24 May 2016
Featured App: Tower Crush – a great new Corona-built game
The great games just keep on coming! This week we want to let you know about Tower Crush, an attractive, well-thought-out, and full-featured game from Cleverson Schmidt‘s one-man indie studio Impossible Apps. Launched on May 18, 2016, it’s a bit early to have earned any accolades, but it’s an amazing example of what can be done in a Corona-built app.
Tower Crush features fantastic graphics and audio. The game supports multiple languages and social networking features. It uses the physics engine, voice-overs, a shop to manage upgrades, player vs. player support, rewarded video ads, leaderboards, and in-app purchases, all in a well-polished package.
Despite balancing a day job along with a wife and child, Schmidt’s endeavor came into being. 56 Lua files and 750 images later, Tower Crush is now a reality. Schmidt estimates that 90% of the code is cross-platform and the other 10% around implementing leaderboards and in-app purchases across three platforms.
Schmidt has written up a blog post describing how Tower Crush came to be. He goes into great detail on his thought process about how to monetize the app.
The game is free with in-app purchases from Apple iTunes, Google Play and Amazon.
With Tower Crush, Schmidt has built a game to be proud of. It’s a great example of what a little bit of creativity and a powerful engine like Corona can build.
Andreas
Posted at 01:58h, 25 MayHi Cleverson,
you did a perfect job with “Tower Crush”, it looks really good, is well polished and is just fun to play!
I love the artwork, sounds, it’s really easy to get into the game and the first interstitial I saw was really a funny video to watch (starring Arnold Schwarzenegger from my neighbour country Austria).
The German localisation is well done, so you just got a 5-star-rating from Germany (iOS App Store).
Good luck and keep on making awesome games like this,
best
Andreas
P.S.:
I like you blog about the creation of the game. It was the same for me when I create “Freeze!”, I got another full time job, had to hire an artist and sound guy and I worked only at night when the wife and kids were sleeping. So I can relate and I know how hard it is to keep on going till finally the game is in the stores.
Cleverson Schmidt
Posted at 09:13h, 25 MayHi Andreas,
Thanks for the kind words! You are one of the best success cases here in the Corona community, Freeze is just great!
I’m not that confident in the translations. I used a very affordable alternative for translations (fiverr.com). I’m relieved to know the game looks good in German 🙂
Now, the hard part, marketing the game. If you have any tips in this area, I would love the hear.
Yes, I know your “pain”. It’s hard, tiring, but totally worth it 😀
Rob Miracle
Posted at 09:17h, 25 MayA while back, a bunch of Corona Developers crowdsourced a translation spreadsheet. I can’t vouch for how accurate it is, but they were developers that spoke the native language to fill out this spreadsheet: https://t.co/9HVFp7QeV1 (Google Drive Spreadsheet). It’s really deep and has many game phrases translated for you.
Andreas
Posted at 02:02h, 27 MayHi Cleverson,
thanks for your kind words, too! 🙂
I played the game a few hours, liked it a lot, couldn’t stop and of course bought 500 Coins to support you. One suggestion here: 500 Coins is the least expensive option, and it still costs $2.99 – that’s a bit steep compared to Coin/Value prices in other games. So maybe if the IAPs don’t work well then maybe lower the prices.
About marketing: Tried a little of that for “Freeze!” and “Freeze! 2”, but it didn’t work for us. The price of marketing is always higher for us than the resulting earnings.
The only things that did work a little were reviews, but more and more the review sites want to get paid for that. While I can understand this – they need to make a living, too – it’s hard to see if you really get many thousand of installs because of a review you paid $150 for. So we just contacted about 500 review sites and blogs and as a result we got about 7 reviews.
The only thing that worked for us was creating a game with all the basic stuff you need to get featured (nice game mechanics, beautiful artwork, cool soundtrack, support Game Center etc., publish in 10 or more of the most important languages, you did all that) and then plain old good luck to get recognised by the editorial teams from Apple and Google (Amazon didn’t make us much, even with some features).
You can continue to work on the game, e.g. add a puzzle mode with in each level a fixed tower for you and a fixed one for the enemy, and some other weapons that are more like rock-paper-scissors (some that work better against stone floors, or metal ones, etc.). And sell these as level packs, 50 levels for $0.99 or so.
The reason to do this is to make updates with new content, and to hope that this time someone from the editorial teams look at it – I guess they don’t look at updates for bugfixes.
If nothing works and you don’t have many install you can as a last resort remove the app from the App Stores, use a new App ID and package name for Android and re-publish it with a different name and different title screen (and some updated/changed content). And hope to get recognised this time.
As you can see, I’m not a big help marketing-wise. We just did what we were able to do (make a nice game) and then had lots of luck.
So I hope you get your share of luck, too,
best
Andreas
Thomas Vanden Abeele
Posted at 04:34h, 30 MayAwesome game! Had a lot of fun playing it over the weekend – very high production value, so well done and I hope it sells well!
Cleverson Schmidt
Posted at 08:53h, 30 MayThanks Thomas!
@Andreas, thanks for the sincere answer. Seven out of 500 replied your review requests, tough numbers! It’s also good to know that the paid alternatives are not worth it. My LTV does not allow me to pay for user acquisition. I think you need to have a perfect monetization strategy that can bring a lot money per user to justify the cost of user acquisition. Otherwise you will spend a few dollars per user and make a few cents, the math doesn’t add up.
I will keep looking for reviews. They may take the game to the Editors, eventually. And thank you for buying an IAP 🙂
Br,
Cleverson