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The Orions: Legend of Wizards Strategy Guide & Thorough Spell & Creature Chart
You may already have heard of Orions: Legend of Wizards, without doubt the best Windows Mobile game released so far this year - and, I'd say, the best turn-based strategy game for the Windows Mobile game ever released. It’s one of the very few games you MUST buy – believe me, if you don’t mind wasting some time on learning the rules and getting known the cards, you WILL love it.
There already are some Orions: Legend of Wizards reviews out there; I really recommend that of Ben Stanley here, that of Doug Goldring here, that of Allistair Lee here and that of nonstandardized here. I've also posted some remarks / comments on the first two reviews in their Comments section, which may also be worth checking out.
What I have always wanted to do is creating an objective, easy-to-use, chart-based unit / spell comparison as I did some 8.5-9 years ago for Blizzard's Starcraft (I’ve published quite a few articles on Starcraft, the different units etc., mostly in a similar, tabular format). Knowing what your creatures and spells are capable of and when they are best used is the best way to beat your opponent. Therefore, what I present here is not “another” generic review, but more of a supplement to all these already-existing reviews, containing a lot of never-before-published, “advanced” stuff.
Please note that the rest of this guide assumes you already know the game at least at a basic level. That is, I won't explain how the cards are placed in the empty slots / spaces, how spells should be used, what elements there are, how the cards are randomly selected in Duel and need to be purchased in Campaign etc. This guide is written for players that do know the basics of the game and only need some expert gaming help, recommendation, strategy advice & clarification. If you need a quick recap, please read, strategy-wise, Doug Goldring's review and the comments.
As with other, decent strategy games like Starcraft (let’s now forget that Starcraft is a real-time strategy game, not a turn-based one – a decent Starcraft player will still play Starcraft as a turn-based strategy game and will always beat a less experienced player doing less turn based-like micromanagement), every unit and spell has a counter-unit or spell of, in general, less (!) price. This means if you have all or most of the recommended cards, you will be able to, to a certain degree, successfully counter-attack the cards / spells of your enemy. Everything depends on how thoroughly you know what spells and creatures you and your enemy have, what they are particularly sensitive to and what are the sometimes very important side-effects of summiting a card (in most cases, adding HP to friendly and/or stealing HP from enemy cards).
Yes, this game, strategy-wise, is as advanced as, say, Starcraft, which also requires a lot of learning to become a decent player. This also means you’ll need at least a week to master this game – assuming you play at least 2-3 hours a day (which isn’t a hard thing to do because the title is so damn enticing and gripping – you’ll love pulling out your PDA to continue playing while, say, you’re waiting for something, particularly if you can also enable the in-game music).
Unfortunately, the in-game creature / spell explanations are, in general, far from verbose and, in some cases, are very hard to understand (see for example the in-game explanation “Steal Spell” of Death / Darklord). As, after playing the game a LOT, I know all these units and spells, this was also one of the reasons I’ve spent quite a lot of time compiling this chart (and writing this guide). I hope it is WAY more informative and cleaner than the in-game help, particularly when it comes to comparing and mentioning the alternatives to a given unit / spell (particularly enemy owner HP decreasing-wise).
The chart can be found here. Make sure you open it in a maximized browser window.
I don’t think much explanation is needed for the chart; therefore, I only elaborate on some of its columns. Let me know if the meaning of some of the columns can’t be understood; then, in a later version of this guide, I’ll elaborate on them too.
The most important column will be the “Recommended?” one. In there, I’ve explained whether the card is recommended and if it is, when, under what circumstances you must consider using it. This column is of extreme importance to achieve the goal I’ve outlined above: to find the cheapest and, therefore, most economical solution for a given task. For example, if your opponent summons a Death / Grim Reaper, which costs 12 Death points, you can easily counter-attack this creature by quickly summoning Life / Paladin and casting Exorcizm. In addition to having only spent 8+2 Life points (that is, 2 less than with the enemy’s Death spell) on the summoning and the casting, you will still have a moderately-strong (4 damage done to non-Death opponents) Paladin with (still) 10 HP on the board, also ready to quickly kill (via the above-mentioned Exorcizm spell) another Death creature. Now, think of how much it would have cost you to get rid of Grim Reaper WITHOUT relying on Life / Paladin (and, assuming, you don’t have (or, currently can’t afford) Air / Black Wind or Fire / Fireball, two of the other, excellent instant killer spells) – yes, you would have spent much more. (Incidentally, this is how a decent Starcraft player, putting special emphasis on casting advanced spells, plays. A simple Plague spell from the Zerg Defiler can cause, resource-, micromanagement- and time-wise, orders of magnitude more loss to the enemy than the original price of a single Defiler, even including climbing the tech tree to be able to produce it at all.)
Also, in order to make looking up information as quick as possible, I’ve also tried to separate information belonging to different categories. For example, this is why I’ve created a separate column about “Increasing / decreasing elemental”. For example, if you need to quickly look up which creature will help in increasing an elemental (mostly the one it’s belonging to, except for Life / Apostate, which increases Death instead of its Life home element), you just look at this column in the section of the given elemental (sections, in order to save horizontal screen estate, are separated in the first column; I’ve denoted a new elemental section with bold there) and search for any entry. For example, if you look at the Water section, you’ll see there are two creatures to increase Water: Nixie and Ice Wizard. (While the otherwise very strong Hydra will actually decrease it each turn by two – until it reaches zero. I’ve also included these cases in here.)
Another example: when you want to be absolutely sure you summon a creature to an empty slot, you choose the slot (the opposing creature) taking the “Particularly vulnerable to...” column into account. For example, if there is an empty slot with an opposing Fire (enemy) unit, you won’t want to put a Water / Ice Wizard or Ice Guard in there because they sustain 200% damage from any Fire creatures or spells. Taking this further, you will also want to consult the “Immune to...” column in there to see whether there are any creatures immune to Fire creatures (as can clearly be seen, Red Drake is, in addition to the well-known, low-cost example of Earth / Forest Spirit). Finally, you’ll also want to consult the “Delivers extra damage to..." column to see whether there are any creatures (or spells) that deliver some extra damage to Fire creatures. (As can clearly be seen, Water / Nixie is one of them; that is - if you don’t use any modifiers like Earth / Dryad in the next slot or Fire / Salamander anywhere else - it’ll deliver 2*3, that is, 6 damage.)
Similarly, if you need to counter-attack a very powerful Water creature spending as little money as possible with the best outcome, you (in addition to the joker-of-all-trades Earth / Forest Spirit, preferably backed up with an Earth / Dryad in the next slot in order to bump up its attack by not less than 2) may want to look up a unit immune to Water spells / creatures. Just a quick glance at “Immune to…”: yes, Water / Ice Wizard (only 1 damage only taken from any enemy Water unit) is one of your best choices in this case. (Let’s only hope that, seeing this, your enemy won’t use Fire spells like Fire Spikes or – for you, even worse – Fireball to quickly get rid of your Ice Wizard - don’t forget the two ice-based Water creatures are particularly sensitive to fire. Or, it won’t use a cheap, but, in this case, pretty powerful (2*2 base damage to Ice Wizard and Guard) Fire / Cerberus in the next slot of the opposing one in order to protect it from your direct attack.)
Also, if you quickly want to further decrease the health of the enemy’s owner but don’t have (currently – because of the lack of elemental points – access to) the traditional HP decreasing spells like Death / Steal Life, just summoning a middle-priced Death / Banshee will inflict 8 damage to the enemy owner right at summoning. In order to quickly find this information, you’ll need to scrutinize both the “Increasing / decreasing opponent health” and the “Effect on enemy owner” columns (these columns are pretty similar in meaning; I still wanted to keep them separate to better separate spell- and unit-based damage).
Note that the “Price when produced” column refers to the Campaign mode. In Dual mode, it has no meaning as, unfortunately, you can only have 4 randomly selected cards in each element in Dual games. This is one of the most annoying shortcomings of the game, in addition to, in Campaign mode, 1. the inability to destroy buildings and 2. to get rid of unwanted cards in order to be able to purchase other ones. Implementing a solution to the latter two would be really beneficial because you can easily reach the maximal number of the structures on a given Orion (see the PS section below) and you will always want to use other cards than is currently available. I will definitely ask the More Games Entertainment folks to add the possibility of more cards for example playing Dual games – it’ll greatly enhance for example multiplayer gaming.
PS: just a remark. None of the reviews I’ve read so far mentioned the fact that you can’t build an unlimited number of structures on a given Orion. This MUST be kept in mind when you, for example, in Hard games, only possess 2-3 Orions and allocate most of your experience points to, as is also discussed at the comment section here, “Power” in order to quickly get some of the better cards, even at the beginning of the game, as the only way to defeat much better opponents. Then, if you fill up your words with resource harvesters / converters like in this screenshot, after reaching the building number threshold, you won’t be able to build anything else (see this screenshot showing this), even when there would still be plenty of space to build your new structures on.
Incidentally, the screenshot above also shows the optimal number of each resource harvester / converter. As can clearly be seen, you’ll need the most Crysols harvesters to bump up Crysols production (otherwise, an Orion only produces 20 Crysols a day). The number of Sulmors converters should be slightly (about 50-70%) less than those of the Crysols harvesters. Then, the number of Goldius converters should be about 5-15% of that of the Crysols harvesters, while Eractus converters should be about 2-4%. If you fill up 2-3 Orions (almost) entirely with resource harvesters / converters, you won’t likely to ever run into resource shortage – actually, most of the time, your Crysols will still remain at 9999 (the maximal level).
PS 2: as you may have already noticed, in the chart, I’m referring to the six elementals using italic; also, when referring to a particular spell / creature card, I always name the elemental it belongs to so that you can more easily find it. Finally, when referring to a spell of a particular creature, I also mention the creature, along with its elemental to greatly speed up the lookup.
I've been holding off on posting about this here until now because there was nothing really ready to be shown off anywhere outside my buzz account. Well, it's still nowhere near ready for prime time(it's not even really a game yet and crashes horribly on the Droid) but I think I have enough to at least show off where I am in development.
Without further ado, this is Cellulon: Attack of the Virii. It will be a 2-d platformer with 3d elements(the models and such will be in 3d, just no 3d movement) for the android platform. The idea is that you play as a citizen of Cellulon, a civilization of single celled creatures. The planet is attacked by an alien race called the Virii, basically a race of viruses who are bent on taking over. You work your way through stages trying to stop the Virii and save your planet. I'm planning on having upgrades where you can pick up pieces of RNA and drop them in a representation of the nucleus that will be in the lower right corner, and allow you to various new things like floating upwards, shooting needles, climb walls, etc.
I'll also likely release a level builder where 3rd parties can create and distribute their own custom levels.
Anyway, this is still under heavy production(nowhere near test ready) but I'll throw up some screenshots here(to be updated time to time) of where I am currently. The first screenshot here is of the game so far running on my Nexus One, and the second is a screenshot of the PC-side level creator running in ubuntu.
Just put up a video with my progress as of today(now has a bit better of a model for the cell with better animations and better collision detection): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gb8XQVHH_Rc
This is still very early in the development stages, only has two levels, and no enemies. Nevertheless, it's a fairly difficult level and is bug free enough to let everyone play with it. The controls are pretty straight forward. Hold phone in landscape mode, tilt left to go left and right to go right. Press trackball or menu to jump(dpad center on the droid). Try to reach the far right side of the level to win(it will pop up a little banner saying "You Win!". Fall to your death and you lose. Either will require you to press back to quit and restart the level to continue playing(from the beginning).
Update: Now has a 3rd level featuring enemies. Getting hit 3 times by the enemies will result in a loss. Kill the enemies by slamming down onto them, by jumping over one and then swiping down on the screen. Getting hit or hitting an enemy will make you bounce off of it.
Also, everyone let me know what you think.
I really like the level builder idea, especially if its robust and easy to use...looks promising.
It's viruses, not virii. You've got your Latin wrong.
I've put up another video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBsCsPbgiII.
For this one, I used a screen capture program for Android, which is unfortunately very slow(thus the really slow refresh rate). Nevertheless, I'm hoping this can give somewhat of a representation of what my new refraction effect looks like. I'm quite proud of it, and plan for the main character to look very close to what's shown in the video(depending on the background, of course)
Lookin' good man. Kind of reminds me of a cross between master blaster and sonic the hedgehog 3 (when you'd get the water bubble and bounce around). lol
Hate to bump my own thread, but I have a fairly good reason. I have put up a test version of the game(it's still in really early development and is just one level with no bad guys) for everyone to play with. Read the first post to see details on controls/errata. Enjoy!
grainysand said:
It's viruses, not virii. You've got your Latin wrong.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Actually he said they were a race of viruses called the Virii
New version is up. It's bug free as far as I can tell now.
Another new version up. Now has a menu structure and better jumping.
i always knew u were upto something great lol, great work man
i just played it, and i must say im awaiting the final release,
Great work!
did you use any tutorials you found online, or just playing around with the samples in the sdk?
cool game
did you use any tutorials you found online, or just playing around with the samples in the sdk?
cool game btw
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Just played around with it and followed sdk examples. Not really any good tutorials on es 2.0
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Sent via the XDA Tapatalk App
yeah thats what I was finding also. I decided to learn how to make android apps before I go into games, maybe it will help me understand better.
New update up. Now has a 3rd level with a new addition: enemies.
nice haha. we need more platformers for android
About me:
Hello!
My name is Ilya.
And I apologize in advance for my bad English.
I am the creator, programmer and designer in my small studio: Thevisioline
Throughout my life I have been helping many people: from simple advice, to great actions. I always liked to help people. But, for obvious reasons, I can not help anyone who addresses me. But one day I had an idea: almost everyone has smartphones, so why not help a large number of people with this help at the same time?
I had knowledge in programming and founded a studio to create applications on the phone - it was not a problem. But what is the studio without its own product? At this point, I decided to approach this topic from the other side: a mixture of the game and the application in one small game. So my studio appeared, and with it my first project: Endless Food.
Game description:
Every day for two months I worked on Endless Food. And even now, five months after the release of the game, work continues on it.
Let me tell you more about my game: Endless Food is a mixture of game and application. The main task was to make a game that would be useful and interesting.
So what can Endless Food help people? Can it, for example, give a second life or give immortality?
It certainly can not give immortality, but in emergency situations it can help, and often, it can save a life for you or someone around you. My first creation is able to train people in such necessary skills as Reaction. Incidentally, the game helps you to think through your moves in advance and make a decision instantly.
When you first start the game does not give you a path by which you can develop the necessary skills. It is just a tool for gaining knowledge. The game gives you only an opportunity, but how you use it, start playing and improving your skills, or you'll delete, you decide only yourself.
The user who just started the game, first of all sees how the hamburger tries to escape from the fork, moving on the plates. In appearance, mindless occupation, but do not rush to make hasty conclusions. To score more than 20 points at the very beginning will be problematic enough and only by training the necessary skills, the player will begin to correctly evaluate all his actions and possibilities, and only after that the user will be able to gain more and more points. But, despite the first successes, in order to develop these skills at the proper level, it is necessary to play this game for at least 15 minutes a day for 2-3 weeks. After this period, the player will restore these vital skills.
There are two modes in the game: Classic and Back and Forth. Each of the modes is responsible for training different skills:
- Classic - suitable for those users who feel that the reaction they have at the proper level. In this mode, the player controls the speed of the hamburger: slows the hamburger or accelerates, thereby using not only the reaction, but also the speed of decision making and the speed of thinking about the consequences. In order to gain in this mode as many points as possible, you need to think through each step.
- Back and Forth - will be more useful to beginners. This, so to speak, the first step in restoring the required level of reaction. In this mode, the hamburger and fork move in the same direction at the same speed, but at any moment the plug can change its direction. The task of the player is to have time to click on the screen, thereby changing their direction.
Endless Food will be useful not only for the younger generation, but also for a more adult audience. Because a person is over 40 years old, care begins to deteriorate, he becomes more diffused and does not have such a quick reaction as in his youth. But, after a very short period of play for 2-3 weeks, even an adult will begin to feel better.
You probably wonder where the calculations came from, if you need to play at least 15 minutes a day for 2-3 weeks? From the moment of development to the release of the game, we conducted many tests on different groups of people, in order to determine the optimal time for training. The game was tested on 50 users from different age categories. 44 of which showed an impressive result. For the remaining 6, we increased the playing time to 20 minutes per day, and after 2 weeks they showed a much better result, although it did not reach the previous 44 users, but it proved that our game can help people of all ages.
The graphics also made a special approach: our goal was to make the graphics simultaneously stylish and pleasant, to attract both young and older audiences. Therefore, we chose the approach to use low polygonal graphics, thus the game became less demanding to the power of the phone, but the graphics remained at a decent level. On the main screen and during the game, it was decided to use as few distracting elements as possible, thereby completely immersing the user in the game.
The game also has a table of records, thereby giving the player to compare their successes with the successes of other users of Endless Food.
The game is free, but the game has unobtrusive advertising, which is necessary for further research in this direction and creating more games.
Addition:
Endless Food is the first, but by no means the last, mixture of the game and the application, in the meaning of which is the help to people. New projects are already being prepared that can help a person in all sorts of life situations.
I want to help as many people as possible using games in their devices. Telephones now have almost everyone, but not everyone can find the necessary information in it. With our games, all the vital information the user can acquire and train through the phone.
To understand if such an approach is necessary for people, we need to get as many downloads and, as a result, feedback. Once in the top on xda-developers, we can quickly get a large number of reviews and complete the game, if necessary. After that, I will immediately start creating new projects and will be able to help even more people.
I plan to gather a team of like-minded people with whom we can do more large-scale projects aimed at helping people. At this stage of development, I need to get into the top xda-developers, after which Endless Food will immediately receive a lot of downloads and reviews! I'm sure that this type of games will become more useful for users every day.
Once again, I apologize for my English.
Thank you in advance and thank you for your time.
Best wishes to you!
Thevisioline
Download: t(dot)co/2zPlbh0fmB
Sword Art Online: Integral Factor for Android and iOS – Guide
Sword Art Online novels and anime series became a mega-hit due to its premise. You are trapped inside a video game, and the only way out is to finish the game. Kinda like the new Jumanji movie.
Sword Art Online Integral Factor for Android and iOS is based on the same Franchise, and we have very high hopes for it.
Sword Art Online had other games built around it, however, Bandai Namco has taken a different approach with this one.
What’s different?
Instead of playing as one of well know popular characters of the franchise, you will be playing as one of the many anonymous players trapped inside the game.
The story it tells is the same that fans would already know, yet in Sword Art Online Integral Factor, it is told from different point of view, which the fans will find very refreshing.
In the game, you come across well know characters such as Kirito, Asuna, and others. However, if you want to make it to the end and beat the game, you will need a guide.
That is what this article is about ?
Let’s get to it!!
Starting with the controls
Ok, there is not much to talk about the controls. These are the basic controls you will find in any third person perspective game.
The virtual thumbstick is on the bottom left of the screen, and to look around you just need to tap and drag anywhere on the screen.
Pinch zoom in-and-out is also available.
The Combat buttons are on the bottom right and the minimap is on the top right. To expand the map you can tap on it. And you obviously need to the map to reach your next quest.
The Hamburger icon will give you a popup menu which is made to seem like the character is accessing the in-game menu, which is pretty cool. Here you can check your status, quest info, and even find your friends.
The in-game communication bar is at the bottom, which gives players three options. Say, Party and Tell.
“Say” is for chatting with anyone available, “Party” is for chatting with people you are grouped with, and “Tell” is for sending a private message.
It’s time to fight!
The combat in Sword Art Online: Integral Factor is very simple but very clever. And we like that a lot.
The big button on the bottom right corner is for attacks. It is very simple to use, you just walk to an enemy and attack.
By holding down the button, you can continuously attack.
The four buttons surrounding the main attack button are for sword skills. And as you guessed it, you have to earn these special attacks.
Using them strategically will inflict more damage on your enemies, and after using an attack there is a cool down period before you can use it again.
The “Switch” button on top of the skills buttons, is the most powerful skill available to you. The “Switch meter” fills up as you do damage to your enemies, and once it is full, the icon will start to flash.
Same as the other skills, you can wait for the right moment to unleash this power for maximum effect.
The orange weapon icon helps you switch between weapons. This is something you need to do as your weapon of choice will depend on the type of enemy.
You need to identify the vulnerabilities of your enemy and choose your weapons accordingly.
Tip-
For instance, if all the skills in your current weapon are cooling down, you can switch to the next weapon where all the skills of that weapon will be available to use.
You will not need to use these tactics in earlier stages however, this will be really useful when it comes to boss fights later on.
The “Dash” button is also very useful to avoid attacks.
mod edit - link added
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bandainamcoent.saoifww&hl=en
im playing this game .
Developers Never Watched The Show?
I ask because this story takes place during the death trap phase of SAO. Leefa is a character that appears during the main story, but she was never in SAO, or at least not when players got trapped struggling to survive in real life through the game. Also, ALO didn’t exist yet. ALO did not start until after SAO was won and the surviving players escaped. Seeing a character like her with references to ALO literally pulls you out of the story since it breaks the story. Leefa said she just started too, which means, in the game’s story, she entered the game after the death risks were announced when no one else was allowed to enter or start the game. And lastly, all SAO avatars were altered to look like their real selves, so she violates the setting once again. So we have a character who never existed there coming from another game that doesn’t exist yet in a way that wasn’t even possible to enter SAO while not even looking like she should. Umm..this suggests whoever allowed this or created the game doesn’t know much about it. It would have to be an alternate universe where time travel is possible but that violates the story in dozens of other ways, like we wouldn’t be in the same story from the anime or manga.
Hi everyone! I’d like to tell you the story about the creation and release of our first game. I will tell you a little about our company’s background and the difficulties that we encountered during the development. I hope our story might be useful to you too.
It all started a few years ago when my brother built up a team of like-minded people who were eager to create, and this was then expressed in the creation of animation and computer graphics for various projects. The team eventually grew, as well as the number of orders from clients. Then there was a point when we decided to create our own game project. Thus, we began a long preparation process. Unfortunately, our existing knowledge base was not enough to start the project. New volunteers joined the team, the learning process started, and the project began to acquire its first outlines. The result was a prototype of Crocks Hunter, a 2D platformer.
The plot of the game was as follows: Crocodile-aliens arrive on Earth to steal the Moon from earthmen. The main characters of the game (a boy or a girl, depending on player’s choice) must go through six different locations (desert, jungle, lava, water world, ice jungle, and fairy forest), and catch — not kill, the game is absolutely violence-free and child-friendly — all the Crocodiles into boxes which are used sometimes for some puzzles, and then defeat the final boss. One of the graphics features of the game is that 3D character models were rendered into 2D to make more complex, natural and fancy animations and to keep the high quality of the overall picture, along with a light-weight installation file.
Initially, the project was planned to be released for mobile platforms, but as the development progressed, it was decided to release it for PC, and then for Nintendo Switch. This was due to several reasons. Firstly, mobile game publishers are into the free2play game model, for which platform games are not quite suitable, although we figured out how to monetize the game, and to draw the player’s interest to micro-transactions. Secondly, in order to enhance the visuals of the game with various effects, we would have to sacrifice the performance. Therefore, it was more interesting to release the game on PC and consoles but at a set price. One of the publishers suggested that we release an update with six levels and two bosses once a month. Thus, it would be possible to retain the player for a long time, but so far we have not tried this model. Although, who knows, maybe you will?
We temporarily froze the Crocks Hunter project but did not abandon it. We are writing new documentation, and designing new levels. We are open to cooperation with investors and publishers to make a global bestseller together.
Currently, we are working without an office, so the whole team works remotely. In order to complete the project and make it at a high level, we would need to gather all the team members in one place, and this requires funding. So we started looking for investors. Many publishers appreciated the great potential of the game but would invest in the project after it being fully fledged and ready for release. As it turned out, Russian investors are afraid of the gaming industry, and they are completely unready to invest in it. Perhaps, this is due to their not understanding the potential and the specifics of the industry. Many foreign investors simply don’t work with Russia. At some point in our search for investors, we were stumped. The team could no longer work on pure enthusiasm. Some team members quit. Some began to slow down the main process, saying that they’d prefer to take orders as before than “work for the fairies and unicorns”. But some determined team members still believed in the project and continued to create it. So this is how the PUSHINGAMES company was created.
Unfortunately, there is no “book for dummies” on how to achieve success from the beginning to end in video games industry. The information you may find on the Internet is very superficial. Therefore, look for according courses, literature, or even better, find some competent mentor who will guide you. Our mentor was a game designer Konstantin Savochkin
One evening, when we were discussing some details, we decided to create a little something to distract ourselves, and came up with the “Quick Week” project. The main goal of which was to create and release one mini-game within a week. It took a couple of days to write game design documents and calculate P & L. Meanwhile, our artists already made the first sketches and prototypes.
We really like the examples of the Nintendo and Marvel universes when the story of one character is woven into the story of another, thereby creating fascinating endless worlds. Maintaining the heritage of the “Crocks Hunter”, we chose the main character to be a crocodile. The result was Jumping Crock: Jellyfish Attack, an arcade retro jumper for mobile platforms, designed in the style of space comic books of the 80’s .
Download link on GooglePlay: Jumping Crock Jellyfish Attack
In total, we spent around $600 to create the game, excluding licenses and developer accounts. We spent most of the budget on localizing the game and its description in 12 languages, including Russian.
To do the translation job, we chose a small but very responsible team — Locnloader a pool of freelance video game translators with 8 years of experience and voice over actors collected in one place. They specialize in indie-games and such small teams as ours, and that affects the price in a good way. For a reasonable price, they did us translations within 2 days. Moreover, they helped us with the ASO description text and edited it to sound a little more adequate, which is sometimes hard when it comes to repeating many same keywords in one small text. What I personally liked is that their team manager had some understanding in game design (and even took a course in it), and a little in ASO. That’s what I call speaking the same language!
We are very proud of the music in our arcade in particular. We love rock! There is 8-bit Space Rock music in the game. It was written by a wonderful musician, composer, and our cousin Yevgeny Protopopov. The music takes you back to the past, especially if you played Battle Toads and Tanks as a child.
Since we created the project with our own money, the payment to our specialists for the work done was extremely symbolic and incommensurable with the level of their professionalism. Therefore we are immensely grateful to our team and believe that without them we wouldn’t succeed.
In order for the project to be successful, it is very important for the team to have a Team Lead, who could drive this train, per aspera ad astra. In our team, that would be my brother Nikita.
Many companies could have achieved well-deserved success, but they never reached it, stopping halfway through. The history of the company with the fruit on the logo is the lodestar for us on how to do things.
Of course, you always want to do something unique and ambitious like Crash Bandicoot. You might want to make the game more complex by adding many different features and mechanics, but it’s better not to do so. Make it easy! The process of creativity absorbs you. You always want to add something else, when almost everything is ready. It’s best to concentrate on the main idea and actually bring it to life, and after the release, just make an update. By making game updates after the release, you maintain players’ interest and make your app appear at the top of the search results in application stores. In the long-term development of your project, it’s very important to take a detached view. Do beta and alpha testing. Of course, this is a bit like parent-teacher nights at school, when they scold your beloved child, and it can be painful, but it will be good for you.
We made our game free-to-play. We were looking for ads SDK for a long time, and we stopped at the companies:
● Appodeal
● AdMod
As the saying goes, “Creativity is great, but sometimes hunger takes over”. The most important thing is to remember who we are doing this for. We believe that a player should stay immersed in the game as long as possible, without being disturbed by ads in the heat of the moment. And of course, you can’t go without them at all. Use all available services of GooglePlay and AppStore, in-app ads, Achievements, and Leaderboards.
After we published our game in stores, the hardest part began — promotion. Promoting the project itself is also very important. You can create a masterpiece, but in order for it to become a bestseller, you got to try your best. How can you do it when there is no budget? To accumulate link mass, you can write articles in the media and various forums. But as practice has shown, there is nothing better than word of mouth. Bloggers, YouTube and streamers are such goodwill ambassadors. Each of them makes game reviews in their particular style. Find the one you like and persuade them to do a review for free. However, you are unlikely to have luck on this one (we haven’t). Russian bloggers ask for two to three times more money than their foreign counterparts, by the way.
Before releasing your game, create your info channels and use cross-references between them. It works! We use:
● Facebook
● Twitter
● Youtube
● Instagram
● Yunoia
● Bridget Loker
● Telegram channels and chats.
Now let’s get to the final part — working with app stores and how we published our game.
Google — everything is quick and easy. The main thing is to make an agreement with your conscience and not to sign Coppa.
AppStore —an application is being checked for a long time. It feels like an eternity. But in fact, it takes a week for them to check it, despite them saying 24 to 48 hours.
Amazon — quick and easy.
AppScater — as soon as you publish on the main stores, you can start invading Greater China. Appscater is there to help you.
So it goes.
P.S.
Once again I want to say thank you to my team. And please, don’t forget to try and play our game
The author of this article and chief marketing officer, one of the brothers, Artem Pushin.
Love your journey from starting to till today. Thanks for your post. :good:
Сongratulations on the release! I would like to read about promotion steps, if you did any, except social networks cross-references..
Love it!