Creating a successful game or app is HARD work, and we often hear of the overnight successes and think that if we just make the right game, we'll be instantly successful and have a million downloads. We hear about the simple and fun games like Flappy Bird, Doodle Jump, and Angry Birds and fall into the trap of thinking we can do the same. Did you know that Flappy Bird was generating $50,000 USD a day in ad revenue?
The problem is that it IS actually possible to have that kind of reception, but it's also possible to win the lottery, and how often does that happen? In fact, you're more likely to be struck by lightning than win the lottery, a lot more likely. I wanted to propose that instead of focusing solely on the likes of Flappy Bird as our template for success, I want to explore what we call the principles of excellence that position you to create great games, learn lots, and build with longevity in mind.
Fast Food Culture and the Time Factor
In the 21st century, society has evolved into a fast food culture mindset. We believe that we should be able to do anything instantly, including making mobile games. We could search "how to make a mobile game" and find immediate results. We can watch movies with the click of a button, order stuff online and have it arrive the same day, research any topic or ask any question and get the answer in a few milliseconds. If we went to a fast-food restaurant and it took longer than 5 minutes for our food to arrive, we'd be complaining about the slow service.
Not so long ago, as a global society, we respected that things took time, and we were geared towards thinking about future generations. A great example was "shade trees". Shade trees were used in farming to provide shade for the workers during the hottest parts of the day. The thing is, the farmer would plant a tree that FUTURE generations would benefit from. It takes a while for trees to grow and years for them to develop enough foliage to provide enough shade. Farmers understood that even if they personally wouldn't benefit from their actions, their future generations would.
It's important we recognise that success in mobile game development takes time and patience. While overnight success is possible, it's highly unlikely, especially when considering how many developers are making games on mobile and other platforms.
The Role of Motive and Expectations in Game Development
Businesses, including game developers, need to make money to continue contributing. However, if making money is the number one priority, then this can lead to making bad decisions with likely short-term strategies that are less likely to work. This is a good point to consider a core value system that influences every decision you make and how you go about your projects.
Excellence Principles for Game Developers
At Kingdom Arcade, we try to adopt a culture of excellence when it comes to creating our games. This is obviously a vague description and could have multiple meanings and interpretations, but here is a list of examples that showcase our culture of excellence:
We always do our best even in the areas that no one ever sees. In the code we write, this isn't made public, but we follow "Clean code" principles and make sure it's well-crafted. We'll produce future posts around the concept of writing clean code for game developers.
We strive for high-quality content and deliver top-notch mobile games. In the code, we protect our games from regressions with automated tests. There'll be future posts around Test (and Behaviour) Driven Development and how to accomplish this with mobile app development.
Automation is crucial in the world of game development. Where possible, we do the extra work to automate our process to help our future selves and other collaborators. In Falling Sky, we built a fully automated CICD pipeline using GitHub Actions that compiles our code, runs the suite of automated tests, and, if successful, deploys the app to TestFlight, ready for immediate device testing.
Sharing is a part of our culture. We believe that helping others is cool, and providing free content that helps fellow game developers is a great way to contribute to the industry. Developers and content creators are very reliant on other people's content to help them learn, so let's be a part of that and share our knowledge on how to build fun games.
How to support
This content will be forever free, and if you like it and want to support it, please share it with others. You can also download my games and leave honest reviews. Feel free to get in touch with any questions and feedback, and we'll try our best to respond.
Download Falling Sky from the Apple App Store today: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6446787964