This post is intended as quick introduction to myself, Crabware, Multi-Animal Spree Popper, the history of the entire world as it pertains to spree-popping analytics and some other stuff.

I am a developer, hoary with age (40+), who has long harboured delusions of game dev. I once almost completed a game on the Amiga (but I didn’t and I was warned I could be sued by Edmonds over the name). I can’t remember if I feared Edmonds back then, but I do now. Anyway. I pushed aside such childish dreams and spent the next epoch working on Business Products until I decided that’s enough.

Enter a “cat”

Fast forward a few more years and I still had made no progress until Revenue Cat launched their Shipaton contest. The idea is to make an app in 2 months and win prizes - and I like prizes (but do not win prizes). I decided this was the perfect time to think up a simple enough game that I could bash out in a month, work on it a bit, then release to great acclaim. Of course it took nearly the full two months because I had a holiday to go on, I was learning Godot from scratch and I had to deal with all kinds of other nonsense (I’ll write more about this later). But still, a game was made!

The game was and is Multi-Animal Spree Popper - it’s about popping as many animals as you can (or not in some cases). It’s a bit of a manic casual retro arcade thing.

The looping promo video for Helsinki

MASP is still not exactly in the state I’d like to have to released - but I think there’s a good chance I’d still be 50% or less of the way through if I hadn’t been pushed by the Shipaton deadline, so I won’t audibly complain. It’ll come along soon enough.

Helsinki

Towards the middle of the end of the Shipaton period, I became aware of the PG Connects Helsinki event - a mobile game conference which had an indie zone. I applied for the free table lottery and won (I do sometimes win things). This would take place just before the end of the hackathon.

Helsinki, Sweden

This was an industry thing so it would never been direct promotion, but I would have a table and sit in an indie zone where people could play the game, give feedback, and I could see how it went down on people outwith myself.

I prepped a few things that worked out quite well:

• A looping promo video I had running on a cheapo portable monitor so that people could see the gameplay even if all the demo machines were in use (was needed a couple of times!)
• A couple of books of mini stickers with shocked animals on them
• Some “business cards” with game art and QR code
• A couple of iPads with mini stands for playing
• An “attract mode” which shows real gameplay and auto-starts again if the game is inactive for 30 seconds. It also had “Insert coin” flashing which some people did not understand
• Some colourful star sweets we bought from Normal, a normal shop. People “enjoyed” these and later I ate the remnants, which was “nice”.

Helsinki, Finland

Things that did not work out:

• A rollup banner which I ordered for fairly cheap but would’ve cost 5x that to ship one-way and possibly be destroyed by customs. So this is now at home in a corner. Maybe I can use in the UK at some point.

The general result was good. An increasing number of people played it & most actually enjoyed it. A few even completed all 16 levels and were looking for more. Got some good feedback on things I sort of knew and a few I had no idea about. All good. One person played for 10 seconds and declared it not their thing and gestured me to talk to the hand (I did not).

One curious thing was a couple of people approached me and made a big deal of how they’d like to either promote me/the game to their audience and do an interview, or introduce me to X, Y and Z but then nothing at all came of it. I get there is networking guff going on but why spend so long building up something you aren’t going to do and then vanish. they didn’t even try to get me to join a list or buy an NFT! Weird.

Prizes are awarded

At this point, the Shipaton game was up. Winners were announced and I was not one of them. Looking at analytics, I don’t think they even looked at my entry, so that was a bit sad and despite my best efforts I then took a couple of weeks off, deflated. I knew I wouldn’t win and the deadline did help me finish a game, but still, it would’ve been nice to be “viewed”.

Report card

Here is the App Store Connect report card covering from time immemorial until the end of October.

Could be worse...?

I think I can probably improve on this.

Coming up

I have a few clean up things I want to get fixed based on Helsinki feedback (making it more obvious what the goals are or even if you won or lost a level for example) so I will set a hard deadline of November to fix these and after that I will be full on Mr Marketing for a while, for which I’ll need to thing up some novel things. I’ll continue to enhance the game but it won’t be 100% dev time for a while, because it’s a bit pointless if no one else is playing it.

I’m under no illusions I can compete in mobile gaming or even make any serious income - but I can do better than zero (yessir, I’m almost certain). Plus it will be fun. Indeed, I’m planning on taking this to other platforms just because I can and it amuses me. I’ve been Business Dev for so long and this is my own thing so I’m free to waste time and do things the wrong way on purpose.

Come back later for the November recap where we see how it all went right/wrong.