (I'm an engineer) may reach out to you soon to discuss your retention numbers etc, if they like the look of how the game performs once someone IS a player (they play for a long time per session, they play for many days, they buy IAP etc), they may be able to help further.

 

I don't really have any advice, but I saw this thread and I will say I'm really enjoying the game so far. Even considering the glut of competition, including pixel art and/or tap type games, I like a lot of elements of your game, including the artwork and character design. Overall it could use a little more "polish," and I'd prefer an IAP to remove the ads, but I definitely like what you've done combining a few different genres.

I hope you continue to support this game and wish you the best of luck!

 

Sorry for my non-response the past week, had been pretty sick.

@aqualien
I finally got around to try Tap Dragon. Hope you don't take my words too hard, i criticise my own work as well, but this is something we game makers need to acknowledge: the flaws of our games.

Art
Firstly, the art, I understand you are not from a artist background, but neither am I. What we need to do for our games is to make it look more than just presentable, it has to look professional, non-artists like us need to use art styles/directions that hides our flaws of not being artistic.

- From your screenshots, your characters have a high resemblance to Crusader's Quest (a very popular social RPG).
- The character designs does not seem to fit with the dragons' designs.
- the monsters has different art style (some has outlines, others don't)
- The pixels in various parts are inconsistent, some HUD buttons are nicely pixelated, some has very small pixels, some are just flat.
- If you were cutting and cropping the sprites, there are parts that damaged the pixel size making the edges look weird.
- EFX are pure sprites. Upscaling of the boss needs better coding parameters so at least it wont anti-alias upon scale up.

The backgrounds are very nice, and nicely animated parallax effects, but not sure if these were taken from CQ as well. Remember, we are not artists, but the least we can do is make our games look consistent, that way it will add a bit to the "professional" look.

Gameplay
The in-game is pretty fun. From what I see, it may take a while before I can get my 3rd dragon, and even longer for the 4th. Exponential slowed down progress is common in mobile RPGs, but in this case, it maybe more interesting if the player can have access to more choices of dragons to play around with. I'm not sure if the stages are designed in any way that some dragons may have skills more useful than others, at least give the players more motivation to unlock different dragons (thus increase retention). I am a bit confused as to if this game is a Incremental Clicker or a Line Defence? And ask yourself, whats the draw of your game? The dragons? then add more dragons please. The main character? Then do something to make him stand out more

Post-Launch
Since you have already launched the game and not get featured, I would personally suggest a few things:
- pull the game off the shelf, read the link i posted in my last post, follow all the do's and don'ts then try to relaunch again after contacting Apple
- Create and add a lot of contents, then contact apple about a possible Major Update Feature.
- Move on to making a new game

Next Time
Before releasing any game, at least come here (TA forum) and request for beta testers, perform a Testflight testing and get early feedback on the game and build interest at the same time.

Always remember this, in terms of game design, what seems to make sense to us, may not make sense to other players. What seems fun to us may not be fun for others (and vice versa). What seems easy and intuitive to us, may not be for others. I call this "Game Designer Blindness". You have to let as many people try your game as soon as it is playable, and get gfx designers and artists feedback on the looks and UX. Don't fight the feedbacks, think about why those feedbacks were given.

Sorry for rambling, I am not successful in anyway, my last post wasn't meant to show that I am successful, it was supposed to show that it is HARD to survive as indie. When I said "I'm there", it does not mean I have obtain success, I was saying I am at the brink of losing my mind trying to sustain a living making games as an indie.

 

That was what I was alluding to about "polish" - if you don't play enough some of the game elements are unclear. But the good news is, the more you play, the more you figure out, and the better the game gets. For example, you can buy the third dragon for only 10k gold. But it took me quite a while to realize that even though it was plainly in sight.

There are other things that aren't explicit, like you get crystal rewards for certain achievements. A lot of it is obvious or self explanatory if you've played other games like this, but it might not hurt to make it clearer.

Initially I would have agreed that more dragons would be good, but it appears that there is significant amount of growth for the dragons you do get, and part of the game is growing them and seeing their new evolutions and abilities, as well as your main character's.

What actually sets this game apart is that in raw gameplay it's more like a traditional old-style shooter, complete with power ups, etc. But the way the power ups happen is more like a Tap/Incremental Clicker mixed with line defense. And then eventually you get to do offline "farming" which puts it more in line with many offline Tap RPG games. So it's definitely an interesting hybrid.

Long story short, I really like this game. My only complaint so far is that there are too many treasure chests that fall that want you to watch a video. Frankly that entire mechanic should be removed IMHO since as I said, the game plays as more of an arcade shooter, and those popups become a distraction rather than a reward.

 

In my limited experience as an indie game developer, I would say it's difficult for ANY genre of game to be successful. I don't think the App Store discriminates. =)

 

I agree with this tbh. I do want to see rewarded videos in your game. Perhaps at the END of round, you can offer to multiply the reward by a percentage every now and then, or 10 diamonds etc. Alternatively, have them pop up after farming is complete with the same sort of mechanic. When they appear from a bubble and you're already tapping like crazy, it gets a bit disruptive this way