When I was a child (gosh it wasn’t that long time ago) my brother bought a used C64 and showed it to me. I was completely amazed. On that day I knew: I’ll learn how to use this magical thing.
He also loaded a couple of games on that evening and we had a very good time together. If I recall correctly we played some basketball game, and maybe the first F1 game in my life as well. After that, for many days I was sitting in the darkness, wanting to use the games on the computer (of course: I didn’t have an approval. I was a bad brother and a bad kid, I know. Sorry brother :)). The situation was basically providing me the motivation to first: play a damn game on my own and second, I want to create my own games.
I started to learn on C64, and soon our parents bought our first PC. My skills were professional from the moment I turned on the new stuff, so after the second time, one of our friends repaired the PC I knew I need to learn how to correct my mistakes. That’s how all began. I started to learn. Dos, Windows, Linux. When I started to use Linux I started to look more deeply into coding. My choice was web development as it was providing the fastest rewards for my early tries. At my first job then, I found someone who shared my interest in games, and soon we started to think. The first times weren’t successful, we didn’t have any finished games. After the place got closed, our ways were separated.
Some years later however we started to think about a new game. A puzzle game, something like the Rubik’s Cube. The project was called: Cubo. We chose Unity as the game engine as it was free and seemed to be easy to learn. I had some posts while doing the development if you’re interested:
After an unnecessarily long development time, we’ve released the game and it was an awesome feeling. The game itself wasn’t a real success from the perspective of a general game release. We barely had some downloads but still: we’ve finished our first game, now we knew we can do it! The game since got unpublished, but you can find some pics about it on uplezz.com.
Now that we knew how can we finish a project, we knew we need to continue. My friend, Peter came up with a story and we decided: hey, let’s create a text-adventure, instantly creating the idea of our next game: Saving Mikey. The game contains a huge amount of text which had to be translated (we’re from Hungary, therefore to have the stuff in English we had to ask for outside help). For this project the original idea was to create the game as native apps for mobile platforms however, we switched platforms for various reasons I decided to go with a single-codebase, multiple platform solution, I chose react-native. Long story short: using the experience we learned from making and releasing Cubo, we prepared a bit better for Mikey:
- created a separate site (https://savingmikey.com/) which somewhat mirrored the look and feel of the actual app and shared some additional texts from the game
- created ads
- contacted some game magazines, reviewers, etc.
- created a trailer
The release in 2019 February was promising, and actually it had pretty good results (in comparison to our expectations). The game had and still has active players, reviews, even gameplay videos on Youtube. For our small team, the results were tremendous! In this way as well, we want to thank every player who gave a chance to the game. Also, it’s a huge honor that you guys requested to have our native language added to the game. We are thankful for all the feedback you gave us and actually we decided to have a free price tag for Christmas 2019. After the free period though we decided to make Saving Mikey available for free forever on both Google Play and Apple App Store. It’s still available if you like to try 🙂
Now the question: what comes next. While I wouldn’t go into details yet, I suggest you follow the blog, I’ll share information while developing the game. As the first episode of this series please look into this article.