Thank you for visiting Kingdom Arcade and checking out our first blog post. I'm Matt, the founder of Kingdom Arcade. I launched Kingdom Arcade in the summer of 2020, and it took me just over three years to release our first game. I am an enterprise software engineer who dreams of creating exciting video games with compelling narratives.
When I was eight years old, I earned enough pocket money to buy a new Gameboy game. I went to our local game shop and scoured the shelves for a cool-looking game. I picked up "The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening." I had never heard of Zelda but liked the cover art. That game changed everything for that eight-year-old kid. I loved the narrative, solving complex puzzles, and the surprises along the way. It was (and is) a great game and ignited something inside me that has never gone away.
I decided to start this adventure and bring into it the many principles and lessons learned in my 11 years of experience as a Software Developer. My intention for this blog is to capture my learnings along the way and share them with those who have also embarked on this journey, even for the hobbyists out there who might be interested.
Being Lean
Why Falling Sky? Falling Sky is a very simple, quick-to-make arcade adventure game for iOS. It's incredibly difficult to break into the gaming market, and in future posts, I will demonstrate various principles that will hopefully help establish success in this near-impossible industry. The market is saturated with games, with millions and millions of games, and as creating games becomes more accessible, we can expect even more to enter the market.
It is vital, therefore, to spend your time wisely, making decisions that will help you achieve success quickly. It's very easy to spend a decade on one game only for it to receive under 100 downloads in its first year. We don't want to be in that place.
What is Lean and how does it apply?
Following a Lean approach to software development means releasing something early (in its purest form, containing bugs) to gather valuable feedback that enables adjustments and updates to evolve your product into something useful. There are many benefits aside from the feedback, such as generating income early. If your product can make money, getting it out to customers earlier can be commercially wise.
It's not all positives, however. The largest pitfall for Lean development is releasing something that's too broken and too limited in features. This can then have a negative impact on your customers, who may never use your product again and could write negative reviews due to their bad experiences. There could also be fundamental flaws that could be detrimental to the business itself, such as data loss or leaking of personal data.
Define the MVP
MVP stands for "minimum viable product." This is the set of features and requirements needed for a product to be deemed good enough for its first version. Every person and organization will have their own opinions and goals for setting these. The important thing to decide here is what the core features required for the product to be well-received are. If you have ideas and features that might be "nice to have" or could come in the future, then these will not be part of your MVP.
As well as the product itself, you might have marketing requirements that are part of your MVP, such as having a company website and social media accounts ready for promoting your new product. It might also include processes such as automated pipelines - I will post about these in future posts.
This is the MVP list I came up with for Falling Sky:
Deploy to one platform, iOS for now - I have an iPhone, which enables me to debug easily. If there is demand for this game, then releasing it on Android is an obvious option.
Good visuals - The game has to look good to stand out to users. All good games have a nice, clean design these days and get people to use the game; the visuals have to be good.
A selection of bonus stars - I didn't want none or one, and I didn't want to spend too much time building others, but I wanted enough variety to make the game fun.
A bonus/boss level - This provides an interesting point in the game, which is a change from the regular flow.
Share high scores - It's important to grow your audience, and sharing great experiences from your game is a fantastic way to do that.
Monetization - The game has to generate income, and there are generally two paths from the game itself: Paid or Free with Ads. I went down the Free with Ads route with the intention of building a larger audience.
Crash analytics - I will delve deeper into this subject in future posts, but I wanted to integrate a third-party analytics tool to gather crash logs.
Automated CI/CD - I will again post about this topic in detail, but automating processes is key to building a sustainable business, and having a full end-to-end automated pipeline was essential.
I then had a list of future developments and ideas for the next version:
More bonus levels
More bonus stars
More "Obstacles" (objects to avoid)
Interstitial Ads - These are more profitable for monetization
Animations - for a more immersive experience
Sounds effects and background music
A global leaderboard
More background visuals to provide
Feedback and new features
The immediate feedback for the game was that while it's fun to play, it ends too quickly because it gets too difficult too quickly. From this, I determined a new feature:
Cap the max velocity stars travel at
This enables good players to hit very high scores. The levels still get harder and feature more obstacles to avoid, but allow for longer, uninterrupted gameplay.
The second change is to introduce interstitial ads. I have two simple banner ads, which are great for a residual trickle of revenue. However, after a number of plays, presenting an interstitial ad allows the player a short break from the gameplay and has more profitable revenue outcomes. I will talk about monetization in future posts as it's a challenging subject to get right, but is important if you want to be successful and continue to generate good games.
How to support?
This content will be forever free, and if you like it and want to support it, just download my games and leave honest reviews. Feel free to get in touch with any questions and feedback, and I'll try my best to respond.