In 2019 I had a client ask if I could make a game for them. I hired a contract programmer to help me -I had worked with them plenty before and got started. I began to work through market research and the game design doc.
I asked my client what type of art styles & genre she liked and worked to create something similar. I focused on the virtual pet market which has been making a slow comeback the last few years.
I wanted to make sure the project would be successful so I did some reach on how well the virtual pet genre was fairing. I found some promising numbers.
“38% game developers were developing games for Smartphones and Tablets (2018)”
Women play more often then men, cost less to acquire then men, and spend more then men (link1, link2). Focus should be towards women for more profit, but causal enough men will play as they actually are the best game gossipers and advocates for games.
Guinea pigs are more popular then hamsters, yet more hamster games are found on mobile. Guinea pigs are most popular in the UK. Basic google analytics was used for that.
I created a fair amount of documentation covering more about SEO, trends in games, most popular virtual pet games, price ranges between pet games (some micro-transactions fared between $0.99-$99), etc, and decided it could be a good market. I decided then to assign my contractor some tasks and worked on art as seen below.
I really like doing market research. 🧠Granted… I had such a tiny budget to work with and creating something successful would take a fair amount of time… Well I learned.
Something that I really struggled with was balancing designing with creating the art, code AND figuring out what to give the contractor below me :C I also did not know upfront my budget so that made it more complicated – but that’s all on me. I had to know enough code to help steer my contractor towards the right libraries and databases which at the time since I had the most experience with it was Firebase..
At least I already had some experience making mobile builds…
I made an okay… placeholder art style I made… I sorta hoped down the line I could really improve it :S
I created all the original art in Illustrator & Photoshop. I think it turned out well for my time frame. Now if I were to redo everything I would create everything in Affinity Design and Affinity Photo as that software is faster, more intuitive and far cheaper to use.
I have a lot of experience in Unity and often use Github Desktop. While Unity Collab is an option, I consider it slower for small projects as it often has check check multiple assets as it updates, where as git is much better at handling that. I have used Unity Collab for a few years on different projects and to me it is more limited.
[If I were to redo this, I’d find both options terrible and move to Plastic SCM]
Since I love Unity and Unity is the platform for mobile I of course went with that