Guess I'll make an app

I just found out that on average, 1/4 of iOS games and 1/8 of Android games (most Android games are trashware) make $5,000 a month from ad revenue. I hate working multiple real life jobs and still making under $30,000 a year. I could make addicting toilet games and get $50,000-$100,000 a year.
(Flappy bird, Angry birds, Subway Surfers, and other simple but addicting games are toilet games. These are apps that you play to pass time, when you have nothing else to do. They have a difficulty curve where losing is common, and ads appear when you lose or win. This speeds up the ad revenue without being annoying during gameplay.)

I could either make a toilet game, or a game that gives you coins for watching ads. I feel like the time for retro indie games is popular. People love 16bit and 8bit games, but what if I go even further and build an Atari style game? I built Turk Hunt in a day, and I could have put more time and work into X-vioas, but the point is, retro games are in demand right now, and luckily for me, Atari art style is the least time consuming art form. I’ll update this topic when I get home. That’s when I’ll start concept art and make a name for the game.

Is this satire or serious?

Either way I mean, why not.

Uuuuuh interesting

It’s serious. I had an idea for what if Grand Theft Auto was made for the Atari, but instead of a person you played as a dog, like goat simulator. I’ll probably do that. I’m sure that’s weird and interesting enough to become a popular game that YouTubers will play.

Actually… If you’re serious, there’s been many, many videos recently of YouTubers talking about developers purposely making stupid. weird, and strange games so they get popular. It’s more so looked down upon, I wouldn’t recommend doing that. But it does genuinely sound like an interesting concept. I’m currently working on FlowLab’s first steam release at the moment, so I guess anything is possible :stuck_out_tongue:

For whatever reason, stupid and weird games get extremely popular, because they are different. People get sick of the same old same old game styles. Games never change. Major companies never have any new ideas. People get tired of it, and they want to try something new, and if the game happens to be funny, it’s even more addicting, because people love to laugh at dumb stuff. People have a very specific attention span. You want to be able to entertain people without offending anybody. That is easily done with comical mischief and animals. Have you noticed that Tide Pods are a popular meme now? It’s because it’s funny and stupid. People demand absurdity. I believe that this game has potential.

Here’s my idea for how the story starts. You are just some normal orange dog, taking a nap at home, not really thinking about anything. Just an average colorblind dog, with dog thoughts. You decide to stare at the TV. The TV never interested you before. You’re too lazy to move. You’re just a dog watching TV, in Atari graphics. The show becomes interesting, you start to understand what’s going on, you’re hypnotized by the TV, you begin to see colors and get new ideas from the shows. You want to try these things, but you’re a dog. You must escape your owner’s home and get outside. You must imitate everything you watch on TV. You desire to explore. You are now a very curious dog, and you swear the TV is talking to you. It is telling you to do stuff. The TV is your new master. Obey it. Steal that car and rob the bank. Fight a goose. Bury your neighbor. Chase away those kids and take their toys. Pee on sunbathers at the beach. Fill out a massive checklist and unlock new areas as you explore the house, neighborhood, town, and big city. You are not just some dog anymore, you are Television Dog.

Remember, this is a game in the Atari/Intellivision art style. It will be in the average RPG angle. Slightly above slightly to the side. It will have a d-pad, and a few buttons. It should look nice on any size phone screen.

(Ill say this first as I dont want to be taken out of context, your game concept does sound really good and using Atari graphics hasnt really been done before.)

I mean the weirdness of things works for memes and whatnot but its not really the case anymore for games due to Unity and Steam.

For whatever reason, stupid and weird games get extremely popular because they are different

This is actually not true. It used to be true, but people have done this so many times becuase of Unity, so its no longer different. Ever since Goat Simulator was released a few years ago people thought random = funny = popularity, but again its already been done countless times that its no longer different or original.

Check this out (for younger people looking at this post, excessive cursing) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0M3dZ0Zyw38
My point about it not being different or original was even said right at the end.

Literally google Simulator games and youll see how much this genre of stupid, poorly made games have been driven into the ground. Again dont get me wrong, your concept sounds good if its actually well made. But thats just my opinion.

Again, your game seems to have an original, fun, concept thatll be well made. Just dont over do the satire.

Anyway I would love to play that…

I don’t play much phone games right now so I don’t what is trending rn. And I don’t watch a lot of youtubers like I used to do.
I can’t help in that part.

I love the story and the concept. Talking Tv it’s really cool.

The game would need some permanent saves… not just achievements… so they don’t feel that the game it’s equal everytime you enter…
Saving position of the player would be a very important thing.
Doesn’t occur me now what would be need to save now… but I’m sure the game will have a lot of things

Well you’re a dog, so you’re supposed to eventually go back or sleep somewhere. You either finish the mission, or give up and you just start back outside of wherever the mission marker was, unless you were doing a checklist side mission, in which case you can do that anytime without starting at a mission point. I mean there can be like dog houses and areas placed around the Town and City where you can save at and load from, so you don’t have to run from your house all the way through town all the way to the city just to do a City Mission. Every time you start the game, it will just load whatever last place you decided to save at was, the dog will walk outside, stretch, and you either decide to randomly free roam explore, go for a mission or achievement, or you will go to the nearest TV and see if there is something interesting on to unlock a new mission. You will also be able to choose to watch the ad commercial channel, to get in-game coins that you can use for Black Market items and temporary PowerUps. I’d rather people want to watch ads, instead of having ads fill up the screen and annoy the player while they are trying to do missions.

Also, I’m not really trying to get my game on Steam, since steam got rid of green light. I’m just trying to make an app for phones, and phone apps are generally simple with an addicting gimmick.

It looks like I’m going to end up getting home later than I thought tonight. I might not have much time tomorrow to work on the game either. It’s already almost midnight, and I have to close at work tomorrow at like 2 in the morning. Maybe I’ll just do some concept art and actually start messing with game logic on my day off on Tuesday.

So checkpoints…
If the player would have to turn the game off immediately - he wouldn’t search for a checkpoint…

It’s not hard to save X and Y player position… it’s 2 saves

I’m aware of that. It’s supposed to be a retro game. I could just have passwords for saving if I really wanted to. The game Auto saves when you complete missions or checklists, but when you start the game from close, your dog still wakes up and walks out of a dog house. You’re not going to lose your progress, and the world’s not going to be so massive that would take you very long to walk down the street to a mission. Once you find all the dog houses, I can have you unlock fast traveling, and entering a dog house opens up a map where you can choose a dog house that you’ve been to before, and the screen will fade out and fade back in, and you will be outside of that dog house. I’d rather the player not be able to save and an area they shouldn’t be, like in the middle of the street, and then spawn and get hit by a car, or be stuck in a mission area and the mission isn’t active, because they didn’t start at the mission point, and no timer is playing and CPUs aren’t set up. Like I said, you weren’t going to lose any progress if you just turn off the game, you just have to start the mission from the beginning, which is pretty normal in almost all games.

Having a hard time making the graphics. I can’t decide how I want the dog to look. Does this look alright? It will only have 2 frame animations.

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For reference on the art style.

Top-10-Intellivision-Games-616x411

I was thinking of making an easter egg or something that the dog becomes even more self aware, and goes from black and white pixels, to Atari to 8 bit, then 16 bit, then maybe even 32 bit. The dog just becomes more and more powerful and transcends through graphical dimensions as the TV becomes more and more of a reality. At first you feel like you’re imagining the TV talking to you, but as the game goes on, the TV breaks the 4th wall and becomes like a mob boss that tells you what to do, and rewards you for certain missions. The game eventually becomes very self aware, until you realize the TV in the game was in control of you (the player) the entire time.

Hey @“Mhx Ar” - I’m not trying to talk you out of making an app, but I can assure you that your information about iOS game revenue is unfortunately way off (Maybe it’s from ~7 years ago?). Check out this Quora thread: https://www.quora.com/How-much-money-does-the-average-mobile-game-make-How-much-revenue-does-the-run-of-the-mill-game-generate-Is-the-revenue-curve-steady-and-flat-Do-some-genres-do-much-better-than-others

The sad fact is, most games (& apps) make nearly nothing on iOS :frowning:

Marketing is super important, but hard to do well without spending a lot.

@grazer So their game gets a couple thousand downloads a day, and generates up to $2,000 a month. A game like Angry Birds or Flappy Bird had millions of downloads making $50,000 a day. What I quoted was the top % of games, not the average games. His game makes above average downloads and still makes up to $2,000 a month, which isn’t far off of the top downloaded games. That’s also apparently only on one platform, since I didn’t see him mention his app is on both android and ios. Also, they didn’t mention how often an ad would play on average in their app, which makes a huge difference in games where an ad plays every 10 minutes vs an ad playing every time you die or pause. Any income I earn would benefit me in helping me pay bills and save for the future.

Side view concepts for TV, dog, cat, generic woman, goose, duck, crow, key and work boots. Most objects (besides the TV) won’t have more than 1 color, but buildings and other objects can. I want this to be as true to old games as possible. Obviously I’ll have to scale these to fit in a 32x32 grid environment, because I just fit all of those in the size of an average single sprite. Old games were extremely low resolution.

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