Our First Commercial Game: A Journey of Passion, Challenges, and a bit of Success
Hello, I’m David, and my love for creating games started at a young age with my first console, a Nintendo, which was a rare and cherished possession in my home country of Cuba. Despite the challenges of growing up in a poor country, my family worked hard to get me that console with a single game when I was just six years old, and that experience left a lasting impression on me.
As I grew older, my passion for games continued to thrive, and I realized that I had the skills and creativity to bring my own game ideas to life. I studied in university and started creating prototypes and participating in game jams. I started to realize that I could build stuff, develop new things, take them out of my mind to be part of life, replicate the games I cherished when I was a kid (checkout my open-sourced SNES Super Metroid version, multiplayer included).
Finally, with a friend and co-author, we created our first complete game called Just Move It, a simple puzzle game with a mission: to release a full-fledged product despite our lack of experience.
Just Move It also inspired the name of our game studio, JUMIT, which is an abbreviation of the game’s name and also happens to be the name of some bugs that work in pairs, as we later discovered!
We launched Just Move It on the Play Store, but unfortunately, it did not achieve much success, and we felt disheartened, leading us to take a break from game development due to our lack of experience.
However, a few years later, my friend came to me with another game prototype, a platformer featuring a rolling car on a 2D platform. I saw the potential in the game and pushed for a partnership, suggesting that we develop it as a PC game, with bigger rewards and a simpler monetization strategy.
My friend had already worked on the project for two years, and I joined for another year. Together, we put our heart and soul into the game, not only in its development but also in learning how to sell the game, work as a team, build a community, and generate buzz for the game’s launch.
As part of my nature, I automated some of our development and marketing processes with platforms like Hootsuite and later.com to schedule posts for mainly 4 platforms nearly every day in the week.
We would take screenshots and videos of new features, upload them to those platforms and schedule them for the next month or so.
This, in addition to our usage of platforms for gameplay video streaming on YouTube and twitch, gave us some opportunities that would just become visible a few months later. However, it was not easy, and there were frustrating moments, but I learned the importance of perseverance and not quitting, as it is the key to success.
Finally, we launched the game on Steam and sold around 2K copies in the first year, which was a thrilling experience to see people playing and engaging with our game. Despite the sales not skyrocketing on Steam, I continued to roll out updates and maintain our market presence.
Eventually, our efforts paid off when some publishers showed interest in our game for porting it to other platforms. After several meetings, we signed with a publisher, and to our surprise, our game made it to Nintendo, a platform that had inspired me to create games in the first place.
Seeing our game on Nintendo was a remarkable milestone for me personally, and the support of the publisher resulted in our game selling 20 times more copies than we had managed on our own. While the financial gains were modest, the fact that our game was played by over 30K people brought us immense joy and satisfaction.
Even right now, our score board continues to change with high scores that I have never managed.
Our game can be found on Steam (Rolling Adventure), and looking back, I am proud of the journey we have undertaken, filled with passion, challenges, and ultimately, a bit of success. It has taught me the value of perseverance, hard work, and never giving up on your dreams. I am grateful for the opportunities and experiences that game development has brought into my life, and I look forward to creating more games and continuing this exciting journey with JUMIT.
There is still much to tell about the project and this is already way too long for you to read, so... let’s continue in an upcoming post.
Current status, Rolling Adventure is being ported it to PlayStation and Xbox.
Thanks for reading!
(first ever medium post)
