How to spend six years and be invisible in the Play Market

Before I started my journey as an indie developer, I played something similar. It was a little-known, but already established project, where large groups of players from all over the world shared a map of the gaming world. But with the ability to communicate and find their place, newcomers there had everything to do and how to realize themselves.

The main mechanics of the game are based on the interaction of groups of players united in “parties”. Parties are the local equivalent of clans, tied to a specific region. These parties can participate in elections to the parliament of the state that controls their “home” region, or nominate their own candidate for the presidency – if such elections are held in the country at all.

After participating in several “world wars” and becoming familiar with most of the game's features, I realized that it was full of shortcomings and errors that players either ignored or abused to their advantage. The administration showed no interest in this. It was the indifference of the developers that I considered the main problem of that game.

One day, when my father and I were driving in the car, he talked about his friend’s son, who writes websites and makes money from it. This could have been a typical cautionary tale about “Daddy’s friend’s son” – but it wasn’t.
He simply asked: “Could you make websites?” And I thought.

At that time, my only experience was a semester at a university, where I had to lay out a few pages of layout for a sporting goods store. But when I decided that having even that little experience was not bad.

So I started my own project under the motto

“If you want to do something well, do it yourself.”

Version 1 (alpha)

Wanting to make a truly worthy alternative to my now competitor, I started with what was really worth doing in order to avoid making the same mistakes – with analysis.

At this point, I identified the following shortcomings in the existing game:

• Hyperinflation. The players operated trillions money. So that you understand the scale of the disaster, our team once bought Mexico (about a dozen territories) for 80 trillion, transferring this amount from one person to another directly. It’s funny, but such amounts did not stagnate in state budgets. As far as I know, at the moment some players have quadrillions.
  If anything, this is the number – 1,000,000,000,000,000.

• State budget. This is a separate topic for discussion. It was replenished either by taxes or by player donations directly.

  No return (in the voice of Owl from the Soviet cartoon about Winnie the Pooh).

  

  Why is this a problem? Because state budgets were a closed system, with its own economy. There was a dualism of prices – for players and states. Two separate markets.

  • Market. This in itself is not a problem, since it operated on the principle of rabid capitalism – whoever offered the best price was bought from him.
    The problem was that the product could be displayed for everyone to see throughout the game world. If someone could produce cheaper than everyone else, the whole world would buy from him, leaving other players, especially newcomers, behind. Newcomers who aspired to become merchants or industrialists simply had no chance to compete.

  • Speaking of production. It was very banal – give the ore, get the tank. Straightaway.
    Without moms, dads and intermediate materials.

  These errors in the game were systemic, that is, they came not from the players, but from the game building system itself. And some of them were so deeply rooted that the only solution would be to create a new version of the game with corrected rules.

  To avoid making the same mistakes, the following concept for the new game was thought out:

  • “Physical” warehouse, with the region of location. The player cannot carry a thousand tanks in his “pocket”, so they must have a place to be placed.

  And the player should not be able to trade across the entire planet – at least without paying shipping. If there is a seller next to the buyer with a slightly more expensive product, then the difference in delivery may play a role in the choice.

  A picture for understanding: delivery is paid once per purchase, and for small quantities it can play a significant role in determining the cost.

  

  In order not to scare you with “ultra-graphics”, I’ll make a reservation right away – this layout is no longer used in the game. But the concept of a physical warehouse is still alive, and this is what the same trading page looks like now:

  

  The presence of a location at the Warehouse gives rise to another difference between the new project and its ideological parent – the vulnerability of inventories. And at the time of “alpha” the amount of money that a player could have with him was also limited. There is no space – put it in the Warehouse.

  But remember – if the region in which it is located is captured, you will lose some of the resources, goods, and all your money will be burned:

  

  This mechanic became part of the inflation protection system. Over time, other methods of withdrawing money from circulation were added. And I now have analytical tables showing how much the average player earns and spends. If the balance begins to get low, events are introduced into the game to help replenish players' supplies.

  • The production process has become more realistic. First, the player processes resources (ore and oil) into Materials, which requires time and money. Then, again spending money and time, the materials are turned into finished goods.

  During the presence of this mechanics in the game, an interesting incident occurred: a top player, who had accumulated one and a half million money since the beginning of the game (a maximum of ten minutes could get a thousand), left and gave it to a friendly team. They spent it on production without a trace!

• So, production is also a good way to fight inflation.

  A screenshot from that time also shows part of the game interface, which was painstakingly created to the best of our knowledge:

  

  To make you feel better as soon as possible after the aesthetic shock, keep screenshots of how it looks now:

  

  • Once upon a time, I, as the creator of the game, had thoughts of combining the personal and state economies through public procurement.

  In short, this is an auction in reverse – legislators set the need for a product and the budget they are willing to spend on it. Whoever offers the most goods for this budget (it turns out, at the lowest price) is the winner.

  This functionality has been successfully implemented and is currently in use. More “law-abiding” players – for their intended purpose. Less – as a way of “drinking budgets”, when players extract round sums from government circulation in exchange for no less round volumes of goods – so that there are no people with the same reserves who can bring down the price.

  

About the triangle of compromises

Sometimes I hear from players the question: why am I working on a project for so long? Like, you could have sketched everything out on your knees a long time ago and released it for release. And that there were already projects before that created much more content for their players in a shorter time.

But, as I already said, it was precisely such projects that “sank into oblivion.” Perhaps their creators switched to other things or they lacked knowledge. However, I believe that one of the key reasons for their failure is the lack of a solid base.

It is very important to lay a strong foundation for the project, which will allow it to be easily expanded and improved in the future, and not turn the game into chaos for both the developer and the players. A quickly made game can become a problem right away. Without carefully thought-out logic, bugs arise that undermine the meaning of the gameplay and open many loopholes for abuse and cheating.

Therefore, for myself, I put quality first – at least at the level that I am able to provide. Since this is my personal project, there is no budget. Consequently, with a fixed level of quality and zero development costs, the third corner of the “trade-off triangle” – time – stretches exactly as much as necessary 🙂

What went wrong at this stage

The main “childhood disease” of the project was the lack of an attractive and sane design. This became a real “curse” – no one wanted to work on someone else’s idea for free, and the rare volunteers who agreed were quickly “lost” for various reasons. The design has always remained a weak point, despite all efforts.

But what finally finished off the first iteration of the game was something else – an unsolvable error in the server processes.

I'll try to explain. In each gaming state, elections were held once a week, and at their own time. This is a background process that does not depend on player activity. This process should have worked stable every week, without fail. However, at best, it functioned properly only for two weeks in a row, after which it continued to “exist” but ceased to be executed. The problem was unpredictable, and I could not find any system in these failures.

The decision came to me after a long time. It turned out that the library I used to manage background tasks (Celery‑beat) had a bug that led to such failures. When the library developers fixed this bug, I finally got a stable mechanism for background processes.

But that happened later. At that time, I decided to radically change the concept of the game, turning it into a strategy and getting rid of the election mechanics altogether. Thus began work on a new version, which became a kind of “branch” from the original idea.

Version 2 (digression)

The new concept of the game focused on the confrontation between colonial cities on an uncharted planet. Players had to develop their colonies, increase resource production and suppress competitors with the help of the army.

Although the idea was far from new, at that moment it seemed attractive to me. As with the original concept for the game, I had experience with similar projects and wanted to create something worthwhile for players without the typical pay-and-win model.

The game retained the color scheme and some logic elements from the previous iteration. For example, parties (analogous to clans) have survived, although they have lost their intra-party “primaries”. However, most of the mechanics had to be created from scratch: this includes base construction, resource management, army recruitment, mechanics for reconnaissance and battles with other colonies.

Finding screenshots from that period was not easy, but some things have survived:

Many players still remember this iteration of the project fondly. However, I eventually closed this version of the game. By that time, I had gained experience and decided to return to my original idea – a political simulator.

Version 3 (beta)

The main mistake of this version was the “legacy code” – developments from the first iteration, which, it seemed to me, could be successfully reused.

The most striking example is the players' warehouse system. Each player could have several warehouses, one per region, and each warehouse stored resources. At the beginning of development, I made an architectural mistake: every new resource that I added to the game had to be registered in all warehouses. That is, even in an empty warehouse there were automatically 0 coal, 0 iron, 0 bauxite, 0 steel, and so on.

This mistake cost me dearly. We had to spend time reworking the game logic, and doing it “live” – so that the changes would improve the system without affecting the current progress of the players. This required a lot of testing on a separate server, but in the end the problem was resolved.

By that time, the issue of the lack of a front-end developer was still not resolved. Despite this, the old blue style of play did not migrate to the new version of the project. The game guide of those times demonstrates the game like this:

From the same guide it can be seen that although the production interface was simple, its functionality became closer to the modern version:

The character leveling panel was also gradually approaching its current form:

And this is what the interface looks like now:

Version 4 (current)

And now, finally, I have come to the version of the game that I am developing, adding and improving right now. The path to it was VERY long, but, as I already mentioned, I was not looking for speed.

This is not to say that all this time I worked in absolute solitude. It is important to acknowledge and thank those who helped at various stages. First of all, my friend, who helped deploy the first versions of the game to the public. I also want to say thank you to the schoolchildren and students who took part in the development at various stages, although they left this work.

At the current stage, I have people helping with game design and consulting on the server side. A friend is setting up advertising, and my girlfriend is actively testing the game.

And, of course, I am grateful to those players who support my project online, and some even with rubles. By the way, money is spent only on the needs of the game. I think it's better this way 🙂

But I will still be glad to see people who are interested in my game and who want to have a hand in it.

I will definitely leave my contact information at the end of the post.

By the way, the importance of normal game design and its appearance is difficult to underestimate. Until the new visual was introduced into the game, many avoided it. They can be understood – the game did not open normally on smartphones (and the majority play on them), and even on computers it looked as…poor as possible.
So, despite the fact that the technologically new visual of the game is not at the forefront of technology, it fulfills the main task that is assigned to it – allowing people to play comfortably from different devices.

With the introduction of the new design, online gradually began to grow. If previously the ceiling was about two dozen people and random visitors, now the number of active players remains stable at 130 people. Of course, this is negligible compared to the mobile giants with millions of players, but our budgets are incomparable. I hope there is more to come 🙂

Growing your audience is a constant work in progress. To be honest, targeted advertising does not bring significant growth online. As a friend says, she only “pumps up recognition.” But publications about the game in role-playing communities, as well as among fans of strategy and military-political games (VPG), gave a good return. So whole groups came to the game – from a few people to dozens. Some stayed for a short time, while others remain with us to this day. Each of these people left a mark on the history of the gaming world.

Remembering the main mistake of my competitors – the “dead” administration, I try to stay in touch with my players. IN game group VKontakte and her telegram channel Patch notes are published regularly, and in the chats that you can access from there, you can chat with me personally.

Of course, I understand that with the growth of online communication control and moderation will need to be transferred to proactive players. Although this is an inevitable step, I try to put it off because it is important for me to maintain personal contact with the community. Even when player-elected mediators emerge, I still plan to stay in touch to continue listening to the community.

It’s interesting how my project attracted the attention of not only new players, but even one small game studio. One day, a person contacted me and asked me with great diligence about the game genre, competitors, target audience, player interest and possible development difficulties. He suddenly disappeared just as he had appeared, and apparently his studio decided that the genre was unpromising.

However, I don't agree with this. The mobile games market is huge, both in terms of the number of players and turnover. Although I have no illusions about dizzying success or investment in my project, I observe interest in it even from foreign players from competing projects. They are already starting to offer their services to translate the game into their native language.

This move opens up the possibility of expanding into the international market, which will increase the audience and make the gaming experience more exciting. After all, you must admit that it is much more difficult to negotiate with another country if you do not understand their language! 🙂

About the application

It was in order to reach this very international level that I started developing the game application. In essence, this is the same browser, it just opens only the website of my project. But as development progressed, the wishes of the players appeared, which made even this “wrapper” more presentable.

The game application has reached the release stage, and is currently in a state of open testing. However, even at the stage of opening pre-registration, I was faced with the fact that the application was not visible in any way except upon direct request:

A question in support did not give anything – they say, wait a little, optimize the game description for better indexing and all that. So, if you understand how to publish on Google Play correctly, please write to me what is my mistake.

About plans for the near and not so future

Right now my first priority is to make the game as friendly as possible to newcomers from all over the world. To do this you need to do a lot of things:

• translate the game into English at least completely;

• add help in the interface (the same neuro girl talking about pumping);

• fill out the game's Wiki site;

• improve the training given to players at the beginning.

And these are just the things that I would like to do before publishing the game. In general, there is a huge list of things that suggest themselves, that players ask to do, and that I myself want to do in the game.

I thank you for reading to the end.

I leave various links to myself and my project at the end. I will be glad to receive feedback and new players.

Game website

Our game on Play Market (please support us there)

Social networks:

Thank you for your attention!