Yotes Status Report #20

     It's big number 20! I've been at this for 20 weeks now. The past always seems short in hindsight I suppose. This week has been crazy busy as I'm wrapping up DragCore, getting way too excited about the project I'm doing next, and getting ready for school on Monday.

   Completed:

    It's rapid development time! I have a task list with things I need to do separated by what could be done within each day. giving myself 6 extra days in case something goes wrong, I predict being finished by January 25th. The Unity bugs I'm facing have really slowed the process down. I have to do something about it before I start another project.

    I still can't shake off that annoying Internal Compiler Error. I even reinstalled Unity and gave it security permissions. I don't know which anti-virus I'm supposed to be turning off, but I'll be trying everything once DragCore is out of the way and I can focus just on fixing Unity for a while.

    I also had to redo a bunch of the game's sprites because I found out that I made them too small. It took a few hours to do and I had a mess of Gimp and MS Paint tabs open. I stayed up late into the night to fix every single sprite and reimported them into Unity. I can't stand waking up and having a tedious task to do first thing. I like starting fresh or at least a checkpoint.

   Downloads:

   It still feels nice knowing every other day a few more people discover my games and give them a try. They don't leave reviews so I can't see how they reacted though, so I can only assume it fixed their boredom for a short while. I see that TriGrid is twice as popular on iOS thanks to it's featured position in the top 100 free apps when it launched. Hopefully DragCore will do the same and last longer.

    I think part of why TriGrid died off so quickly was because of the low resolution icon that made it look cheap. Who would want to click on that? When I noticed that was a problem with the app store icon the patch didn't go live until weeks later because Apple's app uploading service takes that long. I put a lot more love into the icon design this time and double checked all resolutions. It should do much better this time.

   Revenue:

    I'm still riding on Christmas money as of today. Once that goes my parents say they are willing to provide for me until I get my business off the ground. I'm rooting for DragCore to get thousands of downloads and growing over time. The game coming after will be a paid one and I'll be able to compare the revenue models. Free games depend on mass downloads for any ad revenue to matter.

    Based on Admob's revenue model, it will take 1,315,790 downloads on Android or 3,846,154 downloads on iOS to get $1000. Not counting any in-app purchases. Which would be a great start. I'm very deep into the red right now from how much I spend on Unity plugins and hardware. I needed a drawing tablet, a separate Macbook for iOS builds and a cable to transfer content from one computer to another. It all adds up to a couple thousand but then there is tuition to think about.

     My parents want me helping out with that so I'm hoping to ease the pain of the school bill next year with any profits I make. Crazy tuition is also why I'm doing summer school this year and skipping the fall semester to let my parents save up for a while before diving back into tuition payments.

     I'm hoping DragCore gives my other games a boost in downloads once it's out there on all platforms. With every game added to the Yotes Games library, there is potential for a new customer to find and play my other titles. Another benefit of making lot's of small games to learn the ropes before diving into something huge.      

     School is coming up quick and to think, my very first class is math... But whatever it takes. After speaking with Alumni, I realized that even if school feels pointless, it's just meant to be general knowledge for people who aren't certain what they want to do. The real experience I need has to come from myself in my free time. It's the portfolio that sets you apart.

     School is just a launchpad that covers the basics of topics you may no have looked into. I can't count on school to teach students how to become great independent game developers when it's purpose is  to create employees with programming skill sets.