#sheepingaround

While I’ve worked on games in the past, this is my first official release on the App Store, and I’m really glad to have been able to reach that goal. My previous games got stuck in infinite iteration loops and never got to see the light of the day. 

Inception

I have written in one of my previous posts how the idea of Sheeping Around was born. The idea began as a turn based (asymmetric) strategy game, and eventually turned into a card game that it is today. You can read more about it in the below two posts:

Sheeping Around Inception

Inspired by Card Thief and More

Inspirations of Sheeping Around and its inception as a physical card game

Development

I have around 8 years of experience as a Javascript developer. While I am familiar with other languages like Java and Objective-C/C++, my core expertise and speed of development is still in Javascript. Also, I had begun using TypeScript at work since mid 2017 and had loved it. Reminded me of the good ol’ Flash and Actionscript days.

When the physical version of Sheeping Around card game was proven to be fun enough, I began working on a web-based prototype version of it using Angular.js on the front-end and Node.js on the backend in the first week of November 2017. I deployed the system on Heroku on its free plan, and used Heroku Postgres as database of choice. (It was free upto 9000 rows, more than sufficient for a prototype.)

Initial prototype version of Sheeping Around

For the native mobile version of the game, I used cocos2d-x JS with TypeScript.

I pushed the code to GitHub as private repositories. I maintained separate repos for client and the server.

Multiplayer

Initially I had planned on Sheeping Around to be a solitaire card game, but it ended up being too similar to Card Thief. It wasn’t much fun anyway either. I decided to prototype a two player dueling game on paper, and it proved to be a lot of fun. I figured it would be much more challenging to handle a multiplayer game, but given my full-stack experience, I was confident I’d be able to do it anyway.

Architecture of Sheeping Around

Sketch, GraphicRiver and GUI

Around March 2018, I began working on the GUI of the game. I had recently switched my role to Product Design at my company Sumo Logic and had begun learning Sketch and loved it. I bought some assets off GraphicRiver and heavily modified a lot of them and put them together in Sketch.

All screen designs in Sketch

I wasn’t very happy with the initial designs, but towards the end of April things had started looking much better and professional.

Initial designs

Final designs

Google Indie Games Accelerator

The progress in the initial few months was somewhat slow. I spent time refining the balance of the game and tweaking the progression. Meanwhile I was also designing some UI for the native mobile version of the game.

By the end of June 2018, Google announced the first ever Indie Games Accelerator for games made in South East Asia. The submission deadline was July, so I started rapidly working on the mobile version for Android and iterating it really fast. By mid of July, I had the gameplay fully functional. By the end of it, I had the entire progression system and marketplace fully set up. 

Some charts from the progression and reward system of the game inspired mainly by Pokemon

While I was not selected for the accelerator program, it did help me accelerate the game development process anyway and I am thankful to the accelerator program for that.

Art and Animation

I discuss a lot about art style with Rashi, and we had finalized that the characters would be anthro. Check out some concept art and final artwork for some of the characters below:

I really loved the idea of in-card animations in Card Thief, and wanted to have something similar in my game as well. I was fortunate enough to run into Robinson Millaguin in the Indie Game Developers Facebook group. He began his work on animating some of the initial cards in Spine and my mind was blown already. Check out the video below:

You can see more of the animation GIFs on the official website for Sheeping Around.

Tragicomic Theme and Music

I had contracted someone for music, but it did not sound so fitting. It was very difficult to decide what kind of music would fit this game because it was such a unique premise. I started scouting out for tracks on AudioJungle. Farms are usually associated with country music, but I had ruled it out completely. Western style music with gut guitars and ukuleles are a close second choice associated with farm themes. Somehow that style didn’t fit either, and sounded rather cowboy-ish. 

I explored all kinds of genres of music and tried to see if they fit in the game. Finally, I found that the music in Comedy genre seemed to be the most fitting. I stumbled upon the profile of AudioAgent, who had an amazing portfolio of comedy tracks. His tracks are tragicomic themed, and coincidentally, he kept adding more tracks in the genre as the game progressed.

The game now features a total of 9 comedy audio tracks by AudioAgent. (The tracks change every 10 levels.)

You can check out the tracks in the below Youtube playlists:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1Ajh9Cn23k&list=PLnTakDx63B8L0pBpjPD10VB3NJEcXj2l4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXeq713R444&list=PLnTakDx63B8IS3hr4Sd-tnZXgu5vCIoi6

Sound

I had already made a list of suitable sounds from AudioJungle, but it was from a variety of artists and didn’t seem to fit together. I was not sure if I should hire a sound designer for the project. I figured it would be a good idea to ask around anyway.

I am active on Twitter in the gamedev community, and I found Elise Kates’ profile there. She had done some amazing work in the past for games like Moss, and I thought she’d be a good candidate to help me out with the sound. And it was a great decision afterall. The sound effects added the finishing touches to the polish in the game and really brought the characters to life!

Putting It All Together

I’m glad I’ve been able to put all of this together in a single package. The pun in the name, gameplay mechanics, art, animation, sound and music all come together really well. It would be perhaps be one of my proudest achievement since it is an important skillset to have.

Translation, Screenshots, Trailer and Preview Videos

In December, I took help from the Indie Game Localization community to get the game translated in 12 languages. It was an overwhelming amount of work, about 5000 words. I maintained separate Google Sheets for each language.

But what was harder was designing screenshots and preview videos and localizing them into all languages. But it did pay off eventually because it got the game featured in most of the regions that I had localized for.

Check out the preview video below:

Robinson helped in creating a landscape trailer for the game as well, since Android needs a landscape video regardless of whether the game is landscape or not. it was more of a theatrical trailer that served as an introduction to the premise of Sheeping Around and dab a little bit into its gameplay:

Freemium, Premium or Paymium?

The hardest decision for me to take was whether to go premium or freemium (or paymium), and if premium, what would be the price point of the game. Early on I had decided that the game would be premium on iOS and free-to-play on Android, given how easy piracy is on Android (more on piracy in the Piracy section below). I had thought of keeping the game’s price to $4.99, as I had read that Card Crawl had recently upped its price to $4.99 from $2.99 and it increased their month-on-month sales by more than 2x. Turns out, it won’t work very well during release when both developer and the game are new to the market and there are no ratings and reviews. This is also why my day 2 sales were more than day 1 sales, when I dropped the price to $2.99.

My game also has in-app purchases, and most people object to the idea of IAPs in a premium game. But if you look at the top paid charts in the card game category (or even any other category for that matter), you will find that more than 70% of the games have IAPs. This model is called paymium on mobile platforms, and has only recently entered the debate alongside freemium and premium. In the PC world, most games are paid, and the concept of DLCs is fairly normal and accepted, so I don’t understand what the issue with IAPs in premium mobile games is about.

Besides, the IAPs in Sheeping Around aren’t your typical in-your-face popups that appear at the end of every game to give you a reward or to increase your life. They are subtle, just two coin packs that you can buy if need be. You probably won’t need to though.

Pre-orders and the Coming Soon Feature

I set the game to be available for preorder on 31st December 2018. That would make my first new years’ resolution to be to release this game. I set Thursday, 17th Jan as the release date. That is because App Store refreshes every Thursday and it would get greater number of days in visibility if it gets featured then. (Most features last at least a week.)

That is also when I also submitted my game and my story to Apple via App Store’s promote link, hoping to get featured.

On January 5, the game got featured in the Coming Soon section, and it started getting a little spike in pre-orders. From 1-2 per day to around 25-30 per day. On January 20, the game got featured in a lot more territories, including US, UK, South Africa, Middle East, Australia and New Zealand. I netted about 250 pre-orders from this feature. But it turns out that in some places, since Apple lets you preorder without having a linked credit card, they would fail to be billed on release of the game. Because of this, only about 200 pre-orders went through successfully. App store still shows -1/-2 net preorders days after the game’s release.

New Games We Love & Top Charts

Upon release, the game was featured in “New Games We Love” in US, China and the Greater China Area (HK, Macau, Taiwan), South-East Asia, India, UK, Europe, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand. It also went on to become #3 card game in US (iPhone) during launch and stayed between #3-#5 during the first week. In China, which is the second biggest market for me, the highest it went was #9 in card games. (Competition is quite high in that category there, with most paid games priced at ¥1 ($0.15).)

I especially love the words UK editorial team used to describe the game in Games We Love.

Reception

The reviews so far have been positive, with occasional negative reviews talking about some bugs, most of which I have fixed in the week after release. Here are the current reviews and ratings stats for the game so far:

US: 4.6 / 5 (56 ratings, 32 reviews) China: 4.3 / 5 (41 ratings, 23 reviews) Thailand: 4.7 / 5 (15 ratings, 11 reviews) Germany: 4.0 / 5 (11 ratings, 6 reviews) Russia: 4.6 / 5 (8 ratings, 7 reviews) UK: 3.7 / 5 (6 ratings, 4 reviews)

Some encouraging reviews:

“I’ve only played this game for 20 minutes, and I love it already. The creativity, the idea, everything about this game is just beyond my expectations, and I can only assume how addicting this game will be.”

“It a really good game. You should make a physical card game for this game. I really like it and it’s definitely worth buying it.”

“Don’t really review apps, let alone end up playing one a day or two after I started. But this one... this one got me hooked! It’s fairly simple gameplay but sometimes it gets pretty exciting.”

“Pre-ordered it, I've played Card Monsters since release & Hearthstone for 4 years & this game is very solid & entertaining.”

“I think this game is another new twist to a card game, I can definitely see potential for this game. I can’t wait for the next update, hopefully with some new cards to use.”

“This game is family oriented and so easy to play. It has the simplicity of UNO yet with enough strategy to keep you engage but not overwhelmed. This is highly addictive and fun to play. The element of luck is always a factor but how to use the cards given is the key. The games are short but competitive. Those who love card/card battle games should download this without hesitation! Kudos! Look forward to updates to see what you guys come up with next!”

DAUs, Screen Time and Retention Rate

I use Tableau for my data visualization needs, and have custom graphs and dashboards created for all kinds of metrics. 27% of the players have played the game for at least one hour, which is quite encouraging. 4.5% of the players have been addicted and have played for more than 5 hours. I’ve been seeing an average DAU of around 750 and average total session time of over 450 hours. Not that it matters much for a premium game, but I’m tracking it anyway. In terms of retention, my day 7 retention is about 10%, which isn’t so bad. I will give it more time to see what my day 30 retention is.

Press Coverage and Critic Reviews

I had mailed a lot of media sites and YouTubers to review the game. A lot of them covered the game. Thanks to the localization effort, the game was featured in a lot of foreign language blogs. 

Specifically Pocket Gamer and Pocket Tactics wrote about the game. The review from Pocket Tactics was negative with a 2.0 / 5 rating, and from Pocket Gamer was somewhat above average at 3.5 / 5 rating. Pocket Tactics review, though negative, gave me a chuckle because of their words of choice.

You can check them out here:

Pocket Gamer: A surprisingly tense, exciting and fun card battler that doesn’t quite have the tactical depth for the long haul.

Pocket Tactics: Sheeping Around looks the part, but sadly the game turns out to be as dull as you would expect for a game based on an animal that stands around in a field all day chewing grass.

The criticism though has been pretty good in these reviews, and I will add more content and depth in the future updates to address the weaknesses they have mentioned.

Piracy

One thing I wanted to point out was that about 25% of the users of Sheeping Around are using a pirated version. I was under the impression that it would be very hard to pirate an iOS game, because it would need jailbreaking and it isn’t very easy to jailbreak your iOS device. Turns out I was very wrong. There are pirated App Stores like AppEven that you can install on your device, and you can install premium iOS games for free using those stores. You don’t need to jailbreak your phone and the whole process is dead simple. Turns out these folks are abusing Enterprise App certificates for ad-hoc app distribution, and Apple hasn’t been paying much attention to them. 

Within about two minutes, I was able to download a pirated version of my own game from AppEven. It even added its own ads that pop up once every few minutes that bring revenue to the owners of the pirated app store. It made me a little sad, but that’s the way it is. No matter how many attempts you make to prevent piracy in your app, the hackers will have a workaround to bypass it. They can remove the code in your app that prevents piracy, replace your ads with their own. It is their daily business.

Promotional Artwork

For games that Apple finds worthy of promotion using a banner feature or on the Today page, Apple requests developers for promotional artwork. I got this request last Monday and I submitted the artwork by Wednesday. The game hasn’t gotten a banner feature or Game of the Day yet, so I can only hope it will happen one day in the future.

By The Numbers

And finally, the moment you’d been waiting for. Sales. Sheeping Around was able to break even about 50% of its outsourcing costs (art, animation and sfx) in 10 days since launch. 

The top 2 territories where the game made some decent revenue are US and China, followed by Germany and UK.

What’s next?

I’m already working on some new cards that add more variety to the gameplay. These include:

Bonus cards

Peek - Look at the opponent’s hand. 

Undo - Undo the opponent’s last move. It can also potentially undo a stolen or whistled sheep.

Lucky Pendant - Draw half the number of cards in your hand (rounded off).

Shepherd cards

Fence N (N = 2, 3, 4) - Build a fence around all sheep preventing any of them from being stolen for N turns.

Electric Fence N (N = 2, 3) - Build an electric fence around all sheep preventing any of them from being lured or stolen for N turns.

Quarantine N (N = 1, 2, 3) - Cure all sheep of Infestation or Intoxication by N turns.

Vaccinate N (N = 3, 4) - Prevent Infestation or Intoxication on all sheep for the next N turns.

Thief cards

Infest N (N = 2, 3, 4) - Infest all sheep with pests to prevent them from being whistled for N turns.

Intoxicate N (N = 2, 3) - Intoxicate sheep to prevent them from being grazed or whistled for N turns.

Thrash N (N = 1, 2, 3) - Damage a Fence or an Electric Fence and reduce its value by N turns.

Termites (N = 3, 4) - Spread termites to prevent building a Fence or an Electric Fence for the next N turns.

Changes to existing cards

Rescue N (N = 1, 2, 3) - Reduce the effect of Trap, Infestation or Intoxication by N turns on one sheep.

Distract N (N = 1, 2, 3) - Reduce the effect of Guard, Fence or Electric Fence by N turns on one sheep.

You can already add an ally that unlocks at Lv. 20 to the game. Future updates may include upto 5 allies in total:

Shepherd’s side

Beaver - Jack Kim (Lv. 10)

Llama - Fuzzy Wumpkins (Lv. 20)

Sheepdog - Casper Cloud (Lv. 30)

Emu - Emily McCoy (Lv. 40)

Donkey - Muriel Miller (Lv. 50)

Thief’s side

Raven - Merlin Kook (Lv. 10)

Eagle - Cradoc McClaw (Lv. 20)

Coyote - Roxy Fang (Lv. 30)

Badger - Agent Chaos (Lv. 40)

Bear - Boris Rockpaw (Lv. 50)

Additional Features I’ll also be working on some features like: - Expressions and dialogs - Offline mode vs AI - Pass and play multiplayer - Quests

Conclusion

Sheeping Around was a fun project, and unlike my other shelved projects, it saw the light of the day, and it is a proud achievement for me in that regard. For the past 14 months, I’ve worked part-time at a consistent pace on this project (and full time for a few months). Especially as a solo developer being able to develop a PvP multiplayer game where people in US can battle people in China with servers located in London, I think it is a great feat.

Bug Fixes

There were quite a few bugs on release, some of which were show-stopping, and made me release a Day 1 patch. For now, all the critical bugs are fixed, but here is a list of what bugs happened and:

IAPs not working at all: The IAPs would be charged but not be applied. This was the craziest bug of them all, which I got to know from a user who tried to hack the game to get IAPs for free. I got an error report for that, and when I checked, I found the real issue instead. He was the first person to download the game on release, and I fixed the issue fast enough so no damage was done.

Game Center randomly fails to log in 5-10% of users: People who could not log in using Game Center could not play the game at all. I fixed this by adding a fallback to anonymous login, but those folks could not edit their nickname.

Unable to edit nicknames: People who were unable to log in to Game Center could not edit their nickname. I added the feature to edit your nickname recently.

Problems with matchmaking and high dropouts at initial levels: People who had just started playing the game took a while to understand the rules and took a long time to play their turns and also quit midway. So for the initial few levels, I modified the game to always match against AI, until people are trained well enough to go battling PvP.

Bug with IAP price formatting in certain regions: For some places that use commas instead of periods for decimal places, the formatting logic for IAP prices was broken, and showed EUR€ 349,00 as the IAP price, when the actual price was EUR €3,49. This was crazy.

Empty hand: Sometimes people would start with an empty hand or with fewer than 5 cards in their hand. This was due to latency issues with the server, some of the events were missed.

Players wanting to play as Shepherd got Thief instead: Matchmaking now ensures that you are matched only with people who want to play as the opposite side.

Empty leaderboard / Long time to load leaderboard: This is now optimised, by adding a Redis caching layer on the backend for the leaderboard.

Players lose their coins / experience earned after a game: A very ugly bug, caused by many possible scenarios, especially when the opponent disconnects or times out, most of which have now been fixed.

Making a multiplayer game single handedly is hard, and while there were some show-stoppers, I’m glad they were fixed quickly, and not a lot of damage was done.

New Cards

As mentioned in the previous post, there are some new cards planned for future updates. Here’s a sneak peak at one of the new card called “Termites”:

This card works on the Thief’s side as a counter to Shepherd’s Fence and Electric Fence cards.

Effect: Spread termites to prevent building a Fence or an Electric Fence for the next N turns.

Features and Promos

I got a mail from Apple requesting feature graphics one week after release. It asked for banner graphics and Today page graphics (Game of the Day). I submitted them both by the deadline and the game was featured for a week in India. It did not get a Game of the Day, at least not so far.

Unfortunately, India is not my target market, and this banner feature got me just one sale throughout the week. Despite being the topmost banner, it was rather disappointing to see this stat. I expected at least a handful of sales. I even lowered the price to 90% down just for a day, just to see how it performed, and that is when it actually got that one sale.

Perhaps the banner wasn’t lucrative enough, but that cannot be right either, because people did click on the banner and did not convert after landing on the product page. 

The game was also featured under “Pay Once and Play” for quite a long time, and it still is, as of writing this article in Thailand, Singapore and Vietnam. I’m getting a few sales from Thailand almost everyday, where it is still #6 in card games. In other countries, the game has vanished from almost all charts.

Android Release and Pricing

I released on Android two weeks after the release on iOS. It is free to play on Android, but because of lack of any marketing on that side, it isn’t doing so well there. It was perhaps a bad idea to launch as an iOS exclusive initially. Had the game been launched on Android to begin with, perhaps some of the audience could have spilled over to Android and gained some traction there.

This is a learning for my next game. As an indie, the game should be released on all supported platforms at the same time so that if the game gets featured on one platform, other platforms can get the spillover effect. A lot of people asked me when Android version would come out when the iOS version was released, and when it did come out, perhaps a lot of them had already forgotten about it. Attention moves fast in the mobile games world.

Also, a free to play game requires a lot of metrics like retention and life-time value to justify ad spend to acquire customers. Those metrics weren’t high enough for Sheeping Around. It would’ve been better to have the game as premium on Android as well, perhaps that way it could’ve performed a little better monetarily. Also, the paid charts are easier to climb than free to play charts, so that’s another advantage too.

I was worried that if the Android version gains a lot of traction, it might cloud the servers and affect gameplay of people who paid for the game. But now that I look back, I realize it is a good problem to have. I had setup my server to scale horizontally anyway as per the demand, and it was already handling 1000+ players playing per day easily during the peak, it could have easily scaled to handle 10k+ users per day as well.

As for the issue of piracy, it could have been avoided by validating purchase receipts of all users on the server. 

Thoughts on Genre Mixing

Sheeping Around is a PvP card game with a different setting from rest of the PvP card games. Sometimes different isn’t really all that better. Sometimes its a lot about what your audience wants.

Some games mix two genres and do pretty well. Slay the Spire mixed deck-building and rogue-like sub-genres and did really well. The recent trend on mobile has been puzzle RPGs and puzzle PvP battle games, and while I’m not a big fan of them, they seem to be doing really well with the market.

Sheeping Around wasn’t exactly a mix of two genres, but it had one important shift from the norm that perhaps caused it to perform not so well compared to the others in the genre. It was a card game, that caters to the niche of people who enjoy thought provoking games, but it had casual graphics - the kind loved by people who enjoy idle games and puzzle games. So because of this theme and premise, the audience of the game reduced to an intersection of players who enjoyed a thought provoking game with casual graphics. 

This can be proven by the really low conversion rate of the game during its launch week. Even during the time when I did a lowest price sale, the conversion rate only went as high as 0.8%. On average it loomed at 0.3-0.4%. I guess a lot of factors like visibility and the developer’s popularity matter here, but comparing it to others games in the Card game genre, it didn’t do so good.

For the uninitiated, the conversion rate I’m talking about is the percentage of people who bought the game amongst all the people who visited the product page that day.

This was true for my last game as well. My previous game Spellbound, when put up for Greenlight on Steam a few years ago, was a genre-mix of word games and adventure games. When you mix two genres like that, especially when one of the genres is obscure, your audience reduces to a small intersection of players. Especially for word games, it reduces only to people who can speak English well. I had realized this and eventually shelved the game. Perhaps I will work on it some time in the future, but only as a hobby project.

This was proven by the fact that despite the greenlight, the game got around 70% No votes.

Sales

The sales of Sheeping Around haven’t been as good as the launch week. And it will never be, since a game’s launch is like the blockbuster weekend, and any sales that happen thereafter will always be (much) lower than that.

Currently, the game has been making about $5-10 per day. At the current pace, I foresee the game to recover its outsourcing costs in more than a year. Not a very encouraging picture.

Closing Thoughts

While the game didn’t do well financially, it is encouraging to have some fans who love playing the game and give up to 7 hours playing the game each day. 

Cheers to purplesky7836, who has spent a lot of time in the game. He has played 851 games and won 606 of them. There are no new cards unlocked after Lv. 50, so the incentive to play further goes away, but I’m glad to still see the players enjoying the core gameplay and continuing forward nevertheless.

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