The first week of Oh My Shape! has been a small success and a few lessons learned.

First of all, I am very happy, I am still hyped about having published the game. Oh My Shape! works and it seems that the general feedback is good and this has only confirmed one of my doubts. Should I continue working on Oh My Shape! to improve it and add more features? The answer is yes.

Analytics

Today marks exactly one week since the launch. As I already mentioned, it is a game that for now I am not going to dedicate money to promote, so the downloads that are achieved will be from word of mouth with friends, family, etc., and posting on some Unity forums.

The day of publication was the busiest day in terms of downloads and ratings and the second day was close behind. From there, we have had varied days with more or less activity.

In total, as of September 3, the game has been downloaded 70 times. That is, on the Google Play page, we have a wonderful +50 in downloads. The goal is to reach 100 so that this number changes and gives us a little more prestige.

Of those 70 downloads, 43 players have left a rating in the form of stars and currently, the game’s rating is 4.953. This means that the majority have been 5 stars but we have had two 4-star ratings.

Of those 43 ratings, 31 have had a comment or review. Generally highlighting the gameplay and the need for reflexes in the game.

And right now, our most downloaded country is Spain but we also have players from Belgium, Poland, Austria, and Chile.

Revenues

Oh My Shape! is free. It is not a game with which I expect to make money, rather recognition and a solid test of my knowledge in Unity. Even so, I added ads to see how they worked and how players interact with them.

The first and only rule about the ads I had for Oh My Shape! is that they are not annoying, that is, they do not appear just because and the player is forced to watch them to continue playing.

So I added two types of ads:

• Ads that help you continue a level already started when you die.
• Ads that reward you with 100 coins to spend on upgrades for different shapes.

In its first week, 113 ads have been seen, which translates into approximately $0.79 in revenue. My current eCPM being $6.98. This means that for every thousand ads I would earn that amount.

As you can see, I am not going to retire thanks to Oh My Shape! 😀

The importance of Keywords for positioning

Just as in web development and marketing you have to have the SEO (search engine optimization) very studied so that when a person searches for something on Google (or another search engine) it appears on the first page of results to make your game one of the ones that appears in a search, you also have to think carefully about what to put.

Google Play Store has a similar system for indexing and positioning games. It is not only worth having a good start with downloads and positive ratings (which, beware, does a lot).

If you notice, before I wrote the title as OhMyShape! and now, throughout this article, I am writing it as Oh My Shape!. I think it has been a mistake on my part to call it that because it is a complicated keyword to position. Separately there are more possibilities of ending up listing with the search “shape”. I have also started using other keywords in the game description such as “geometry” or “puzzle” (although it has nothing to do with puzzles) to see if it appears in any search.

It frustrates me a bit to see that we do not appear even close to the first 250 positions of any search right now.

Next steps for Oh My Shape!

There have been quite a few comments with very good feedback to improve the game because certain actions have been a repeated topic of discussion. For example, the lack of clarity about how to play. People do not read a giant tutorial full of text at the beginning, they simply skip it and after 3 seconds they realize that they do not know how to play. But it’s not their fault, the fault lies with the giant text-filled tutorial.

So here is the roadmap with the improvements and updates that Oh My Shape! will have in the coming months:

[September & October]

• Translation into Spanish (since it is the most downloaded country)
• An options panel to:
  • Change the language
  • Be able to manage the volume of the music
  • Be able to manage the volume of the sound effects
• Push notification system
• Dynamic tutorials. We will remove the mega text tutorial that no one reads and add images and gifs to indicate how to play.

[November]

• Endless mode. A game mode only playable when you have passed the 15 levels and that will allow you to compete with players from all over the world to see who has the best score.
• Integration with Google Play Services that includes:
  • Achievements, so the player has more reasons to play and perform certain actions in the game.
  • Leaderboard to display the ranking of the best scores in Endless mode.

[December]

• iOS version
• PC version (itch.io)

[Far away in the future]

• Maybe new levels
• Maybe multiplayer

That’s all for now. As you can see there’s Oh My Shape! for a while. Remember to download it, play it an rate: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.edgargomez.ohmyshape