So that Flappy Bird thing happened in early 2014 and we, along with a million other developers, downed tools for a week and thought “can we write a simple, yet awesome, one button game in a week?”
“Space Flange” was conceived, here’s our initial design:
And we did, we made a game called Orbit – this is how it looked in about two days:
Another week of polish and the finished game started to look like this:
We were pretty happy with the core mechanic – simple but really tough to master gameplay, play sessions were maybe 60 seconds long, seemed like the sweet spot for a mobile game. We showed it to a few friends, even got it in front of some Apple people who said they liked the look of it. We decided against ads and iaps, so thought we’d put it out for 69p, see what happened. Answer – not a lot, we had a total of 29 sales.
We moved on, but always felt that it had been a total failure – money aside, only a couple dozen people got to see the game. And though it took a week to write, a few more weeks had gone into polishing, tweaking, marketing assets, you know how it goes. So we kept talking about putting it out again, on Google as well as Apple. And for free – no IAPs and no Ads, they just totally messed with the one-more-quick-game-flow of the experience. And you need a LOT of downloads before you make money, right? So … let’s just put it out, with a small “buy the devs a coffee” button, and see what happens.
More detail on our product page here : http://www.mewestudios.com/ovoid
More info to follow!