How Was Year 2013 And How 2014 Is Going To Be?

It would be better if the creator of introducing statement was someone like Aristotle but sorry, it is author of this text. Perhaps it was Aristotle, unfortunately I do not remember if he said that…. Anyway, more important is that after the New Year, we have been thinking here. We asked ourselves: where were we? Where are we now? And where we want to be?

Where were we?

We started work on game Save the Snail in April 2013. First of all, the dream came true – finally we began make games seriously. I mean term “seriously” serious. Reason is simple: the “dreaming part” is still something fuzzy. Basics of more important, more crucial moments lie in something different.

Save the Snail was actually a test. Test of our ability to create game design document, test of programming skills. We could also answer the question if the Unity 3D is right tool. Nothing was certain until the June when the game was actually finished and prepared for release. We took a step forward and made Alda Games official. And we started to think about monetization model. Freemium or premium?

Results? Just long story short: first of all, Unity is great tool. Secondly, we can do the game – from the idea and concept to release. Not without bugs unfortunately. We realized that we have to dedicate more time to testing. Much more time actually. But yes we can, we dare to say we can create games!

Where are we?

And here we are with our second game World of Cheese. It was published in the half of December 2013 after 5 months of development and until now (the day of publishing this post) we have almost 10 000 downloads for Android as well as for iOS. We dedicated more time to testing and preparation of promo as well. The game wasn´t without minor bugs but really just minor, I assume that ordinary user did not notice anything. Cause it has not influence on gaming experience.

What really makes us happy (and to be honest, surprised as well) is fact that our debut Save the Snail still reaches hundreds downloads per day for both platforms.

Actual numbers: Android – 102 743, iOS – 102 469.

Question of monetization remains still opened. We tried both models and probably the best one seems to be the freemium. Not just according us but according statistics and experience around the other game developers as well. We still cannot answer definitively, you know we have actually only 2 products.

Where do we want to be?

That fact leads to the last topic of this blog post – future of our gaming studio. Well, we still must learn, we are still quite novices in game industry. That is why we want to visit events like GDS 2013 and meet people from industry. Earn knowledge, experience, work on own know how. Even the meeting with player, the most important end user of our products can be helpful, inspiring. In other words we do not want to live in some different reality, we want to be a visible part of gaming world.

But most important (and to be more concrete), we are working on 2 new games simultaneously. One of them, tower defense from not very usual environment should be ready in April 2014. And second one (well, not very sure about deadline yet, but first half of year certainly) will be very cute, trust me ;-)

But we won´t stop, we are working on game design for bigger and more complex project. Time will tell when and if we will come out with it ;-)

My apologies for long post but you know excitement for new challenges is so… exciting.

Cheers,

Martin Vonsak, 15.01.2014 | Brno, Czech Republic