#dotsandboxes

The coolest version of Dots and Boxes by 300Mind is live, this blog will give you a brief introduction of what these updates are from features, themes, and more.

I noticed Dots and Boxes (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.timekey.dotsnboxes) is now ranked #2 in searches for ‘Dots and Boxes’ and #1 in searches for ‘Squares’, which has gone up.

It’s a strange nostalgic experience looking down the search rankings, and seeing all the versions of dots and boxes that were my main competitors when the app was first launched (which was 4.5 ish years ago) way down in the search listings, and to be competing with a whole new set of apps. It’s an experience somewhat akin to facebook stalking old friends you knew once upon a time, and observing how much times change.

Revenue

Dots and Boxes has been making £1-£2 a day in ad money over the past week or so. I’m not sure if this is due to it being the christmas holidays, or due to it now being #2 in the search rankings, but it’s gone up.

When I was at school, and didn’t really appreciate the value of money to the same extent I do now, I used to think it was really impressive and cool to be making this much money, but in real life terms it’s really not that great, even for a passive income.

I’ve read stories about people making £100+ a day passive income, living off advertising money from their blog, etc, which seems to be in a whole different world entirely to the kind of revenue I’m making, and seems to be a relatively common occurrence.

I need to get round to putting full screen adverts in the game that show up 50% of the time after a game is won/lost. I also need to get round to putting an in app purchase in the game that removes the adverts, which involves interfacing with google apis, and a whole lot of testing. *Hopefully* when these 2 things are done I should be making at least double, if not triple, that figure.

Known Bugs

Bluetooth in game is kind of buggy to set up - it requires pairing, which is clunky, and all the code for getting bluetooth to work was lifted straight from an official android bluetooth sample project and adapted until it worked, so it doesn’t have the same look and feel about it as the rest of the game. It’s not smooth and consistent, it’s just kind of tacked on.

I worked on a wrapper around the android bluetooth library that was part of my game engine, and interfaced with the UI classes i was making, quite a while ago. This worked with pairless bluetooth, which was much better and smoother for implementation in a game.

I should finish working on this, and implement this bluetooth wrapper in Dots and Boxes.

There are a couple of other minor bugs/crashes that have been reported in the android developer console which I should get round to fixing and release an update for.

Too much to do, Too little time

I’ve also been considering making a suite of apps similar to Dots and Boxes: that is, simple, commonly played ‘classic’ games, for example 4 in a row, tic tac toe, sudoku, etc. 

Each of these games would take approximately 1 to 2 months maximum to create, so I could potentially get between 6 to 12 of them published in a years time, and if they did as well as Dots and Boxes, that would multiply my passive income by between 6 and 12, which would be financially nice, especially considering that games like this can continue to make passive income for years. But there are a lot of ‘ifs’ there.

It would be a very different strategy to take than what I am currently doing, which is working on a few big, quite complex games which will take many months each to complete, the current one being Xargus.

I’ve been reading about lots of game developer failure stories, including a great deal apps which are very high quality/polish which have made almost no money; and this is reaffirming fears I hold that Xargus will not make money, and that the amount of effort and polish I put into Xargus will not correlate with how much money it makes, but that luck will play a significant role.

Not that game development, for me, is primarily about making money, I might add. Rather, I kinda need money, and game development is a way of making money as well as being fun/rewarding in itself - 2 birds with one stone. Resulting finance is also as good an external measure as any of how well the project has done at the end.