What I Learned From Developing And Launching My First Mobile Game | Pygame Development Story
61I started playing games at a very young age. I have always loved playing games. Right when I was around 3 years old I remember my Dad had bought a brand new computer which had Windows 95 on it and one game: Doom. That was the first PC game I ever played and I remember playing it with my Dad till 2 AM late nights at times. That was the moment that fascinated me to the world of games. Years later, in 2013 I would be launching my first game that me and a few of my friends had developed. The game was made for android and was made entirely in python based framework pygame.
The game is titled “Kyte: Kite Flying Game” and is still available to play on Google Play Store.
Game link: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.gameeon.kyte
It was a remarkable journey for me primarily because I was young and dumb and had absolutely no idea about how games are made or promoted. At the time I had a bunch of friends who were equally enthusiastic about just one thing: making games. We thought that only that desire was enough, and we were right. Initially we struggled for almost 1 year. This game was in development since early 2012 and we had to see a lot of ups and downs since we were learning while developing the game and the technology we used to develop our game required us to write even the basic functionalities from scratch. We didn’t rely on a game engine as we were from an engineering background and wanted to create the game using code entirely.
But what a truly fascinating process it was, I remember staying up late till 4 am with my friends basically converting my grandparents’ house as our office and we had an absolute blast during the development of the game. The core programming of the game was done by me and an incredibly talented friend of mine named Prasad Thakur. The art side of the game was handled by my friend Prasad Kajarekar who along with a bunch of folks that we found from our animation learning institute came up with amazing kite designs for the game. It was a truly joyful experience to develop this game and the biggest learning from this was that things take time.
Of course, years later I’d realise that this wasn’t the best game I ever made. Not even close to being called a good game, but it’ll always be special to me since it was my first game and it gave me exposure to a lot of things which wouldn’t have been possible if the game wasn’t developed and launched in the first place itself.
I remember we launched this game in the month of March 2013 and on the night of the launch we went for a late night drive in Prasad’s car. I was so stupid at that time that I didn’t even inform at my home and it was super late. We were extremely young at that time, I was 18 at that time and was going to turn 19 that month end. My Dad came searching for me that night and when he found us hanging out in the car he shouted a lot. At that moment it was quite embarrassing to get shouted on in front of my friends but looking back I think if given a chance, I’d not change my behaviour. It felt great. It was one of the best nights of my life. We had launched a game that we worked on for almost more than a year. I felt like the King of the world!
What followed after the launch of the game was pure surprise. Of course I wanted the game to do well but the game didn’t just do well, it did AWESOME. In it’s first week of launch the game got more than 10,000+ downloads. YES, 10,000+ downloads. And by the time my birthday the downloads kept increasing. Looking back I realised that we had this early mover advantage. Our game was among the only 3 games on Play Store at that time and we had a huge friends circle who were super supportive. All of them downloaded our game which sort of helped us get ranked higher on the charts.
Hope this video will be a good learning for entrepreneurs starting out in the games industry.
My name is Nikhil Malankar and you can follow me on:
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Background music credits: Lewis and Dekalb Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
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