The great thing about mobile apps and mobile games in particular is that the app stores that are used for people to access the games are still in the wild west days.
Heck the whole mobile game industry is. So there is a huge opportunity to make your mark.
One thing I learned the hard way is if you do not already have a portfolio of apps then do not spend months and months creating a single mobile game.
I did this three times before I woke up 🙂
Being the geek that I am, I pushed and pushed my brother Anthony to create a company dedicated to mobiles games. Funky Squid Games was set up in September 2012 and we went to work creating games.
We had really high hopes and I poured my heart and soul into that venture.
Our first game was released just before Christmas 2012 – Syncroz for Apple IOS, and we followed this up with Flip Frenzy in March 2013 and Astro Assault in May 2013.
All games were worked on concurrently, with a team of four programmers, three artists, and a support, all project managed by myself.
I have been a software developer for close to 30 years, many of this in project management so it was the right idea (I thought) to be doing this myself.
As you can probably imagine, a large team of people for a eight months is a pretty significant cost, and I can say to you quite truthfully today we have lost a lot of money doing this.
Not to mention the amount of work that had to be done managing the team, designing the games (yes I was the game designer for all three), putting out “bonfires” when things did not work as planned, etc.
Creating things from scratch takes a long time. I mean you can build a brand new house, or you can just move into one that someone else built immediately.
As I found out, there is no guarantee that building a new house (building brand new mobile games) is going to give you better results.
One thing you can bank on is that it’s going to take a lot longer to build a mobile game from scratch then if you re-skinned an existing game. To reskin iphone apps takes a lot less effort than you might think, and frankly a game reskin is fun.
If you are in a similar situation to me and have in the past created games, consider reskinning your own game. You might find you get some fantastic results doing so and as mentioned its a whole lot less work than building a new game from scratch.
If you are looking for some definitions, please take a read of the reskinning apps information I put together on this site.
The bottom line is I firmly believe you are going to get far better results if you get inexpensive source code, and make changes to it and then put that in the app stores.
Less risk, less time, less cost, and (probably) better results. Whats not to love. So get to it, and skin your iphone app today!
I am only just getting started on this site, so please check back for more information.
Cheers
Tim
