One game developer discusses the road to 10 million downloads

[Music] [Music] so my name is de la maza rakonin I'm the monkey man behind part-time monkey and I'm basically what morals just described one game enough after another so the agenda today is I quickly go through what I did before my part-time monkey times and then the actual story to that number is now actually 15 million but still then what I'm going to do next and at the end there's a small indie mobile dev tool box giveaway basically some of the tools that I use most often in practically all of my games

so before part-time monkey I started my career in 2006 in a company called pixel gene which basically made small java games and some prototyping for enoki and stuff like that then Rovio acquired pixel gene in 2006 and I became a junior graphic artist and eventually I did a bunch of Java games again there there and no again for regarding for Nokia and we did a game brand called bounced red ball with white big eyes on on it if you remember it and then obviously Angry Birds and then I wanted to spread my Angry Birds wings and found my own company boom a goon I co-founded it and then three years after boom Lagoon I figured that I or our parts separated with the with the founders and I found

that my indus to do part-time monkey which is just me so here's the story on that so 2015 i left boom lagoon my foreign partner monkey the idea here was basically to do whatever whether it's premium or free-to-play whether it's hardcore casual but still on mobile though so my first goal was the the full process from from stretch and launch a game on iOS and Android so I developed a flap flappy bird clone game called Timothy unsatisfied artist which was my first time ever really programming so I learned a lot on how to make games obviously in unity c-sharp so I developed that games in about two weeks and I got perhaps 50 download on it so that was my first experience and very good ratings like one start this is

a shitty flappy bird clone and oh you know the goods then I started the development on my first real game with monkey Rama monkey frame okay where I figured out that it was actually a premium game so I wanted to try the same thing than what Angry Birds was in the early days whether it's going to fly or not and I figured out it's not and but I learned to learn more about programming and yet again went through the process of from zero to launching a game and I learned more about programming this game are developed in in about one and a half months and to this date this game has gotten downloaded about to 200 K times and while I was waiting for a monkey Rama to go through the review processes I developed I wanted to try what it's like to make a local multiplayer on

iPads only and basically just for fun so this game had no monetization no ads no no nothing basically so again got got got to experience the process of launching television in about two weeks downloads 4k then I wanted to figure out what I'm going to do next and you may guess that I had just previously watched Star Wars Episode which ever had the podracing bit in it and then I had also be playing Hill Climb racing so I basically wanted to rip off that because it was good and but I made make it prettier and a little a little bit more elaborate but when I eventually started to test that on other people their initial thoughts were along the lines of so this is helical I'm racing right so basically that was enough of a reason for me to drop it because I don't want to be a ripoff artist as though that right now

we're at about 200k downloads then through that prototyping phase I made a space shooter type of prototype which became space bang and this was my kind of I wanted to dip my fingers in real free to play it so it had a lot of different kind of well first of all my first game with virtual currency and I ap virtual currency packs and stuff like that a lot lots of different rewarded that's infinite gameplay basically I wanted to make something and see whether it's so easy to become rich that you can make just an OK free-to-play game with lots of monetization thankfully that wasn't the case so it failed but eventually it led to a publishing deal with the Chinese publisher I dream sky I talk about that a bit later and to date this date this game is the

game that has the highest LTV of all of my games and it's 20 cents no you you way yet but you know something developed it in about two or three months downloads 70 K or something one quarter of a million almost there then I had been playing way too much of kind of thought of five with a bunch of friends so I figured that I could do that for a mobile like very casual cartoony way and well yeah the project basically just bloated it had loads of features you could buy properties that generate money drive around CD you could become a policeman fireman gangster experience level is with the movie theater go gamble in the casino and everything and then I figured that I have no idea what this game is about so so I just ended up dumping it I did it in or developed it for about one month

but never released so we're still at one quarter of a million then after all this failing failing failing I was feeling hungry because I had no money so I started doing some prototyping for Ubisoft review and Armada so basically I was doing lots of prototyping based on their ideas and I figured that because this prototyping thing is going so well I could do you know for my business around this and I had plans for it I had even some talks about investments and everything and I was like almost like I had a name for it even and we were I would like now we're going to do this let's do it let's do it and then I felt like dad that's shitty I don't want to do that sir so I wanted to stay true to myself and keep on fooling around around with indie stuff and through my one of my gigs in Ubisoft Romania I got to know

this Romanian dude who what really wanted to get kids games and he had some of the Arts already done and he had a prototype of the game so he was looking for somebody to to fulfill this game and so he found me and I will I could you know try my fingers in that as well not in kids but you know so we made kids discover dinosaurs it's so yeah it was an experience on kids gains develop about 1.1 months and eventually it could download it for about 80 K times so it wasn't a huge success but there was a kind of a fun learning in that in my opinion that it didn't suffer from the similar rise and fall effects than the normal casual games to well download wise it did but there is to this date it's been released on

almost a year ago but it's still going steadily about 20 thirty bucks a day so I think if you did like a series of these games keep kept on regaining them release one every two months or so which could is easily doable in my opinion see you know build a pretty steady business around that but I just don't think that's for me but I think it's an interesting lesson yeah so this was my first heat game breakout ninja released it this year January my idea I was I had been playing a lot of catch-up games you know them very casual simple games and I basically ripped off one of their control mechanics but added my own bits to it and did a very simple art star with silhouettes and it went through the roof the development time on that was about three weeks because it's

a very simple game but Apple featured it and Google features did eventually quite nicely as well so on the App Store it was downloaded more than a million on Google Play almost a million so now we're 2 million downloads then space bang again with I dream sky through break out in just sixes I was approached by a few publishers one of them being our dreams guy and they for some reason wanted to publish the space bang into Chinese markets so I figured why not get some publisher experience as well on and off I develop it for about two weeks like implementing SDKs is changing at networks doing stuff like that but the game is pretty much still the same eventually it also flopped financially and download wise but it was a good learning for me what it's like to work with external partners in general this was the mother lode for me just released last month space frontier

co-developed with auntie olivia sewer from red links ship some of you may know him now he has his side company link swamp deliver so the Phoenix dude skated and redlynx and ketchup were both acquired by Ubisoft and that's how the link kind of goes from red links until the sewer to catch up and he made this deal happen with ketchup and he knew me he wanted the developer so I developed it and we did it for Argus develop in about two months but it was ready in this year's January but working with publishers it may take a while before it gets launched there's a lot of on-and-off work again doing SDKs and whatnot but now it's been downloaded more than ten million times which is great and the total Donald's 12 million and then I released my own game Silly

Walks it's been out for three weeks now or something I co-developed it with this dude Ozma you Sylla from rage mode entertainment basically a Finnish indie dude who has had minor success but not a very well-known dude but a very skilled one we did it in about three and a half months or so and it also was a pretty big success for us two million downloads but I think or actually we were more kind of competent what came to how you use rewarded ads and stuff like that so it actually ended up making about three or four times more than breakout ninja which was great so that's the journey from zero to 15 million downloads so what I'm Nick about to do next is obviously more games I want to do them like that I've actually started the

development of monkey Rama - monkey Rama I think is my best game to date and some of the kpi's to also indicate that but though I wanted to do that it's going to be a bit bigger project but I don't want to be in a rush because as you could probably tell from the other games they've been kind of all not rushed but done in a fast pase so but with this one I want to take my time whether it's six months or a year I don't yet know I also want to and have already expanded I have a dedicated artist Seymour Conan who did much of the art on see works already and looking for an office and housing it downtown by the way which is cool I'm looking for a level designer also for this monkey Amman project I'm not looking for a full-time level designer but a freelancing one so if you are or no one please hook me up all obviously I'm

still going to do more cooperation I'm going to be working with ketchup on space frontier and probably other games as well I might be working as a publisher as well if there's like the good kind of interest which still seems to be but let's see and about that stuff if you want to know more or have somebody who wants to know more use this email address and shoot and so here's the indie dev toolbox that I mentioned there's the link below and so it covers kind of many aspects of indie development first of all I've done a bunch of extensions for unity UI because there are a bunch of things like when you create new canvases or buttons or scrolling lists or anything like that

I've done extensions that do that automatically just with a press of a button and stuff like that there's a bunch of level design tools basically object handling grouping regrouping I mean ungrouping replacing objects with prefabs or stuff like that it was very useful in monkey Rama I've taken the in-app purchase manager from unity and revised it to be more simple and easy to use there's an audio manager which is very simple but it handles object pooling and makes it easy to play audio anywhere with the few variables there's a generic icons so basic or all the icons that you use in mobile games - social icons play menu purchase stuff and everything like that in a cartoony fashion and there is a sort of a documentation of all of this it's not very heavy but it tells you the outliers

so there should be ok so that's it thank you for your time and thank you that's great does anyone have any questions yeah I have them straight away good hi thanks very interesting stuff I was just wondering and I think also many other developers are wondering like did you do any marketing for any of these projects that you published yourself or did you just you know make a page in Google Play and wait for somebody just to discover it or I mean to get even these 80 thousand downloads somebody has to find it so what happened with those yeah you only rely basically on featuring on the platforms so I haven't used any budgets on it because I have no idea how to do it and as you can see from the nature of my games there

are small games and especially as I mentioned in space bank that's the highest LTV that I have which is 20 cent so that doesn't really allow me to do much UA or even marketing so I've kind of it wasn't my plan but it happened so that I guess the more games I push to the platforms the better they CC me so so they end up featuring me more and more stuff like that basically basically I only it's sad but I only value the launching week the most and then I do updates up until they don't get any updates anymore so that's it any other questions so I think one of the things that I think is the key lesson I think I took from markers and from you know talked before Barris it's the this persistence is key to it this assistance but with always an eye to the lessons that are being learned from each

of the other stumbles that you have and the way you know what's the key kind of lens that you use what's a kick in a way of thinking that helps you make the call for what the next thing should be well I think yes persistence is definitely a key in what I do but I don't I don't really plan my stuff that well so I don't know what's next all the time so it's more like go with wherever you're in parishioners and ideas are and learn later and see what the Western legend was instead of going towards that so using it to sort out our case or did that yeah and then using that as a fertilizer for ideas from that point yeah yeah yeah I think it's at least for me it's been best just to kind of scout out all the opportunities whether it's your own ideas whether it's people to start a company with our platform new platforms or whatever and just pick the

one that feels right go there and see what the next chunks is Chuck junction points are gotcha [Music] you [Music]