I Made a Mobile Game for the Money - Here's how | Devlog

This is the final devlog about making a mobile game which I've just published on Google Play. I'm talking about strategies to make money out of your mobile app with ads and the struggles I had with the Play store policies. I will reveal the revenue my app is making in later episodes of this game devlog series, stay tuned for that. Link to the game down below.

-=-=-=- Alpine Odyssey - Casual Ball -=-=-=-

-=-=-=- Music in video(Epidemic Sound) -=-=-=-
Yhello(Lofive)
Day Luxe(Molife)
Show me Life(Siine)
Paid Vacation(Superintendent McCupcake)

Evan King - Yikes
Evan King - Pretzel
Evan King - Memo
Evan King - Useful

[benyoungblade]

My wife and I played this game for nearly an hour after watching your video. We loved passing the phone back and forth. Truly took us back to the good ole’ days of mobile gaming. Nostalgic for sure. Thanks!

[CodeMonkeyUnity]

heh it's awesome that someone thinks I'm COOL!
I hope the game does well, in terms of game design it looks interesting!

[escapeundergroundgame]

The game looks nice.
Controls are a bit hard until you get used to it, but they are ok for me.
I would add:
- an animation when player hits a tree: it trembles
- weak/skeleton trees here and there - they are shattered when hit by the player (they have no effect on the player)
- maybe coins should be a bit bigger... or make an aura/bloom to fake this; also, their magnet range should be a bit bigger
- you could add environment effects like snow fall, wind or even day/night cycles.
Anyhow, good luck! :)

[SEOdev]

The game looks great, I think it looks far better with a skier as a character rather than a sphere but the overall design is really good.

[Dont-Care-WompWomp]

just played the game and I can say I love it so far. Just a suggestion tough, add ramps that you need to use to jump over cracks in the ground to make the game a bit harder. The ramps don't need to be difficult to use and it would also add to the aesthetic of the game.

[Its_Just_Shane]

Love how easy it seems to be for packaging and loading to Android. Can’t say it’s been the same for me on unReal.

[yarrichar]

Nice job. Good to reminded that relatively simple games can still be fun. It makes the thought of getting back into game dev much more appropriate - thanks!

I like how you've done the ads as well. I thought it was going to be on every crash, but letting me completely opt out if I want to start from the start again is great.

[nipperinshorts]

Okay, dang. Good luck dude. Pumped that you’re straight up about trying to make some money. You’ve inspired me.

[SuperDutchrutter]

Absolutely keep the skiers. It adds so much to it

[TanzFang]

Honestly had great fun playing, very easy to pick up but you can feel it get progressively harder. Well done mate :)

[flipflodev]

The game was really fun to play! One of my favorite things is the smooth fade/zoom in when starting up the game and the sounds the character makes, really nice attention to detail!
I see you already added the ski/snowboard characters back into the game, love it. I was a bit confused on the icon and text for selecting the characters in the top left, to me this Players button looks more like something for multiplayer / a friends social feature. One idea that came to my mind regarding this character selection would be to blend the two scenes together: the camera is zoomed in on the character and you have left/right buttons to switch to another character. If the character is unlocked, there's a start game button at the bottom and when you click it the camera zooms out and the game starts.
Another idea for the gameplay would be to add a boost mechanism when the player holds both left and right controls down, depleting a boost meter which refills over time or by collecting special items. This could also be a purchasable skill.

Also at first sight after the first 5 games the characters pricing seemed a bit too high for the first one, it reminds me of the first Temple Run game, where you had to play a long time until you could purchase your first character. I would love a cheap character (next to the one you can get from watching an ad), such that you can purchase something after playing only a few games.
Anyways, the game has a really cozy atmosphere to it. I am looking forward to the follow-up video :)

[domni]

So an updated version of Skifree, i dig it 👌🏾

[fille.imgnry]

But why isnt this game in portrait mode? 😮😮 i am thinking that you want to be able to see as far ahead as possible?

[DanielBrooks]

Downloaded and reviewed. I think controls need to support two-thumb playability. Clicking anywhere just alternates the direction, so sometimes i have to double-tap to go thr direction i want

[neozoid]

Cool really wanna see the Income stats🎉😮❤

[Hacrhehe]

Nice game! Suggestion: Maybe make day/night cycle? It would be cool to see this game have them

[PiGameDev]

I played the game. The environment looks really nice. It would be nice to have some player character, instead of the ball. I wonder, why the game is not vertical? I think it would suit much better as we are moving down, not left/right, wouldn't it?
The game is hard, but overall good job!

[REVYMofficial]

I hope you can make game development fully sustainable! Good luck 👍

I was playing the game for a while today and it's pretty fun and addicting. The fact that you can simply watch an ad to continue playing indefinitely seems to a be a very nice business model as well, as sometimes I wanted to watch the ad just to get a bit further but some other times I didn't bother but restarted a new run anyway.

Here are a couple of bugs I found while playing though:
1. Between some slope segments there's a flickering horizontal line (I'm playing on an old One Plus 5T device, running Android 10)
2. I got an Ad that was not showing once and went through the Report Ad flow to report that, which causes the ad to end immediately, but upon returning to the Game Screen that was not computed as an Ad view, so I couldn't keep playing, and the "Watch Ad" button was disabled, so I couldn't start a new Ad as well, so I needed to start a new run.

Other than that, looks like a very solid game for the purposes of getting money from ads, nice work!

[EcomGraduates]

Make the ball a snow ball and have it get larger as it’s going down the slope. Not only do they need to avoid obstacles the growth of the snowball would introduce another level of complexity