
Show HN: I built an Android game after work with a friend in 6 months - quiqueqs
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.thirtymatches.apuraditos
======
levirosol
Take my $0.99 and give me an ad free version!

Take additional $0.99s and give me boosters, like clock extenders, wild
letters, and hints.

Leaderboards. OMG. Leaderboards...

Let me grow your user base by inviting my FB friends in exchange for said
boosters.

Relevant leaderboards (because people i know are on them)

Spend half of those $0.99s and hire a designer to create a design that caters
to the middle aged women crowd. Spend the other half of the $0.99s on
advertising. Web / Fb of course, but late night TV seems to do exceptionally
well for that demo.

Recoup those $0.99s by running your own ads for said ad free version and
boosters with a larger audience.

~~~
MichaelGG
Careful, it sounds like you're proposing a pay to win model. Maybe that's good
financially, but it ruins the game. If "boosters" (sounds like cheats) are
allowed, somehow compensate in game. Maybe by offering pure matches, or by
giving the boost to both players (kinda defeats the point).

OTOH, perhaps I'm a strange minority, and these annoying, unbalancing devices
are loved by many.

I'd certainly pay for ad free, even a buck or so s month (Google Play has
subscriptions).

~~~
levirosol
you are the minority, and so am I. I hate that stuff in most games, and rarely
fork over my cold hard cash.

But the middle aged women demo does not think like your typical HN reader. And
that demo is orders of magntude larger than the HN community.

At best, OP should pray to monetize 2% of their audience. Of that, only maybe
15% end up being repeat customers.

and remember, 37% of all stats quoted on the internet are made up. but you get
my point ;)

~~~
xiaoma
The vast majority of gamers don't spend anything.

The thing about free to play games with in app purchase is that there are a
few "whales" who spend so much money they dominated all revenue statistics.
Here's a video from Kongregate talking about this phenomenon on their platform
(which has since broadened to include android games):

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ekz466sDprg&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ekz466sDprg&feature=youtu.be&t=10m44s)

------
dreamweapon
Finally, someone who has the guts to admit that their app wasn't built in a
weekend!

~~~
Someone1234
Honestly and the claims seem to be getting shorter and shorter all the time.
First it was "we built this in a month," then a week, and on to just a
weekend.

Recently people have been saying they built the entire app in a single
"hackathon" (basically one day).

If you really look at almost all of these claims they're false. Often times
people would have built three similar apps and for their "new" one they just
combine elements of the three and call it done.

~~~
general_failure
Well, I did write my app when I was waiting for the food to cool down after I
put it out of the microwave.

~~~
actionscripted
So you wrote yours in a singe snackathon? Congrats!

~~~
9point6
Depends on the food, there're things I've heated in the microwave that have
been cooling down for the past two weeks

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fharper1961
Congrats on finishing and publishing a side project. I know how hard that is!

Some quick feedback.

First the Play Store listing. I installed Tiny Words on a Nexus 7, and it
shows the first 3 screenshots for a 7 inch tablet. Then it shows the same
screenshots but on a phone. It is only by scrolling to see the other
screenshots that you finally see the 4th and following screenshots "The best
score after 3 rounds wins!", etc.

After installing I chose the FB option, but it opened a FB login web page
which would require typing in username+login. I have the FB app installed and
logged in, so this shouldn't happen. You'll lose a lot of users at this stage
unless you fix this.

~~~
tjmckenzie
I used the FB option as well, and was not required to login to FB.

~~~
pavel_lishin
Ditto, but inviting friends doesn't seem to work - I see a "facebook" window
pop up, then it disappears, and I don't see a list of friends to challenge. :/

------
valevk
You should consider adding an option to at least try the game without giving
your information away (facebook or email). Maybe an offline mode.

~~~
quiqueqs
That's not a bad idea, maybe in the signup screen have that option. I know a
lot of people really hate downloading and app and having to signup before
using it. Thanks for the feedback.

~~~
sdernley
Definitely worth doing. I've noticed in some of my apps where i haven't had
this as an option that people really drop off after downloading, but if people
have the option to play without signing up they usually at least give it a
try.

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xandroid4net
Hi, I'm New to hacker news, but I also built an android app on the side and
have 20ish downloads. I built it all myself and it cost only a couple hundred
dollars. However I can't get users to stay. Most of the 20ish users installed
it and then didn't play. So my question is what is your plan to get users to
download and keep them interested? My app took about 4 months and I build it
using Xamarin.Android. I don't want to break any forum rules by adding a link
to my app, but I would be interested in getting some direction for marketing
and feedback.

~~~
privong
It might be better to submit this as a standalone "Ask HN", with more specific
information about your app.

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med00d
Nice! It's funny, but I was just reading about a similar game being built, but
this guy took 16 months and spent $58K building the app. Here's the post
[http://forums.makingmoneywithandroid.com/income-
reports/1635...](http://forums.makingmoneywithandroid.com/income-
reports/16351-expense-report-wordsearch-hero.html) where he talks about it.
His game isn't exactly the same, and definitely has a lot more going on, but
there are some similarities for sure.

~~~
dmix
35k? That seems like a big, risky investment considering he doesn't even have
any developers or designers in-house and this is his 3rd app.

Although maybe he prefers doing one-offs? I'm not super-familiar with the game
scene.

~~~
med00d
It seems like this is sort of a "hail mary" for him. He's hoping to make $600K
over the next 3 years and he's planning on spending a ton of money on ads.

~~~
cocoflunchy
The thread is from march 2012, and his app has between 1k and 5k downloads. I
doubt he made a good return on his investment...
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rhs.wordse...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rhs.wordsearchhero)

~~~
med00d
The user joined in March 2012, but the thread is from 10-17-2014.

~~~
cocoflunchy
Oops, you're right.

------
joeblau
That's awesome. I spent 12 full weeks last year and built a game for iOS
without using a game engine as well. It really gives you an appreciation for
understanding the OS, Memory constraints and trying to model concurrent
actions.

Another thing that I really like about game development is that it really
challenges all of the sensors on a device. It pushes the limits of animation
and sound which a lot of utility apps don't really embrace.

~~~
avinassh
any resources/tutorials for a beginner? I know Objective C and have built
basic apps, but not games

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volent
I can't seem to login via email.

It asks for my email, then it says "Do you want to create an account with this
email ?", I press "Yes" then it asks for my password and whatever I type it's
wrong. If I click recover password it says my account is not yet created.

~~~
quiqueqs
Oh, if it asks for your password than it's because that email is already
registered. If password recovery is not working in this case, the it's
definitely a bug. I'll look into it, but meanwhile can you maybe use another
email address to signup?

~~~
Doublon
I'm also unable to register with my email (then it says "welcome back" and
asks for a password) or recover my password (says that my email address is not
registered). When trying to use FB login I get "Whoops! We could not log you
in using Facebook. Please try signing up using your email".

------
sjs382
How do you currently market the game? How do you plan to?

Do you have any planned (or potential) revenue streams other than ads?

I'm in the midst of building a single-player word game, so anything you have
to say on this would at least give me something to think about.

~~~
quiqueqs
We actually just released the app yesterday. We don't really have a formal
plan, just this sort of stuff, like posting to HN, game and android related
subreddits, twitter, etc. Right now we only offer ads (and very few actually)
since the goal is to attract users. In terms of revenue, our plan is to get
some metrics and user feedback, figure out how users use the app, what they
like, don't like, etc, and use that to add some relevant in-app purchasable
items.

------
rikkus
Looks like Snap Attack, which I've played on my Windows Phone and is good fun!

Did you write up anything about your experiences making it? Would be
interested to hear.

~~~
quiqueqs
Haven't really setup a dev blog yet, but I will soon. In the development side
there isn't anything overly complex actually. The app doesn't use any
graphics/gaming library, it's developed in native Android targeting versions
4.0+, mainly to avoid spending a lot of time testing and adding patches for
older devices. The backend is done in ruby but it will probably be rewritten
in erlang/elixir in the near future if the game gains traction. The main
reason being that my friend which developed the backend works full time as an
erlang developer and is eager to try out elixir on a real project :)

------
Jonovono
"Hurry up! You only have 1:30 minutes"?

~~~
Perdition
Yeah that irked me as well.

"1.5 minutes" "One and a half minutes" "one minute and thirty seconds"

The use of the colon to separate hours/minutes and minutes/seconds means that
you need to supply units to tell which it is, but "1:30 minutes" seems wrong.

~~~
GavinB
"90 seconds" may be the best sounding alternative.

~~~
quiqueqs
I like this :)

------
leetNightshade
I just wanted you to know that I can't try out your game since it doesn't seem
to support Android 2.3.

~~~
quiqueqs
Yeah, it requires Android 4.0 or newer to run. It was a decision we made at
the beginning since we don't own Android devices running those versions and
didn't want to spend all of our time making the app compatible with all
android versions (or at least starting at froyo).

------
pacofvf
Great game, just a few silly nitpicks, the UI looks a lot like Etermax games,
I hope you do ad free versions, I didn't liked so much the Spanish name
(Apuraditos), also I don't know if that word is used in all the Spanish
speaking word. Saludos desde México.

------
funkyy
Looks good. Can you give more details to us? Like what was biggest issue for
you, did you do it full time or part time. How many hours average a week you
would spend on it and how many downloads did you got thanks to HN?

I thinks those details would be very good to have!

Good luck with your success!

~~~
quiqueqs
Sure. The app actually went through several iterations. The first thing I
developed was the main board of the game and it was definitely the hardest
part (at least at the development side) since it needs to detect valid words.
If you play around with it, you'll notice that you can form combinations of
words that are linked together, so you basically have paths of words that
might be connected to one of the fixed words through this path, and are thus
valid combinations (hard to explain, but I think it makes more sense when you
see the gameplay). Getting this logic right involved a couple of weeks of
trial and error. On the bright side, it increase my vocabulary skills :).

Most of the gameplay was developed locally, without any backend. By the game I
was sure I could get the gameplay right, I asked my friend to join me and work
on the backend. So for the past 3 months more or less, we've been working on
getting all of the endpoints right, and testing, testing, testing and more
testing to make sure we could catch as many bugs as possible.

In terms of hours, we probably put in about 2 hours per day on weekdays and
about an average of 5-10 hours during the weekends. In hindsight it looks like
a LOT of time, but if you've ever done Android development, you probably know
that the amount of time and effort that goes into testing the app on several
devices, probably surpasses the actual development time.

------
thearn4
Awesome! Congrats on getting it out there. I just started getting into mobile
development as a hobby this year (after 6+ years of mostly systems
programming/scientific computing). I'm hoping to have something released
within the next few weeks as well.

------
jonaldomo
I just played a few rounds, it is really fun. I did not understand what to do
the first two times though. I kept looking for a way to submit a word similar
to what you would do in a scrabble game.

Very nice design and animation. Well done.

~~~
quiqueqs
Thanks, it means a lot for a developer to hear the the design looks part of
the app looks good :)

------
vblord
Congrats! I wish you guys success with your app!

~~~
quiqueqs
Thanks!

------
StavrosK
Small typo: addicti _ve_. "Addicting" is a transitive verb. I'm addicting you
to heroin.

~~~
dotsamuelswan
Addicting can be used as a participle adjective. You'd be hard-pressed to find
a style guide that says otherwise.

~~~
StavrosK
Descriptivist pig!

~~~
dotsamuelswan
I couldn't possibly argue with that.

~~~
StavrosK
In seriousness, though, "addicting" sounds worse to me. "Addictive" is more
standard, wider-spread and more sonorous.

~~~
talmand
As a non-expert English speaker with 41 years or so of experience, I feel that
"addicting" is just fine in this context.

But that's just my opinion.

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Rinum
There's a typo on the help page, the first word: "Objetive" ... missing the
"c"

~~~
quiqueqs
Cool, thanks!

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reshambabble
Wow this is awesome! Motivates me to get moving on my own side projects.

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lmedinas
Did you used any engine ?

~~~
quiqueqs
No, we just used the Android SDK.

------
MichaelGG
What an excellent game. Please charge me for an ad free version!

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ode
Make a promo video and put it on the play store page.

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jbeja
Which country are you guys?

~~~
quiqueqs
We're in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

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fat0wl
on a news site i would rather be linked to an article about the process than a
download page for the game. booooooooOOooOoOo (jk just sayin)

~~~
prawn
If you have questions about the process, why not ask them? OP appears to be
happy to answer questions in the comments.

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artmageddon
Nice work! :)

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nachokb
looks awesome and fun

