🧙 Solo Dev Journey #1: How to start with UA? From a store link to a LIVE UA Campaigns

just reached out to Yakub and said, "Thank you very much, guys, for putting out the content. It's very helpful because thanks to you guys, I'm able to spend and grow the game from 0 to $25,000 per month. And now it's actually growing to 50,000 per month. And I'm a solo developer. I'm doing everything by myself. And this video is exactly for you." It's 4 a.m. and we're rolling the dice. [music] My day drops knowledge made of golden eyes. Felix with ads making those coins rise. Check up designs worlds chasing the sky with the two and a half gamers the midnight [music] crew talking UA advers and game design too. Mat feeling shak bringing the insight. We're rocking those vibes till the early daylight [music] master eyes on the prize. Tracking data through the cyerspace skies. Felix stacks colors [music] like a wizard in disguise. Jacks lift us to the high. Two and a half gamers talking smack. Slow hockey thick got your back. Ads are beautiful. They light the way. Click it fast. Don't [music] delay. Uh-huh. Uh-huh.

Aha. [music] [music] Hello everybody. My name is Mate Lantich and this is a solo episode. A few of you and by a few I mean a lot of you actually reached out about my developer journey and how is it fun to follow. Okay, in that case I have a video for you because I had this interesting case on Monday. So I launched a new game to give you a little bit of context. This is the game and it's called one mage army and one of my developers pretty much finished everything I wanted him to do and now I I had a game with singular implemented with ad monetization implemented and ready to go. But all of my motion

designers and the playable guys were busy with working on the client's client job. So okay now what to do? So before we go into the the actual UA stuff, let me just go over a few things that were very much necessary before I necessary to implement before I added this game to the production. So here, so this is the this is the game. It was in the in the development for some time. Anyway, so I had to add all the different networks obviously from Unity, Google, integral, meta, moangle, lift of plavin exchange which is already there anyway. So all of these connectors had to be in place and also this had to be in place as well. So singular I'm using singular for for all my games for my apps. I'm using arbridge but this was pretty much the case for for starting. So what I had to do is pretty much go and set up all the

necessary connections. So here and by the way this is Android only for now but iOS is already worked on and it's going to be live within next couple weeks. So first of all attribution setting Facebook added ad monetization impression events and IP events as a mobile purchase and some engagement events as well. Let me see. Okay, so we have first lever victory like until level six hero unlock all of the pretty much I would say first session events. So I need to add more because I will let I will show you like what I'm actually doing right now in terms of the campaigns. Okay, so this is this is done auto monetization is in place. I want to do apploing campaign and Facebook campaign, but I don't have any creatives. So, that's a problem. And I only have my store page, no assets, nothing else. And I think since since Yakob was on the games forum this week,

he he said like some of you just reached out to Yakub and said, "Thank you very much guys for putting on the content. It's very helpful because thanks to you guys and us guys being two and a half gamers, I'm able to spend and grow the game from zero to $25,000 per month. And now it's actually growing to 50,000 per month. And I'm a solo developer. I'm doing everything by myself. And this video is exactly for you. Okay, this episode is brought to you by Potencus. And if you're a mobile game publisher tired of leaving money on the table, listen up. Potencus is a premium ad network built by people who have actually been on both sides of this industry. Game publishers, agencies, successful exits. So, they get it. Here's the thing. Potencus has direct deals with Amazon, Apple, Coca-Cola, Vodafon. It's not programmatic. It's direct. Those budgets land in your game at premium CPMs. No middlemanex. And

they handle everything with their in-house team in terms of the critics. Plus, they've partnered with playable maker wing. So, they will take brands YouTube videos or static images and actually turned into playable ad or revert video. Proper interactive format built for gaming inventory. Brands getting a gaming native creative publishers are getting a higher CPMs. Everyone wins. Head to potencus.com to get started or check their creative portfolio in the link in the show notes. Thank you very much Potencus for sponsoring this episode and the this category of people that you have one game, you don't have a creative team, you don't necessarily have the expertise to do all of the all of the stuff around this. So that's why I'm kind of bringing this my recent kind of case study, let's call it case study or experience to you guys. So we have all of this. So now what? Well, I don't even have a game play. And it's actually very

bizarre because this is only Android and I have iOS. So, well, if I need to just, you know, exaggerate it quite a lot. I don't really have the gameplay. The game play doesn't exist on the on the internet. I I search YouTube. It's a very small game. Nobody knows about it. So, I went here and thanks to my friends at Layer AI, I was able to create so many different videos that don't really use any types of gameplay. So, let me just zoom out a little bit. And this is crazy. One hell of a hell of a board for one mage army. So, I started here and then pretty much, let me just actually scroll from the very be very beginning. So this was on the right hand side my first and only message to the to the agent. I put the link. I have a new game. I need to create a videos for user acquisition for this game. There you go.

So I then I immediately got this one video but honestly 12 second video. It's not 2014 anymore. So I need 59 second videos similar to this one. So create a storyboard and pretty much here's the context, right? So I put all all the information in here and it's it's not that much information to be honest. So you know if it's life fantasy survival mer game it's more like a let's call it tower defense but this is fine all the information outline like store look 2D cartoon chibi beige ro mage whatever this is it and then since from like this we had an interesting discussion so certain building ass generation and whatnot and I I'm going to go through all of this but uh we can actually try to do this again if If we go and try a new session. So we have a new session. So what do we want to do? Prompt ID as well. It's still the case.

Here's the here is my here's my link. So I have this game. I need to create three videos with those for UA in 59 second blank. keep the niche style of let's say art style of the game based on the store visuals and let's let's do one let's do one more and this focus on storydriven creatives showcasing one mage versus horde of zombies for example So let's see let's see what we're going to get. And again this is I've already done this and I can I can show you in a second how it's actually how it was actually working on on the different boards that I already have

because I have so many things there. So I started let's we can go here. So I pretty much started with few videos again no game play nothing just story driven videos. So I can show you. I think this one is the the final video because yes. So here we have the video and honestly this is the best performing video that I have on on Facebook and even on app login right now. And as you might have noticed like everything is AI. It's not perfect. And I'm pretty sure like if I show if I did this for any of my clients like they will say oh my god like what the are we talking about? like this is terrible but and you know like I don't care honestly I need to work with what I have and this is exactly the the example where you can see that doesn't really matter that much you need to show something and you need to you know show these videos to your to your

audience and you need to have a ton of them so for the first batch I created like see I mean it's again like it's not perfect but perfect is in this stage it's very relative and I would rather have like 10 of these types of videos than one perfect video because again these days is all about volume and diversity. So then I created pretty much video like this and we have so many. The fun part is that this looks actually like a game play, but everything was created by AI. So it did I didn't touch it at all with any of my motion designers. So you need to you need to understand that. So I have suddenly out of all of these again not perfect quite close to the game but not really the game videos. So and this is 30 seconds. We have more 59 second videos that layer created out of my

just store page link and that's it. So we have all of these and then I was like okay well so I have I have I can show you cuz then I added it in directly into the campaigns and I created so one two three four five six seven eight nine videos for the for the start. So you already saw this one. You already saw this one, right? Perfect. Then I created this this video with an voice over and again like the theme is pretty much. Yes. So I can I should I should actually show you the videos right here because I was sharing the the other the other page. show this is this is a video that I also created voice over against the same style 59 second video multiple different clips again so this is this is one then I have another one which is kind of similar but not exactly the same but again like the theme you

can you can kind of get then I think this is my favorite one again this is the one that I showed you just just recently but with the headlines and more more elements in there again 60-cond video. This one is yeah the best performer that I said that last video last wizard layer story. Check obviously we have another one. So again like I think you can get the idea no game play only AI and the theme is or like the the story is around the game. So it's I don't want to say it's fake. It's not fake. It is actually the setting of the video then. Okay. But I also need playables if I want to go and actually actually start an uploading campaign. So I was like okay well thank god thanks god I have playable maker.
So I told my boss I made [music] a playable app with playable maker and he said to me what language did you code it

in? And I said I don't know with playable maker [music] all you do is drag drop click and it does it all for you. So he again he said, "What language did you make it in?" And I went, "I don't know, [music] English." At the end of the day, as long as a playable maker does it all for you, why do you care? It's just like magic. And I have still there. So I have multiple different playables from from Playable Maker right here combined with with an actual videos. I also created one. Yes. So that this is one video that I created and also different playables different playables with just layer and sprites that I actually added into the into the layers. I can show you here. So I added all the sprites from the game here and therefore I was able to create like I think I have now like 10 different playables. I created the first two just for for the testing and now I actually iterated on the the the next

seven so I can I can use them. So, I'm keeping them in the in the back pocket when uh the time is right, which is going to be in the end of this week or maybe early next week or during the during weekend. We'll see. Depends on the numbers, obviously. Uh then I would just add them into the into the campaign. And honestly, I was expecting Applamin to be absolutely amazing and killing it from the get- go, and it's the other way around. It sucks, but oh my god, it's so terrible. The campaign started with like $60 CPI or something. Okay, let me just show you. Yes, let's do let's do this. Yes. Wow. No, seven. Interesting. Yeah, this is this is it. So, so 7 was already the the good case scenario on see it was 30 on Sunday and

then finally it dropped to to five and then it's kind of kind of dropping or just kind of dancing around seven which is still quite a lot but now this 3.6 six is something that that I'm definitely definitely want to see. And ideal scenario is it's going to be even lower than than that and it's going to be anywhere near near two. But again, like I've done this before multiple times, so I know I should not panic. But since it's my own money, I'm was kind of panicking a little bit on the on the day one and day two day two. But I know like I I need to stay calm and then just kind of optimize towards the towards the the profit eventually. The thing is like I I I added blended RS campaigns for worldwide because the c the uh the game is right now I think 40% and 60% pinup ads but I also I mean I also added a couple of days ago US ads campaign just to test and just to see like what can we actually get from from

up campaign. But if we want to go back to actually Facebook and how I started there, it was very different from what I usually do because I mean I usually have a long soft launch. I know what I'm I'm getting like which what kind of numbers and what kind of campaigns as well. So first of all I wanted to get at least some some data in. So I wanted to go and create worldwide campaign for purchase. Well funnily enough I didn't have purchase yet in the dropown menu. So I was like, hm, okay, well that's that sucks. But then what do I have here? So I had the ad impression event available because I mean it's usually quite easy to to record that event within the the installs you have because you need still to this event to appear in in singular to be able to get it here and what blah blah blah blah. Anyway, so getting back to this, I added the ad impression event and started a small campaign on Sunday and then quickly on

on Monday, I started getting some results. So pretty much I even had a purchase. Woohoo. Anyway, so I think that was the the case where I actually want could start the the purchase campaign later. Anyway, so 18 cents I got so many different I mean installs. Thank god it's 200 installs enough for me to pause the campaign and start actually running and achieve event. So if you remember I showed you the the singular events and this is a level five achievement. So I started this and honestly it started to produce an interesting results in terms of the the the installs right away even the purchasers which is surprising because this is not a purchase campaign but most mostly pretty good CPI. So, I started getting an interesting amount of installs and ad revenue of course as well from from this campaign which allowed me to do purchase campaign for tier one. And I'm going to do a video

campaign later when I have enough purchases for for worldwide as well just to get more installs, more purchases from the whole world pretty much. And this is how it looks like in terms of the of the of the achieve level campaign. So, I'm 10 10 IPM 13 IPM. That's very solid. 90 cent CPIs and this campaign is pretty much tier one which I'm going to show you what it is actually 10% it's again it's not a lot. This is not scaled game but it's not the case and it's not the purpose right now. The the whole purpose was to get some data in so I know like what I actually have in my hands. And if we go here and then just to a country level country level breakdown we have Australia, Germany, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, UK and US where pretty much Germany is killing it and the rest is is okay. But again this is achievement level campaign. So this is not the case to actually measure the ROS on the

purchase side but also just to get more installs in to see how the the retention looks like to see what kind of ad revenue I can get. And then as soon as I was able to actually see that I can do the the purchase campaign then I went immediately for the purchase campaign especially for these tier one countries because that's where the money is. And even now with 150 per day budget like three three euro CPI is not bad even f well Germany Japan is quite nice US is 4.5 keep in mind these are like the very first batch of videos that I've done in layer for and I was working on this for maybe an hour and a half for 10 videos. So this is the first batch. So here's where we are starting and from here it can only get better only get better. So that's that's the whole message. So anyway, so this is what we did or well what I did and there's plenty of stuff

that what I want to do next which I say which I said I don't even have Firebase in the game yet. Well, it is there but it's not working. So the next step for me would be to go check the Firebase, set up Google Google Ads campaigns and then just run hybrid campaigns for the worldwide and obviously some tier one countries as well. So if we go and see here which one is the best performing video, it's the last wizard is this one again. So the message is it doesn't really need to look that great. It just needs to be there and have you just need to have a lot of different different videos within the the campaign. Let's go back here to layer because now since the last wizard was the best performing video I went here and said look you know what see I need it three iterations the same ar direction more like different colors a little bit and the the twist or the plot twist should be slightly different but

we already have some some videos right here. So, we have so many so many videos already that I want to I want to try and add here. And if and I also have a lot of I mean besides a lot of sprites, there's a lot of a lot of playables in here as well. So, this is all like six different playables with very different uh visual style as well. So, if let's see. Yeah, let me know what you think. Hopefully this was helpful and yeah, I will be documenting my dev journey for sure with you guys and make your life easier because I mean that's what this is all about. Stay two and a half steps ahead of the industry and see you later guys. Cheers. Bye-bye.