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Author Topic: Thinking about buying Android license  (Read 9239 times)

Ticked_Off_Pixel

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Thinking about buying Android license
« on: March 05, 2013, 06:53:24 PM »
Hello friends!  ;D

I'm thinking about buying the Android Indie license ($400) to start developing games and non-game apps for the android market. But I have a few doubts i'd like to clear with more experience users before I spend money. I hope you can help me:

1) The setting up process (installing android SDK, connecting with Unity, developing, building and publishing in Google Play market) normally simple, that a begginer could do, or it takes an experienced developer to complete these tasks?

2) Is it more difficult to make an android game than a PC game in Unity and Playmaker?

3) Is it easy to port an android game (made with Playmaker) to iOS, with minimal adjustments?

4) How's the best way to deal with the resolutions and height/width variations among several android devices? Would NGUI help in this task?

5) What's the maximun Drawcall value sugested?

6) Is it easy to use Ads? Which one is the best?

7) Is it common to make, at least, $1000 from sales or ads, in the Google Play? What's the most you got?

8) Any other tips?

Please leave your impressions.

thanks! 8)

Ticked_Off_Pixel

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Re: Thinking about buying Android license
« Reply #1 on: March 07, 2013, 07:55:31 PM »
Nobody?   :o

You don't have to answer every question, just the ones you know!

 ;)

Sjones

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Re: Thinking about buying Android license
« Reply #2 on: March 07, 2013, 08:11:29 PM »
these are more generic questions regarding games dev and unity as a whole, I would suggest asking these on the unity forums.

for the most part its all down to your type of game/app.

about the only one thats easy to answer is the first one, yes it is easy to setup - again a unity question not playmaker.

playmaker isnt any difference from PC to mobile just input is different, but you knew that anyway, keyboard and mouse vs touchscreen means you would have to design the UI based on touch

Ticked_Off_Pixel

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Re: Thinking about buying Android license
« Reply #3 on: March 07, 2013, 09:39:37 PM »
Thanks Sjones,

I know most of these questions are not really PlayMaker related, but in Unity's forum there are a lot of really experienced programmers, so most of the things i find hard to do in Unity, it's a piece of cake to them.
In this forum, I assume there are more artists and game designers than professional programmers.

Anyone else?

Lane

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Re: Thinking about buying Android license
« Reply #4 on: March 08, 2013, 08:02:26 AM »
From everything I have read iOS is more significantly more lucrative than android but I'm fairly certain that the demographics are quite different between the two so i think it depends a lot on the app you plan to publish.

As far as ease of development I don't have any input since I don't publish to android.
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kiriri

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Re: Thinking about buying Android license
« Reply #5 on: March 08, 2013, 08:09:03 AM »
I've never managed a game myself that made it into the final stages, so I can't answer all your questions. But I've worked on a couple of commercial games so I'll try ;)

2) To do android games commercially you need to do them quickly and accurately. Otherwise it often isn't worth the time. Usually I get about a month for the entire GUI and logics. So that may be considered hard if you're new to this.
Speaking of which, the GUI and controles are your nemesis on touch devices. Getting them right on every resolution takes at least 30% of your time, unless you prepare prefabs like buttons, dragmenus etc beforehand (as I've planned for my next projects, if that can be managed with the contract).

3) Actions like mouse event etc are all emulated on touch devices (at least on android). Therefore, apart from the resolution and optimization, it's relatively easy.

4)In the past I used to design the game with mesh GUIs in a square resolution (1:1 aspect). That allows you to get the aspect lateron and multiply it with the size of the gui objects (as well as their positions in a bit more complex manner) to position everything on any resolution.
However, while this is useful for PC, it poses problems on phones when you're suddenly changing from something like 16:9 to 9:16.Therefore I plan to use JeanFabre's DataMaker addon in the future, to permanently save certain gui positions to an xml file under a specific "resolution" category.
This would probably work better since there are only a rather limited amount of resolutions on tablets/phones and since manually moving the gui items would give the artist more freedom in guidesign (like different arangements for landscape vs portrait mode).

5) No idea, I've not meddled with the artists.

6) Yeah there's a couple of solutions and they seem simple (like admob). But I haven't worked on free games yet, so I don't know any details.

7) Apparently it is. Depending on the sums I'm usually paid the games must make at least that to not go bankrupt ;)

Hope this helped a little. Like I said, I could go into detail about certain workflows involved, but I don't know much about any other department than programming.

That being said, I do recommend working in an established team before trying your own thing. According to Gamasutra a lot of people start solo projects, but a lot of people fail them too   :-\  As long as you're not staking all your finances on this I don't want to demotivate you though :D .
Best,
Sven

Lane

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Re: Thinking about buying Android license
« Reply #6 on: March 08, 2013, 08:35:07 AM »
When you say mouse actions are emulated is that how you can test play on a PC? How does multitouch testing work - do you have to publish and load onto a touch device in order to test those types of gameplay?
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kiriri

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Re: Thinking about buying Android license
« Reply #7 on: March 08, 2013, 08:47:31 AM »
yes, unless you write dedicated scripts(never done that) to emulate it you need to push it to your device first. Although pushing sometimes takes annoyingly long, it's what I always do to get it properly working.
And yes, for single-finger stuff there's not much wrong with the mouse actions, which of course work in the editor too.

Best,
Sven

Lane

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Re: Thinking about buying Android license
« Reply #8 on: March 08, 2013, 09:03:36 AM »
yes, unless you write dedicated scripts(never done that) to emulate it you need to push it to your device first. Although pushing sometimes takes annoyingly long, it's what I always do to get it properly working.
And yes, for single-finger stuff there's not much wrong with the mouse actions, which of course work in the editor too.

I've always wondered. Thanks for clarifying, and yes... that would be abysmally annoying.
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Ticked_Off_Pixel

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Re: Thinking about buying Android license
« Reply #9 on: March 23, 2013, 08:06:50 AM »
Thanks everyone for the answers! 

I had an Unity 3.5 free android license, so I decided to downgrade Unity to 3.5.7 and start developing.

In 18 days, I came up with this:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.TOPgames.Happy_Star_Adventures&feature=search_result

It's a simple game for children, that helped me develop my Unity Android/Playmaker skills, without much frustration, so don't complain if it's too simple for you :)

Please rate it well, and leave your constructive critics, to help a fellow developer stay motivated!

Thanks again!