After 9 months break from development of my old pet project (joined a new company) I finally launched it properly on Google Play! I spent 2 weeks of my Christmas staycation and prepared the project for the release. At least something to distract from what is happening around. Music for the trailer and game was created by my 12 y.o. son using Garage Band, and the head of QA was my 8 y.o. daughter.
The game is here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.yak32_games.iron_cube (with a staggering zero downloads, as it was launched today and have no idea how to promote it)
The game is written in C++ with my old custom game engine and uses:
- a greedy voxel mesh generation algorithm
- dynamic voxel world built from 32x32x32 clusters
- simple AI with state machines
- Minecraft-like pre-calculated ambient lighting
- dynamic water (still glitchy) - water fills connected areas
- real physics with Bullet
- path finding with Recast
And it’s all runs on 7 years old mobile phones!
That was relatively easy and now I need to do the most terrifying part - promoting the game on Google Play somehow.
It’s so different now comparing to 2014 when I launched my first game and organically reached 40 thousand downloads without any marketing somehow.