#mochibits

It didn’t really dawn on us to make it into a real game until we decided we wanted to start using Unity. We had no 3d experience,we had no Unity experience, and we felt this game was the perfect opportunity to learn as we go. We wanted the game to have a simple structure that didn’t require a lot of graphics and content, but one that we could still make juicy. For ORBB, all it really needed some spheres and 2d textures. No other 3d assets necessary!   The “physics” model was very basic, and we could setup a simple prefab system as our template so we could quickly create levels. This was going to be easy!

Our original goal was to finish it in 3 months. We worked on a beta for 3 weeks and then showed it off at GDC. It was received well. We figured we were on the right track, but after receiving some very observant feedback on some of the levels we designed, we decided the direction we were going wasn’t true to the original core feel of our game-jam game. The original gameplay was not timed. There was no death, and the player could jump about freely at their own leisure. Half the levels of our GDC demo were quite the opposite. We had timed challenges, insta-death, and very very difficult sequences of jumps you had to do to finish a level. So we changed the focus of the game. What we came up with was a series of gameplay obstacles that did not involve time, death, or any type of hardcore twitch timing. It was beautiful. The only issue was  that we pretty much wasted a month on the other type of game. Now at the same time we were trying to figure out how to build this game and keep our original core feel, we were also debating on the various types of monetization techniques we could put in the game.  Powerups, cheats, special flying characters, extra levels, bonus stages, totally paid, paymium, ads, etc.  Those can be really be put into three categories: consumable IAP, level packs, and a paid game.  The first two being free with IAP. We weighed out each option’s positives and negatives. Consumable IAP was good because it will allow us to convert people who could potentially download the game for free, and we’ve seen decent numbers with our other games. On the other hand, adding consumables would require us to significantly change the gameplay to come up with the currency and consumable system. We decided against it. Level packs made sense, because it would allow us to release the game for free to get the most exposure and downloads. We would get really good conversion if it did as well as our other games with the same model. Having ORBB be 100% paid also made sense because we felt it was a solid game and would deliver a solid experience. We also have noticed more paid indie games get featured compared to games with free games with content as IAP. (fingers crossed) We decided to just make it paid. We felt we could promote the game, and that the game was juicy and solid enough that people would not feel ripped off for a few bucks. Back to development... We’re now about 4 months in, and we’re already getting sick of the game. Little did we know that level design sucks. At least it did for us. Even after agreeing to keep the same feel as the game-jam, our levels went this way and that way and every which way. It was tough to stay focused. It wasn’t until we had all the gameplay features and initial versions of all the levels, we were able to see the light at the end of the tunnel. 6 months of development time. Not bad right?

We started planning our launch with the help of Dana Trebella (@dtrebella). We opted not to shop ORBB around to publishers, but the thought did cross our minds. The reason we chose to go self published was because one of our goals was to start building our own brand in this younger market demographic. Our previous games were mainly doing well with the older demographic, and we wanted to branch out. October 9th, 2014. Launch day. Thanks to Dana, ORBB received some pretty good reviews from a few great app review sites. We were very excited. We even got mentioned on the Touch Arcade roundup for that week the game came out.  I put our chances of getting featured at about 50/50. By my calculations, getting featured would mean the difference between a 5 figure first month and a 3 figure first month. We didn’t get featured. We were sad, but not surprised. Now the big question is if ORBB can sell without a feature and some good blog reviews. Here is the juicy information that will give you the answer to that question! NUMBERS!

Launch day: (October 9th) Price: $2.99 Downloads: 33 Revenue: $62.42 First 2 weeks (total): Price: $2.99 Downloads: 104 Revenue: $204.94 (Note: revenue could be off because some downloads are promos)

As you can see, the numbers were very VERY bad. We hit the longtail 1 week after launch. We had hoped that even without a feature, we would be able to get 10-20 downloads a day longtail. We were lucky to get 2-3 downloads a day, if that. We knew on October 13th, only 4 days after launch that ORBB would be a monstrous financial flop for us. Ugh. As a last resort, we decided to go free on November 3rd. I sent email to a few free sites and luckily we got picked up by AppGratis.

App Gratis free feature: (November 3rd) Price: FREE Downloads: 34,308 Revenue ($0.99 after promo): $46.48 Whoa! We were really happy with the total number of worldwide downloads from the AppGratis free promo. The resulting revenue… not so much, but hey, it’s enough to treat a few people to some beer at GDC! Moving into the holidays, here is the Christmas and New Years spike (or lack thereof).

Holiday spike: Price: $0.99 Downloads: 16 Revenue: $11.16 Somehow AppTurbo caught wind of ORBB, maybe from the AppGratis promo, and they contacted us about going free sometime in January. Here are the results.

App Turbo free feature: (January 5th) Price: FREE Downloads: 30,295 Revenue ($0.99 after promo): $17.85 Another satisfactory result of a free promotion, at least for downloads. Also a few more beers for GDC. Here are the lifetime graphs for downloads and revenue for ORBB.

I know that first graph is totally useless, so here is the download graph between the two spikes.

A lot of zeros and ones! We like to do business in binary! ORBB lifetime statistics: (as of January 22nd) Total downloads: 64,777 Total revenue: $323.70 Total development time: 6 months (2 people) As you can see, this is utter destruction of any type of business model. We chose poorly. Very poorly.

In retrospect, we could have done a few things differently, but the outcome was never guaranteed.  We could have forced the 3 month development cycle, but would we be happy with the game we made? Even if we went free with IAPs, I just don’t think the game would have been interesting enough to the people who feature games. I think we would have drawn a larger indie following if it were more twitch-based, but then we would have moved away from the whole purpose of the game in our minds. Going into this whole ORBB experience, we had a few goals, and we actually achieved some of them. We wanted to make a quality gaming experience that people enjoyed. We wanted to up our Unity experience and publish something to the stores. We wanted to have a game that was polished and finished so we could actually say, “We did this!” We met all of those goals and are very happy with the results.  What makes us the happiest is that we were able to maintain a 5 star average as the result of the first free promotion, and now after the second free promotion, we still have a 4.5 star average. The reviews say a lot of good things about ORBB, and that makes us proud. We made a fun game!

Unfortunately, positive reviews don’t pay the bills. Having a well-liked game is not a guarantee. As indie game developers, we need to ship, and ship games that make money.  That is the biggest lesson we learned from ORBB. Taking a big leap into an unknown market is taking a big risk. Luckily we had the time and were doing ok with our other games to take this risk. Our advice to anyone wanting to make games or branch out to different type of games or apps is this… Define your goals and have realistic expectations. You have to honestly ask yourself questions like these: Am I making this game to flex my creative muscles, or am I trying to build a business? Do I have enough money to last through development? Do I have enough money if this game flops? How much risk can I take? If you’re willing to take risks and have the money to do it, then you can pretty much do anything you want. However, if you have a family to feed and bills to pay, you have to be responsible with your plans and expectations. For us, we learned our lesson, and we simply cannot afford to release another financial flop like this. That’s why we won’t be releasing a paid game for a while. We’ve come to the conclusion that it’s no use making a paid game if it doesn't get featured by Apple. Not that our game was worthy by any means, it just would have been nice.  I’m sure we could have made a few more revisions, beta tested the crap out of it and eventually come to something really worthy of a feature, but we had to cut our losses at some point. That point was just after 5 months of development. Thankfully, we still have our good old freemium games that keeps our blue collar indie careers going and our families taken care of. We’ll definitely be releasing a couple more freemium games in the coming months and years.

Thanks for reading!

-Kyle and Howard