Cafe Racer release trailer [Low Poly Endless Android Game]

It was a long time coming, but my first game is now live on Google Play.
You can get it here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.PiguinSoft.CafeRacer

It was a solo learning project, created using Unity and Blender, programmed in C#.

For those interested in how it looked during development, you can check the WIP thread here: http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/wi...-motorcycle-customization-mobile-game.376201/ and laugh at my expected release date and my first tentative tries in modeling. A bit more detail has been added since

 

Nice work Hog. From the trailer it really feels like you've captured the feel of riding! Really nice.
Do you have a release date set?
The trailer is well done as well, and the polygonal aesthetic is nice and doesn't distract from your #1 intended goal.

I'd really like to read a post mortem on this - when you get the time. From start to finish, the decisions you made, issues you hit, reasons for extended development time - all you care to share.
Could also be used a real nice marketing "weapon".

Again - nice job. Will check it out when released.

 

Thanks

Release date was... er, two days ago Seems I am really bad at self promoting, since I somehow forgot to include the Play store link. Edited and fixed!

What I was mostly aiming for was the thing that I felt was missing - giving the feel of riding while retaining arcade playability. And you can't really have that if you ride on a straight road. The thing that helped me was experience, since I was a motoring editor, so I knew what I wanted it to feel like. The obstacles on the other hand... boy there were a lot of them. You are right, I should probably do a post mortem

 

The overall look is awesome, the idea of having a low-poly fragmented sky is great. I'll download the game ASAP!

 

Thank you

The sky was one of the main things that I knew for certain I wanted, before I even started developing - Loved those Low Poly renders with it, and I just had to figure out how to make it work properly.

Let me know what you think, all feedback is helpful and appreciated

 

One question Hog, are those common European bikes?
The most common bikes here in the US are Harleys and crotch rockets. Might want to consider those models if you plan to update the game - maybe some other 'locations' as well. Just a thought. Plan to play it this evening.

 

Those are '70s - '80s motorcycles, chosen as those are the ones that are most often the base for cafe racer/ tracker / bobber conversions, both in Europe and the States. Can't have a motorcycle game without Harleys of course, and there are a few more engine configurations that are missing - besides V2's, there are no triples, L2's or whatever the Moto Guzzi engines are called.

The idea is to add at least one new motorcycle per update, with a few more customization options thrown in the mix as well. Then a few different levels, like the obligatory snow environment, and the list of things to do is simply never ending

So, as you can see, I do agree on all points. At the moment I'm trying to get it up and running with some recognition, playing with keywords for better results in the search, and trying to set up some promo codes to give out too. I'll manage to do everything i want eventually, but I hope that for a 1.0 version it has decent variety - especially when you get into customizing.

Thanks again for the feedback

 

Please add a button to close all screen, on my phone I don't have physic button, so it's boring to close each screen.
Add the possibility to increase quality with realtime shadow.


If you need a good translation in French, don't hesitate to contact me.

I give you 5 stars, please try my game Orcwar RTS, and give me a review.

 

Two of my test devices don't have physical buttons either, but never had a problem with that since the on screen buttons remain active even though dimmed out.

I tried realtime shadows, but decided against them since i didn't feel the blocky nature of them on mobiles was worth the load on CPU - just the spoked wheels would be enough to bring low end mobiles to their knees

Thank you for the offer, need to do a few things first before starting the translations.

Downloaded, rated and reviewed

 

Congrats finishing the game, it looks good.

 

It looks like you've been pretty successful with your marketing. I see you're pretty well rated with 399 reviews already. Would be willing to share what avenues your chose to market your app?

 

I actually haven't done much marketing wise, since my budget is a nice round 0.

What I have done:
- Did run an open beta which brought me about 500 users over the span of a month and a half before launch, brought feedback which was really handy and engaged in discussion with a few of them.
- While on beta, got discovered by one YouTube channel with about 25k subscribers, that put me in one of their videos.
- Once Cafe Racer went live, I contacted a few more YouTube channels, sending them the game trailer and little info on the game. What I learned was that small channels will support new games, while those with more subscribers did actually ask for money in exchange. Didn't have it, didn't believe in it, didn't pay for them, so I was happy with what visibility I could get through the newer ones.
- Created a Facebook and Twitter page for the game, with an in game reward for liking/following it, so I would gain some visibility to the friends of my users. Small gains, but every little helps.
- Invited all my friends to like the fb page
- Since it was a game geared towards customizing motorcycles, came into contact with a few friends in relevant FB groups. Didn't get much traction from there, but at least got a few posts seen.
- Tried to reply in as many reviews I could that posed questions or critique since i wanted to get a feel of what people felt was missing or not working as they'd like, strangely that made a couple of them rate the game higher than before.

What also happened:
- Discovered that a ton of sites started offering cracked versions of the game for free in game currency. Didn't appreciate it, especially since my net income from in-app purchases so far has been 2.4£.
- Although I had read about it, was a bit disheartened by the fact that some people not only left 1 star reviews without even trying the game (its a free world after all), but some used those just to curse for no apparent reason. That felt strange.
- Got a ton of emails from 'promoters', offering 5 star reviews in exchange for money. Ignored them.

That was a longer post than I thought it would be.

 

Why not making a stand alone PC game instead ? And selling it throught gaming sites ?

 

Well, that's obvious, it's because... err...
...I wanted to do a mobile game? LoL.

I'm testing the waters. This was a learning project for me, and also a way to give people a glimpse into the world of motorcycling through my eyes. So it seems I have what is called 'Low Poly Vision'
If it proves sustainable, I will venture into more projects and eventually platforms, but mobile games have a big audience and the advantage of being able to be played on any downtime - even on the bus or the tube/metro/subway, or while waiting for a friend to arrive when you are meeting them outside.

 

Interesting. it sounds like running the open beta really made a big difference. I didn't run an open beta more than a couple of days and I didn't get very many users. I'll have to look into some of the those YouTube channels you mentioned. If you don't mind, could share a few of them? I bet twitch reviews would create similar, if not better success than YouTube. I'll have to do some digging there too. I think my presence at the GDEX convention will jump start things though. Thanks for taking the time share your experience. I think we're both at a similar stage in this business. I hope it goes well for you

 

Off the top of my head, GameZone is a really cool guy and highly recommended.

Fingers crossed for the GDEX convention, hope it will do wonders

 

@Hogfather

Hi, love the look and style of your game .. Will it be coming to iOS ? And if so when ?

Cheers.

 

@Griffo
Thank you, I was worried that the aesthetics that I so liked would be a sticking point for people, glad to see it isn't so.

An iOS release is planned, just need to find a workaround on some issues - the dreaded multithreaded rendering crash. Oh, and buy an iPhone and register as a developer with Apple So unfortunately no concrete date yet.

 

Just uploaded v1.01, should be live in a couple of hours.

I was hoping that my first update would have to do with actual content, but crashes and angry one star reviews meant that I had to rethink my approach.
From what I could gather, the issue wasn't exactly from my end, but from a combination of some processors with specific versions of Android, that simply couldn't handle multithreaded rendering. That proved to be an issue, since I had optimized using MR, as I hadn't been able to locate the few threads that warned against that bug.
Solution: Optimize again, and again, and again. Increased car LOD to 3 levels, played a bit with the logic, changed distances where the Ai wakes up, added small random delay to each previously batched action to avoid stutters, moved to Vertex-Lit rendering, and a ton of little changes here and there.
For good measure, I also updated the project to 4.7.2, going through each script of my plugins and making additions where appropriate, to make sure they would work properly. And extra hours and hours of testing in two phases, one for the main changes and another one for the Unity update to be sure that nothing has been broken. Fun times!

Hopefully that will address the issues without a negative performance hit, since the app seems to run smoother than ever during gameplay, with framerate only dropping in the showroom due to the, transparent, window to the world.
If it doesn't... I have no idea what else there is to do.