How to create a mobile game in 1 month with $300,000 monthly revenue?
First of all, think of what kind of game you’d like to create and play for yourself. It is important that you enjoy the process of developing the project all the way to the publishing stage.
We first publish all our projects on Apple’s App Store, for iOS, and then our Publishing Team pushes the game on other platforms like Android, Nintendo, Steam, Steam Deck, Xbox, PlayStation and so on, depending on the project. And we work solely on Unity.
So keep in mind that this is a Unity iOS mobile game.
Since we are into cars, and we know a little bit about what makes up a car and how it should feel when driving, we narrowed our search to a few possible scenarios for our new game: racing, drift, drag and offroad.
We searched the App Store and came to the conclusion that there are a lot of all types of car games, but offroad genre was slacking, so we decided we’ll try to fulfill this niche market.
Ok, now that we have cleared this out of our way, we have to decide the game scenario and a deadline. It’s essential you put a deadline for yourself before starting a project, otherwise it’s very easy to get carried on and work too much on the less important stuff.
We decided on a deadline of one month and a simple scenario of cargo delivery in an offroad forest environment, with 5 locations and an infinitely procedurally-generated missions list.
Step one and two are done, now jot down the main game mechanics and find references.
Our talented Lead Game Designer did all that in 4–5 hours and provided us with a more detailed plan:
Now comes our 3D Designers team into play
Okay, the visual aspect of the game is ready, now comes the nice stuff, our remarkable Developers Team.
To win some time, the devs work in parallel with other teams, they don’t have to wait for shop renders to be ready to start developing the game.
A good balance between team and time management is key when you have such a tight deadline, so the team has to make sure they don’t wait on each other but rather do things in the same time and try to complete their tasks dependencies along the way and also each other. I think this is a good definition of “team work”.
One of the features we decided to implement is “multiplayer”, and for that we used PhotonEngine.
Photon is handling 1000 concurrent connections with ease, and having 12 players per room was the most suitable for this project.
We decided to not use Unity’s built-in PlayerPrefs and came up with our own SaveSystem
This was future-proofing for us in case we wanted to implement an account system to save user data on cloud, which we didn’t do in the beginning.
Having quite a tight deadline puts some constraints on your working routine, and sometimes the code is written fast, not beautiful.
But who cares? If you can deliver the project in a month, if your project gives stable 60FPS on modern devices, and stable 30 FPS on devices like iPhone 6s.
We have an extraordinary Developers Team that made this deadline, mechanics, performance and an astonishing overall project possible.
With the help of our Marketing Team we worked out our game’s economy, and we decided to go for a split revenue generation of 60/40 percent between in-apps and ads.
The result, after one month, looks like this:
What do you do after you successfully publish your game? You celebrate!
This is us, tired, but happy.
We are Midnight.Games, a game development studio, based in Republic of Moldova with a 200+ team, 7 years in business.
Check out our website: www.midnight.works
Follow us on instagram.
