Laser Dreams - free mobile puzzle game for iOS and Android

Hi everyone!

Laser Dreams is my first real game and it’s getting really close to being done (EDIT: it’s done!). It’s a mobile puzzle game where you need to guide all of the laser beams to the target using various items you can drag and drop and rotate by tapping on them.

Although the idea is not exactly novel, I think some of it’s features really set it apart. Most notable is the level editor, that allows the players to create new levels themselves. These levels can then be reviewed by me and published in the Player Submitted Levels stage.

DOWNLOAD HERE:
iOS: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/laser-dreams/id1097313394
Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.redfragment.laserdreams&pageId=116975864458605169157

Any advice and feedback is very welcome. Let me know what you think! :slight_smile:

Cheers!

1 Like

Pretty good game, I like the idea. I only played a few levels, but it was fun and I think your game has some potential.

Have you considered putting in the effort to create a level generator? Certainly, your beginning levels should be done by hand since you want to lead the player through specific scenarios. But since you say that your biggest hurdle is making content, procedurally generating levels would help you speed that up. Even if your level generator is crude/faulty and you have to tweak each one, it would probably be faster than doing all of them from scratch.

Good luck!

Thank you for the feedback! I have not thought about generating levels, and honestly I don’t even know how that would work. It would be very hard to create fun levels, that have multiple solutions, shortcuts, utilize some specific game dynamic etc. Hmm, I’ll have to think about it more, thanks!

Excellent. I felt like I was back in the 80s again - very neon-y! It seems like a solid puzzle game. Good luck in the app stores when you submit it - post back here and let us know its available. Maybe put the web version on free game sites with a link to your store pages to try and drive downloads/sales.

Really like the atmosphere you have for the game. The music is also really good.

That’s a good idea! Is there a good list of these sites and their terms?

Thanks for everyone for their feedback and for the few that ended up helping with the levels for my game. It is now released and available for free here:

iOS: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/laser-dreams/id1097313394
Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.redfragment.laserdreams&pageId=116975864458605169157
Website: http://laserdreams.redfragment.com/

There’s also this cheesy trailer:

Hey, very good job! :smile:
Just for curiosity I would like to know:

  • How many people worked on this project?
  • What (approximately) was the development time?
  • Have you published the game by yourself or with a publisher?

Congratulations and good luck! :wink:

Thanks!

We are two people that worked on it over a period of about 10 months, but that’s only in our spare time during weekends and lots of breaks :wink: We published it ourselves, it’s free on the app stores.

We are now scrambling to get it out there, which seems to be a new challenge in it’s own :smile:

Absolutely! it is a new challenge! :smiley:
Even if you do the best game in the world, I think it is not trivial to get visibility in the world!
If you haven’t a capital to invest in advertisement, rely on a publisher could be a good compromise!

Another curiosity:
How you will monetize your game?
I saw the strategy: “watch advertise video, get diamonds!” :grinning:
Is it Admob?
Probably you can also consider to add in app-purcheses (maybe to unlock levels)…

Yes, ads are (unfortunately) the current way of trying to monetize the app. They are however very rare and optional. The ad networks are Chartboost, Vungle and AppLovin.

Hi @RedFragment
I’m testing the game under Android (Galaxy S4, OS 5.1.1).
It looks very nice and performances are very good! :smile:
Can I ask which version of cocos2d-x you used?
I ask because the latest versions have performances issues on Android (maybe cocos2d-x 3.12 fixed rendering issue, on the audio side they are still working).

Anyway I see very low downloads on Play Store (more than 500, I guess less then 1000).
Did you make a marketing campaign or something like that?

Hey @drakon99, thanks.

The latest cocos version I merged with is 3.11.1. I think I also merged a performance related pull request at the time.

Yeah, I have not received many downloads yet, around 4000 across all platforms. I had some adwords but they were only mildly successful. I guess the main problem is that I don’t have a big budget to spend on marketing.

Luckily, I had some good exposure on a few review sites and here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANo8sAONLI4&t=93

One thing I can probably be proud of is a retention of 34%. I’m assuming that’s pretty good for a mobile game, or not?

What you mean for ‘retention’?
Maybe you intend that for 1$ of revenue you get 0,66$ (1 - 0,34) of profit?
If so not bad! :smile:

@RedFragment

Congrats on the release! Did you try getting your app featured in the iOS app store? I’m about to ship soon, and I’m wondering what the approval process is like.

Retention is the percentage of players that return the next day.

From what I read, it’s very difficult and you have very little chances if this is your first game on the store. But yeah, it would be an immense boost and probably guaranteed millions of downloads.

@qwpeoriu
How an app get “featured” in app store?

@RedFragment
I understand.
How you compute retention? Did you use analytics SDK?

Retention is the % of users that opened the app 24h after the first startup. So basically the number of users that did not just try and immediately remove the app. I built my own analytics backend :stuck_out_tongue:

@RedFragment
After a year I saw your app got 10.000-50.000 downloads on Android!
Did you get this downloads “for free” or you did some advertisement campaign?

Congratulations for your result! :slight_smile: