Likwit: First mobile casual game developed by my company

[Icy]

A little of auto promotion here

We have finished the development and testing and our first mobile casual game is finally out.



It's a game in the style of Candy Crush to name the most known one, free to play and later you can chose to pay to unlock levels sooner, for extra "lives", etc. The gameplay is casual but more strategic and hard than the game named before.

Unlike most casual games that use bright colors and fast paced music, we decided to go for a more relaxing experience, from the "spa" look, to the zen music, etc.

The game has been released for Android and IOS by now in the following countries: Australia, Spain, Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Colombia

You can download it for free here: For iPhone/iPad and for Android

Outside those countries, if you want to try the Android version, please send me a PM and i'll give you a link to download it, but you must be confortable with installing apps from outside the Play Store.

Please download it and give me feedback here to keep improving it. We are still tweaking the levels difficulty and creating new ones so the game keeps challenging but not frustrating.

Now a bit of extra info for those curious about the game development/marketing plan:

The first idea about developing our own game came from attending the San Francisco GDC a year ago. I went there with the two company founders (i'm partner but on an smaller % of the company) to look for apps/games to market, as mobile marketing is our expertise. One morning having breakfast there, we asked ourselves, why don't we create our own game and then market it? We can both earn good money if it goes well, but also to learn the whole process, that at the end will help us to better market other games/apps in the future as we will know it from the inside.

Development/testing took 9 months (and mid $XXX,XXX self financed) and everything is original, from the game idea to the music etc.

Our game director is one of the guys that lead the old "commandos" series from Pyro Studios back in the day and that also lead the team of Planet 51 "the game" for consoles. He is also a teacher in the best games development post graduate course in Spain.

As funny quote, when i met him, I told him how guilty he was from releasing commandos when i was a student and how much study time did that game steal from me, he answered ok Ivan, i'll return back that time now with our future games

He started as employee but now we are doing an spin off of the current company, who's main business is mobile marketing, to start a new one only dedicated to develop mobile/tablet games. He is going to join us as partner on the new company, so this is the first but hopefully not the last game we will develop together.

The development team was a mix of internal programmers and external studios for the Unity engine that we used, graphics and music. Something that ended being an average experience, so we have now hired our own team of Unity engine experts and designers to have it all more under control for updates and future games.

Once the game is out, now it's time to make it public. We are in talks with some publishers for the asian market, where is hard to enter on your own. for the rest of regions we are self publishing it.

Just from the mouth to mouth (and facebook integration) during the beta testing, we have reached the top 55 game position in the Spanish App Store chart for "Strategy" games and the reviews are great so far.

The metrics look really good, both on the number of new players and the money expended by them (yeah it's a business after all ). Now we are working on the retention, mainly adding new content and tweaking the current levels based on the players feedback and stats. To help on that, we log all the kpi related to time played per session, the times a level is replayed, the number of "moves" required to beat it, the levels that frustrate the players and make them turn off the game, etc.

Next to come is an investors round to find the required financial help to do a big worldwide launch. We have the two biggest Spanish Venture Capital firms very interested on it and we are in talks with some foreign ones too. The CEO of one of those two VC was really encouraging to us, saying that he want so invest in the company no matter if this game booms or busts, as he sees high potential on the way we work and have setup everything, from the business plan, to the analysis we are doing now.

As my own part in the game development, well... has been sadly nothing besides beta testing it and suggesting some stuff. I'm more in the strategical decisions part of the whole company and mainly in the marketing area, so I could not get involved on this as i would have liked if i have had the time. Hope for future games I'll be more active in the development side asI was developing mods for text sims in the past.

What it is being for sure is a great experience and learning process about the games industry in general from the business side, and now i'm reading metrics and stats all the time to learn what our users like/dislike and how to improve their experience.

If you have any doubts that I can answer, i'll happily do.

UPDATE: The game is not avaialble yet in all territories, i'll put up a link when ready.

[Butter]

Congrats! Will give it a shot.

[Izulde]

Says not available in your country

[Peregrine]

Sounds cool - will try it when it is available in the App Store.

[Icy]

Originally Posted by Izulde

Says not available in your country

Oops, I'll see if i can give you guys a direct link or else the exact date it will be up for the USA app store.

[Sebastian Palkowski]

Congratulations, feels cool to have a game in the App-Store, right?

[Icy]

Added a video so you can watch a demo and listen to it while it's available worldwide

[Icy]

Little update, things are going really well, we created the new company in July, named HeYou Games.

Since then, and after 60,000 new installs, we have reached the top 10 most downloaded games in it's category in Spain and Australia in the Apple store and Google Play. Those are the two countries we chose for our beta release.

IGN Spain talked about it today (Spanish language):
Noticias LikWit: LikWit, el juego "top" para dispositivos móviles

The game has been translated to the following languages already: English, Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.

Apple approached us 2 months ago to feature the game in a few Spanish speaking countries as test in a couple of weeks and if the performance is good, will be featured worldwide, that will mean tons of new installs for us and the big worldwide launch.

I'll keep you guys updated and will let you know when it's officially released in USA so you can try it and give feedback.

[kingfc22]

Very nice!

[JPhillips]

That's great news. Congrats.

[JAG]

Nice work Icy, congrats.

[Toddzilla]

Bravo, my friend!

[Marc Vaughan]

Well done

[lighthousekeeper]

awesome