Bitscorp[GameDev] Crystal Blast - The Recent Update
Hi everyone!
Although we haven't had much time to work lately, we're still dedicating our free time to game development. We hope it becomes profitable in the future! :)
We're excited to announce that we've recently published Crystal Blast on both the App Store and Google Play with several updates.
Known Challenges We're Facing:
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Marketing is challenging - It's incredibly difficult to promote games without purchasing ads. Google and Apple require significant investment to boost games to the top of search results or trending lists. We contacted two publishers, but it seems the gameplay of our Crystal Blast isn't as attractive as current Hyper Casual trends. For now, we've tried boosting in specific countries with low cost-per-install and optimized our descriptions to try reaching the top 5 in Google Play searches. Google Play Store works well, but targeting specific audience attributes is much harder compared to Facebook ads.
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Cross-platform development - While Unity greatly helps with game development, "cross-platform" doesn't mean it's simple to support Game Center, Google Play Services, push notifications, and other platform-specific features.
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Analytics platforms - Google Firebase is excellent, offering out-of-the-box BigQuery integration on their Pay-as-You-Go plan. It makes it easy to save queries for traffic analysis, and Data Studio is great for building charts based on BigQuery data sources.
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Distribution tools - Microsoft appcenter.ms is fantastic for distributing to testers via Fastlane from a local machine. However, it currently can't distribute Android Bundles, which became a major requirement in Google Play as of August 1st. Azure Application Insights is also great, though reviewing events is more challenging compared to Firebase and Data Studio. We're still evaluating both platforms.
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Push notification systems - appcenter.ms lacks robust support for push notification campaigns, whereas Firebase offers predictions on user churn and makes it much easier to set up notifications for targeted audiences.
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Game services integration - CloudOnce is a wonderful Unity plugin that supports Play Game Services and Game Center. It's also easy to write your own provider if you want to expand to Amazon or Chinese markets.
We would greatly appreciate any feedback about the game!
P.S.: We're looking for a game art designer to join our team (no profit for now, but lots of fun and potential opportunities to grow together).
More updates coming soon! :)