For The Battle. FTB. FTB: Stickman Fight Games. A game with 25K+ downloads and 4.5+ rating on Google Play Store. Made by a single guy (Me, aka VippyGames).
What started as photoshop drawings during boring android lessons in school where me with friends wanted to have some fun, to somehow, relatively successfull game with many people giving it a lot of positive feedback.
But how everything started? it's time for myself to look back at the journey and gather conclusions. How this online stick man game became pretty popular? Let's dive together.
School. Android programming lessons. All we do is literally WATCHING VIDEOS. Coronavirus. Literally no reason why we should not go home early.
After creating tons of games in Java, CPP & OpenGL, SDL2 and so on for 3 or so years, I finally decided to give Unity a try. I didn't want to use it then as I tought it's a lot of drag and drop and not that much programming and it would be boring, and better to write networking code by myself (Pain).
The game modes were:
- Deathmatch Normal
- Battle Royale Competitive
- Titanic(with 999999 Kg zones casually falling on stick men and launching players toward the sun).
At the time wanted, as you see, to create more than 9 zones. But then two problems:
- Players won't find each other easily
- Mine creativity is limited(As of 2020. Now too tbh)
Trust me — this map is trash. Funny thing is it still in the game — should be reworked tho - anytime until the sun explodes. Also the boxer above was meant to be added as second character in addition to kung-robbo, a plan that was aborted, at least for now.
The images for the android version will be from the recent version (FTB 2.6). Cause I'm lazy.
Anyway, we celebrated a birthday party to one of mine friends. Then we began to socialize after touching some grass(didn't happen we were at home). I somehow mentioned For The Battle, that cool game, steam, bla bla bla. Half of them saw me working on it during android programming lessons.
The birthday friend threw an idea that this game looks like it should be on mobile devices. And I thought:
And indeed at that time For The Battle seemed like it would be more fun for android devices. Friends take the device, play together, deathmatch battle royale whatever. I remember myself playing Clash of Clans and BTD Battles in school, where all(addicted) classmates gather in one circle and attack in clan wars. There indeed was some magic there.
At the end of the year I launched the game on Google Play Store. And NOEONE told me that launching a game is an important event and I should use pre registration, marketing on social media, and game should be ready.
Unsurprisingly mine second brain cell was inactive. So you got the game on 2021.
Finished school. During college. Learning useless math and stuff. Working as backend developer at the same time.
So cool FTB had skins, abilities, fun with friends and everything but you know - still something is missing. It's kinda fun jumping around hitting others in the battle arena but still. Game could use a boost.
It was very tricky to balance them. On one hand - you want to make the winning guy stronger. On the other hand you still want so others always can eliminate him and not some random stick dominating the arena for the entire day.
For that were added a lot of systems and hours were spent on balancing in game upgrades.
Eventually were added small orbs that you can collect to become stronger. So you have some chance gaining power. At the current state - even 1st level player can win 10th level player, with some luck, skill etc, as the upgrades do not modify the taken and received damage from other players. Anyway the state looks fine at that time.
As some people used, let's say "not family friendly" names, I removed custom names and allowed to select animal name for your stickman instead.
- Why animal name?
- Why zonkey in the list?
I duno.
The idea is:
- Throw 2 players in a small map
- Every 30 seconds a new unique random zone spawns above them and lava moves up. Players must move up to keep fighting
- After some (5 minutes) they need to kill each other before lava eliminates one of them
So simple, and yet so fun. The amount of LMAO moments we had with mine brother & friends playing this mode was incredible. Tho still need to fix the fact that 99% of casualties happen cause of falling into lava and not 1v1s.
Also, added teams game mode, where, as you could guess, two teams fight one another.
Good. Now time to throw some money away.
As a guy with zero marketing knowledge, I knew one thing. It's an ONLINE game. It's FUN only with a LARGE number of HUMANS playing at the same time.
How to gain human players? Throw some money at Google Ads of course. I won't expand on it, but let's say that I definitely did not know what I was doing. The good thing that many socials - discord, youtube, facebook etc were created.
BUT. There were FULL game rooms. 16 players, hitting, fighting each other. Literally tens of them entered the battle arena for weeks after those days, despite google ads not running anymore and no people in the room. The amount of time they played daily was peak.
Also they left many reviews. 4-5 star reviews. This showed that, as I enjoyed the game with family & friends, other people found the goofy, uniquely drawn animation and fighting of FTB cool too.
Don't know how to explain this feeling. Imagine developing software by myself for many years for myself only. Then you create some game where people jumping for many days and enjoy it, and read from reviews that people REALLY actually like it. That's an amazing feeling. As a hardcore gamer myself, seeing others jumping with me or others and having fun in for the battle - a game that I created and having a nice time, like I had in many other games, it's an incredible feeling. The feeling of bringing the good experience I got by myself from other games.
They are fun to kill, chase and so on, but they won't replace humans. As FTB has complex map and many ways to get from one way to another. You won't do it via simple movement. You need to use jumpads, ladders, abilities, bugs in abilities that were eventually left as features. If mine friends & family didn't understand how to complete the tutorial, those bots are lost case.
But hey, they are fun to kill and me & other people who download the game seem to like to chase them. They were added as additional source of XP in game.
Many misc stuff was added. Like in app updates, settings… blah. Boring. The cool one is you can play offline - just with the bots. Thanks for the guy suggested it in the reviews section, cool feature.
Didn't work much on FTB since that point as were doing other stuff & a bit was depressed after launch and did not know what to do from here.
Same as previous year regarding FTB. Most of the time getting into the crypto world. Created custom tools, Bianic app(available on play store) etc. Kinda break from game dev.
Me living mine life. I mean average gamer & programmer without life-life. And hey let's check how FTB is doing as I didn't do so for some time. Also the many notifications from Google that I need to upgrade libraries or action will be taken may need to get some attention.
And woha. 50+ downloads daily, and people seem to play this long forgotten game, and some even leave 5 star reviews.
And I kind of remember the fact that THE GAME IS FUN. IT HAS POTENTIAL. FAMILY, FRIENDS, AND RANDOM PEOPLE SHOW THAT IT'S THE CASE.
Now we are in the recent 2 months. Mine second brain cell activated. I understood some points:
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Need simplicity. People don't think like the developer and some buttons, features that easy for me not necessarily for others.
Special. FTB is fun because it's indie-game simplicity is SPECIAL. You improvise to move, improvise in fighting, your upgrades, how you gain XP and so on. In other games you just go left or right, there you get wherever you want however you want.
It's just fun. Seeing mine father fall into lava when I'm 1hp in duel. Other people chasing and fighting bots, investigating portals and the huge battle arena. It's gameplay it just fun.
Need marketing. As online game that is VERY FUN but mostly with friends or large groups of players, need to allow those groups to be created, so every random who enters For The Battle will enter a ready room with many others to fight with.
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Recently added guides, explanations, manuals, descriptions to everything. New upgrades, abilities, emotes, skins, chest opening sound. Progress bar showing gained XP after game and how close you are to chests. Daily chest & coins concepts. Minimap.
Currently working on login & saving progress to cloud and improving the fun in the arena even farther.
To help people find each other currently only the normal deathmatch game mode available. But competitive, duels, titanic and so on are in work and will come back soon more fun than ever!
The focus on:
- Ease of use. Guides, easily get into FTB.
- Quality. Make core gameplay and game modes even more fun than they are now.
- Marketing. Let's bring the next wave of stickmen to the battle arena.
A new chapter has begun. Let's see where it is going.