Games A Lunar Lander inspired game in progress

[melonZgz]

Hello there.
Inspired by @ilan Lunar Lander thread, I decided to rescue an ancient project from a few years ago and give it a chance.
The idea is working on it for a month and see what I can accomplish, as I wouldn't like it to last forever as some of my old games...
So here's the game now:

There is nothing special there, just a parallax effect and some animations for the rocket.
There are a lot of things to add to the game engine itself, like particles, zooming, sounds, breakable rocket, limited fuel, items, animated obstacles, better controls, minimap...
And I'm still thinking about the game mechanics itself. Now the idea is just going from A to B without damaging the rocket. Another option could be go to rescue an astronaut (or many of them) and get back to the initial platform (I allready did that on my UFO game)

 

[ilan]

in my opinion your Alien UFO Rescue Mission game is a very high level game and i have no idea why it is not popular. i have not seen a better lunar lander game concept then what you have done. you should really consider promoting your game using facebook, google ads. it is a shame that such a game has not crossed the 100k installs long time ago.

how is the frogger game going? you should probably first finish that game before you start a new one. it is also a very high potential game concept!

 

[melonZgz]

Yep, I also think the UFO game was great... I'm very proud of it, but I don't know why it didn't work. Maybe because the tilt controls... Once you get to them I think the game plays great, but that may be the problem here: In a mobile game, the first impression makes it all. As a free game, if the very first seconds aren't successfull the game is going to be uninstalled in a high percentage

how is the frogger game going? you should probably first finish that game before you start a new one. it is also a very high potential game concept!

I just got stuck on creating an online scoreboard for it... so I slowly abandoned the project, but yeah, maybe the frogger/crossy road game has a lot more potential than this one. I wouldnt like to spend hundreds of hours working on a game to get almost no downloads...

 

[ilan]

Maybe because the tilt controls... Once you get to them I think the game plays great, but that may be the problem here: In a mobile game, the first impression makes it all. As a free game, if the very first seconds aren't successfull the game is going to be uninstalled in a high percentage

i dont think at all that this is the reason because the thing is that you dont have 100k installs and 99k uninstalls the thing is that you have very low install rate so people have not tried your game at all. so you need first to get the install and then decide if the uninstall was because of gameplay or something else but in your situation the problem is the low install rate.

reason for low install rate:

- bad presentation in the store (not good looking screenshots)
- bad icon
- bad name
- not good enough description (keywords for the search engine)
- no promotion

what you could do

- try to put popular words inside your description like of already popular game.
- your app is pixelated. make it clear in the description/game name. people that like pixel game will probably search for: pixel, 8bit, retro,...
- make your icon more interesting and fancy
- start a promotion campaign in admobs. target low price countries where you can get an install for 3-5 cents and get lots of installs and like this your game will get higher rank in the search engine of google.
- add youtube video
- talk about your games in forums

i know it is a little bit time consuming but after investing so many hours it is worth to try and invest few hours to see if your game has potential or not and in my opinion it has!!

I just got stuck on creating an online scoreboard for it...

what?? come on upload your game. believe me after you have uploaded your game it will be much simpler to update it. if the scoreboard is the only thing that is missing than your app is ready for the store. later you can update it after getting some feedback.

good luck!