DEV Community

Alexandr K for Balconygames

Posted on • Updated on

[GameDev] Crystal Blast - The Recent Update

Hi everyone!

Since the last time we didn't have a lot time to work but we are still working in free time in gamedev industry. Hope it would become profitable in the future :)

We finally published the game in App Store market and Google Play the recent updates.

Notes about the well known issues for us:

  • Marketing is hard :) it's really impossible to promote the games without the buying ads. Huge money flow for Google and Apple to boost the games to the top of the search or trending. Tried to contact two publishers but it looks like game play of our Crystal Blast game is not attractive as Hyper Casual trends these days. For now we have just tried to boost specific country with low cost per install and use specific descriptions to give a try to become top#5 in google play searches. Google Play store is working good enough but it's hard to target audience by specific attributes comparing with facebook ads.
  • Unity helps a lot to develop the games but cross platform doesn't mean it would be really easy to support game center, google play services, push notifications and so on.
  • Google Firebase is great, out of the box BigQuery integration on plan Pay as You Go. Easily save queries to analyze the traffic, data studio is great as well, everyone could build charts based on data source from BigQuery.
  • Microsoft appcenter.ms is really great as well to make the distributions for testers via fastlane from the local machine. But for now it's impossible to distribute Android Bundles that's major change in Google Play since 1 August. Azure Application Insights is great as well but for now it's much harder to review events comparing with Firebase and DataStudio. But I am still giving chance for both platforms.
  • appcenter.ms is missing good support for push notifications campaigns but in the same time Firebase has predictions on churn, not churn users and it's much easy to setup notifications for target audience.
  • CloudOnce is wonderful unity plugin to have support of Play Game Services and Game Center. it's easy to write own provider if you decide to use with Amazon or Chinese market.

I would appreciate for any feedback about the game.

P.S.: Looking for game art designer to join to our team ( no profit for now :) ) it's a lot of fun and possible opportunity to grow together.

Continue to collect the notes :0

Google Play
App Store

Top comments (0)