Back to Defold after 2 years, "Bouncy Catapult" hypercasual prototype

[marat.giliazov]

I’ll try, thx

[britzl]

Thank you for the feedback. I will look into improving the manual, probably next week.

I have updated the Facebook manual and added a separate section for Facebook Analytics:

Defold Facebook manual

I saw “facebook.EVENT_ACTIVATED_APP” param name and thought “Aha! Gotсha! I need to send this event on the app start!” And there was nothing saying I actually should not.

This is unfortunately a left-over that should have been removed from the docs. EVENT_ACTIVATED_APP, EVENT_DEACTIVATED_APP and EVENT_SESSION_INTERRUPTIONS will be removed from the docs in 1.2.149.

• What about “EVENT_LEVEL_ACHIEVED”? It’s supposed to be one of “standard” events, but I don’t see it in consts list.

This is missing from the docs but available as facebook.EVENT_ACHIEVED_LEVEL. It will be added to the docs in 1.2.149.

Finally I’ve found the list of events supposed to be sent automatically: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/analytics/send_data/events#autologged , decided that probably Defold does this without any additional actions, built the app, launched it on the device and observed “App Launch” event in the dashboard.

These events are logged automatically by the Facebook SDK that we use.

[marat.giliazov]

Perfect, thanks for the update!

[jhonny.goransson]

Great game by the way!

[britzl]

BUG: Wrong representation of scaled physical objects

Created DEFEDIT-1524 to make sure the editor behaves like the engine does.

Fixed in 1.2.149

[marat.giliazov]

1 month passed from the last update. There some changes were made in the game:

• Game link is the same: http://anvil-games.com/defold/catapult/index.html
• Sounds and music added
• Some visual effects added, along with the trail; made it via ParticleFX as @Pkeod suggested, but today this awesome extension was released by @aglitchman , going to give it a try
• levels were rearranged and polished regarding players feedback and analytics
• some UI changes

Also the game is released in few countries on iOS currently - you can play it before I’ve ruined it with tons of ads https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/bouncy-catapult/id1450757809

Yes, the changes might look minor as for 1 month of work, but it was a month of Facebook ads experiments, checking different creatives and approaches, learning how to make these creatives, understanding the rules of this game and burning some money, of course

Currently we’re working on other color themes to see if brighter ones will work better, you can check the mock-ups:

[Oleg_The_Evangelist]

I love the new style and design. Somehow it feels much better now.
And the first 15 minutes now are much more fun!

[markus.gustavsson]

I really like the picture on the right!

[marat.giliazov]

It’s our favourite too, just started testing this color-theme in FB ads tonight

[Mitch]

It’s our favourite too, just started testing this color-theme in FB ads tonight

Have you managed to get many organic installs in the hypercasual space? Or are you relying on FB ads? How is the CPI?

[marat.giliazov]

I’m getting around 0 organic installs, while not running any FB Ads, but I did nothing to gain organics. While running ads there comes 20% organic installs (well, any install which was not tracked by Facebook I count as “organic”) and they show worse metrics than ones came from ads (what is expected for organics).

As for CPI - in the beginning of my experiments it was more than $1, now it’s around $0.65, but this is a deadly high CPI as for Hypercasual game, so I’m now just experimenting on the game, but it hardly will gain any real success on the market. I’m not sure if we can reach $0.2-0.3 CPI with this game, but keep trying.

This week will push experiment with Playable Ads, we’ll see if it will show lower CPI or not…

[AGulev]

"Edge bleeding"
It’s a thing I believe every user faces when he deals with atlases first time in Defold (ok, and in pretty any other engine…) Solution is to set a margin/borders in your atlas settings. I even voted to set such margin by default here , but now I’m not so sure.

Solved in 1.2.156

[marat.giliazov]

Hey hey, time for a small update!

What happened during last 2 months:

• I’ve tested everything I wanted with UA experiments, unfortunately the best CPI was about ~$0.5 (with Playable Ads made on Defold) which is still too high for such type of game to be covered by monetisation
• Tested game with two hypercasual publishers - HomaGames and Voodoo, their tests showed even worse results - CPI higher than $1
• I also tested “Paid hypercasual” approach - the idea was to try to acquire installs to paid version of the game and see 1) if CPI can be lower than game price 2) if there is any organic traffic from paid games top charts;
  Results for our exact game: 1) CPI was around $15 for game priced $0.99 2) there were about 0 organic installs/purchases from highest reached ranks as #top40 Puzzle & Arcade, #top300 Games, #top700 Overall in USA (more details in Russian here)
• The game was published in Russian web-games catalogue Yandex.Games, direct link to the game is here. This catalogue works in alpha-mode now and the game generated about $15 in first month after release. Meh.
• I lost my job (our office was accidentally closed by the mother-company)

What’s next:

• Add more content: different materials for bricks - glass, concrete etc; different shapes of bricks - triangles, circles, boxes; modifiers and obstacles on levels; new characters, new backgrounds, new sounds;
• Try to make gameplay more dynamic, there are few ideas to check, maybe I’ll post test build here for the feedback, if anyone wants (for example, the ability to swoop down by tap on special button - should help to aim better and break final bricks)
• Make game paid and ask featuring from Apple on AppStore;
• Add ads and publish as F2P on GooglePlay;

Keep tuned

[selimanac]

I lost my job (our office was accidentally closed by the mother-company)

Sorry to hear that. Best wishes…
And thank you for the details about your cpi

[britzl]

Sorry to hear that. Best wishes…
And thank you for the details about your cpi

I agree, sorry to hear this. Good luck!

[marat.giliazov]

@britzl, @selimanac thanks for kind wishes! It’s not so bad - from some angle of view losing job opens you new opportunities Anyway, I already have some offers + there will be a delay related to some bureaucracy before starting actually working in a new place, so I’ll have “legal” time to work on this game

[marat.giliazov]

Added a new feature - “swoop down” by tap on the circle under the lever + made “Bouncy catapult” really bouncy Now gameplay is little more dynamic. Working on new bricks and materials currently.

You can check this new feature here - http://anvil-games.com/defold/catapult/index.html

[jhonny.goransson]

Great feature!

[britzl]

Looks great!

[marat.giliazov]

Another month passed - another update ready!

As always, you can check the HTML5 build here: http://anvil-games.com/defold/catapult/index.html

What’s new:

1. New materials - stone and glass (or ice? how it feels?)
2. New shapes of obstacles - circle, triangle, square
3. 50 new levels + randomisation of level’s contents
4. “Swoop down” feature
5. More bounciness and dynamic in gameplay
6. Level progress is shown right in the lever now! Diegetic UI, huh?
7. Settings dialog
8. Taptic engine support on iOS (check out my extention)
9. Localization system! Currently only Russian and English supported, but more languages are on their way
10. More damage from more powerful impacts (but unfortunately it’s not really sensible in the game)

I think game is almost ready to be released as version 1.0, just thinking about adding new characters + some sort of coins/crystals to be collected on levels to unlock new characters for these coins, or release the game as is and add such characters and coins in the update…