The authors of Bring Me Cakes: "the time has passed when the feature sold games"

The developers of Bring Me Cakes, one of the first games on Defold, told why they work on it, as well as what to expect from the feature on iOS if you release a paid game.

Alexander Semenov, Senior Editor App2Top.ru Questioner: Let‘s start with a story about the team. Where are you, how long have you been making games?

Alexey Gulev

Alexey Gulev, developer of Bring Me Cakes: The team consists of two people. Me and Sasha Titkov. We are both from Belarus and now live in Minsk. In game development, everyone is more than 6 years old. A couple of years ago, we met at an ambitious gaming startup (which, by the way, is already closed at the moment) – that’s where we met.

How did the story of Bring Me Cakes begin?

Alexander Titkov

Alexander Titkov, game designer of Bring Me Cakes: I’ve been counting down the history of the game since February 2016: we just announced that the startup is winding down, and we have to close all questions about current projects and look for a new job. By this time, Lyosha had already left the company and he did not find the very beginning of the game.

The very idea of the game about Little Red Riding Hood was thrown up by a fellow artist. For some reason, she fascinated me very much. The idea was to control the characters using a gyroscope. By that time, people had had enough of the gyroscope for a long time, so I replaced the basic mechanics, and also came up with a couple of characters.

In my spare time at GameMaker, I made a crude prototype of 10 levels, where there were basic mechanics and several characters with their own characteristics. After the playtests, I wanted to make a full-fledged game out of this prototype, but since there was nowhere to get a budget for the game, the project became my kitchen indie development.

You say that the prototype was made on GameMaker. At the same time, the final version is made on Defold. Why did you switch to it?

Alexey: Sasha mastered GameMaker only for the prototype, sketched a rough version on it. There was no full-fledged development on it.

As for why we chose Defold.

I was just looking for an engine to replace Unity for very small games for mobile devices. Already downloaded Cocos2d to look at it. But at the same time, the podcast “How Games are Made” about Defold was released.

After the podcast, I decided to take a look and figure out this new engine. I wanted to try it on a “combat” project.

When Sasha came with the prototype of the “Hat”, I immediately realized that this was what I needed.

On Defold, I made a “prototype 2.0” in a couple of days, which looked almost like the current version of the game.

We really liked that the prototype build size turned out to be just ridiculous: something about 4-5 MB. This is despite the fact that the graphics were sharpened for Retina displays. The application loaded in less than a second and showed excellent performance.

The good work of the prototype played a cruel joke on us. Initially, we did not bother to prepare a second texture pack with a lower resolution, we did not even think about such a need at that time, because there were no performance issues at the early stages of development. It was expensive to redo something at the late stages of development, so formally the game supports very old devices, but in fact it does not work very fast on them.

Actually, the creation of this “prototype 2.0” was the start of normal development. Before that, there was only a prototype on GameMaker, graphics for the first chapter of the game and a couple of sketches. The game was in a state of completed pre-production at that moment.

Was there a specific task before the project (in addition to creating the game itself: that is, to test such a theory)?

Alexey: As I said before, I wanted to try Defold in combat conditions.

I also liked the project and Sasha’s approach. I thought that the collaboration could grow from just one project into a small indie team. The “hat” looked like a small project in order to work together. And so it turned out.

Alexander: Naturally, the task of earning money was also there. We both already had the experience of released projects, so we quite soberly assessed the current situation and our strengths. We were confident that we would be able to perform the game at a good level, and the game would be able to fight itself off.

Thoughts about “making money” were not just fantasies. We studied the market, competitors, search queries and so on: everything as Uncle Galenkin advises.

We clearly understood already at the start that this is not a long-operated fritupley product and traffic will never pay off here, so we counted only on organic and niche. We were sure that we would take the quality of performance, humor and ease of mastering the game. Classic puzzles are not such a competitive environment, and there are enough fans there.

Did you do the whole game together? How long?

Alexander: Almost everything is done by the power of two people. We ordered only music, animation and translations on the side. The calendar period for the development of the game is one and a half years, but we did it in our spare time, sometimes with long breaks.

The last few months before the release went all in: everyone quit and worked on it full-time.

Did you make an approximate estimate of production?

Alexey: We counted only direct costs: outsourcing, the cost of accounts and other functional expenses.

We don’t need to rent an office, because we work at my house and live very close – we are lucky here. We have only $1,500 in direct costs. We made transfers to Fiverr very cheaply, otherwise we would have to part with a similar amount only for localization. The disadvantage is that the quality of translations is sometimes very mediocre and you need to spend a lot of time on management with each of the translators, but we simply could not afford another one – we have a kitchen development.

Returning to the engine. What advantages does Defold have?

Alexey: The Defold developer community has a very cozy and lamp-like atmosphere. It’s great that you can get a comment on almost any question that concerns you directly from the developers of the engine. In addition, the engine is completely free, without any “buts”.

What are the disadvantages of the engine in operation?

Alexey: The engine is being developed by a small team – this is a virtue and a disadvantage at the same time. Sometimes you have to wait for the promised functionality for quite a long time, so you constantly have to decide whether to do it right now yourself with a crutch or wait for a beautiful solution in the engine.

On the other hand, the situation is similar in other technologies. I think that every developer has his “favorite” bug in the engine he uses, which has not been fixed for a long time.

I also had to master writing native plugins. Now it’s better and there are a lot of ready-made solutions, but we, as the discoverers, had to deal with it ourselves. I also talked about this on DevGAMM.

Were there any unforeseen difficulties during the development of the game as a whole? How did you decide?

Alexey: For a very long time, the engine lacked the ability to fasten advertising networks. We were very worried about this, but in the end it didn’t hurt too much, since the development was delayed just before the appearance of this function.

I also remember the problem with the non-obvious documentation on non-consumable purchases, so we spent a couple of days on such a seemingly small thing.

What was the support from King? And is there any post-release support?

Alexander: We participated in testing the cross-promo functionality from King, which allowed us to test our game on 2.5 thousand players from Thailand and Indonesia.

Another support can be attributed to the Defold game contest, in which we won a prize and King took us to GDC. It helped us a lot mentally so that we could get together and finish the game.

After the release, King did not help in any way.

You have launched the paid version on iOS and the free version on Android. Can you tell us about the first results (sales, downloads)?

Alexander: In short, everything is very bad!

With the paid version, we received a feature in 56 countries: Russia, Europe, the Middle East. It sounds great, but in fact everything is not so rosy. During the week of the feature, we have 330 thousand visitors on the App Store page, mostly players from Russia and the East, and their conversion to purchases is very low. For example, a third of all visits were in Russia, and it brought in less than 10% of revenue. For our $3 game, the conversion to purchase is less than 1%, the ceiling of our earnings is not difficult to calculate.

It seems to us that the time has passed when the feature sold the game by itself. There is no getting away from the classic marketing plan, where the feature is only one of the points.

We talked to colleagues who also recently had a release with a paid game and realized that everyone has approximately similar indicators. In addition, we came across an article from cool guys from Germany who share their results from the launch of a paid game. They had a global feature, banners on the main page in the USA, a lot of reviews in the press and so on. The situation is much better than ours, but given the amount of “visibility” that they have received, the indicators no longer seem so good.

Yes, now some of the readers will think that even with such figures, it would be possible to earn more on a free game with advertising. But it is unknown if we would have a feature if the game was free. Therefore, we proceed only from what we have.

There is no money for us on Android either, but there is another reason there – there is simply no traffic.

That is, is iOS performance better for you?

Alexander: iOS has earned more in absolute money at the moment, but there is no way to compare it with Android with a similar audience coverage.

What is the share of revenue from advertising, what is it from purchases?

Alexander: We have an advertising version only on Android, here it brings about 70% of the total revenue, but we mainly have installations from Belarus and Russia, where advertising is very cheap.

What are you planning to do?

ALEXANDER: The project is frozen, making new content is simply unprofitable. There is still an exit to China with a publisher. It is scheduled for November. We are also ready to launch on several PC platforms. But that’s it. If a miracle does not happen, then the new chapter “the stoned magic forest”, which, by the way, has already been completely drawn, will not see the light.

At the moment, the main efforts are thrown at the new game.

You have released stickers for Telegram. Do they help with sales somehow?

Alexander: We made stickers not only for Telegram, but also for iMessage.

We didn’t see any additional traffic from this one. There are insanely many stickers in all messengers now, they are very cool, and, in our case, they are not a source of traffic for games. Rather, the opposite is true: fans of the game will download your sticker pack.

I see, thanks for the interview.

• The page of the iOS version of the game is located at this link.
• You can download the Android version from this link.