Saturday, February 4, 2012

Design to Product on Android - Intro (1 / 17)

Hi everyone,

Welcome to a large blog series about what it takes to design, plan, budget, develop, test, and deploy an Android app, in this case, a game.  Over the course of a year or so, our studio has been reading countless articles, some do's and don'ts about how to get in to the Android marketplace.  Super long stories short, basically, it doesn't make much sense to dump a ton of time and money in to this hoping you'll make millions over night.  But, because we're persistent (and possibly borderline crazy), we're going to do it anyways.

The Android marketplace relies on independent developers to populate their app catalog.  This is both good and bad.  It's good because the apps released there usually do not have a large budget behind them and perform and look subpar, usually.  It's bad because the marketplace is absolutely *flooded* with apps, making any release you make almost impossible to find and gain exposure, and thus popularity.  On top of that, Android users overwhelmingly don't want to pay for anything, which actually makes sense because of the absolute crazy amount of free apps all over the marketplace.

I recall reading an article last year about how a businessman went in to the games industry with a bit of cash to fund his startup, so he thought, and make good on his returns for all the cash he put in to it... well, he deeply regretted the whole thing and attributed his failure to the fact that he had absolutely no experience with software, development, or really had any idea on how complicated things can get, and how long they can take... needless to say, his projects went over their time estimates, over budget, and he folded within a year.  His "lessons learned" were that he wished he had at least a software developer background so that he had a better idea of how long things would take, which I'm sure would have helped his planning and budgeting.

I'm coming more from a software dev's perspective going to business.  This series will focus on our journey, how we are going about this project, the business itself, budgets, ideas, some sarcasm, maybe some code, and some other stuff.  This series won't be too focused on "the techie side", but more on the process itself of how to go from the idea -- I want to make a game -- to a product.


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