Great stuff! You are ready to rock and roll but now you want to figure out what the next step is.
Well you have a few options and some may or may not be appropriate to you depending on your level of geekness, whether you actually want to do that tech stuff, and what your budget is for the process.
The three main choices you have at this point is to
- Outsource it all e.g. Get someone else to do it all for you.
- Do it all yourself
- A solutions that consists of parts of option a) and option b).
Generally speaking, I would recommend you look at outsourcing some of the process at a minimum and maybe all of it (depending on your budget), at least for the first reskin.
Remember earlier in the eBook I talked about the four stages of competence. In my opinion trying to do it all yourself with the first reskin when its all new territory could be a recipe for disaster.
By the same token, I am not saying you necessarily have to have a complete “hands off” in the process either. Maybe somewhere in the middle?
For example, if you are not an artist, I would not suggest you even attempt to create the graphics yourself. An artist is a very creative person and it takes years of practice to get good at it, so its probably not a good idea for you to take that role if you are not already an artist.
Aside from the general artistic skills and creativity requirements, there is the need to know and understand software like Adobe Photoshop, Texture Packer (sprite sheet creator) and may even Tiled (the map editor) that allows you to create and edit TMX files.
If all that makes little to no sense to you, treat that as confirmation that you should indeed get the graphics done by someone else.
Programming on the other hand is a different thing. At first glance you might think, hang on Tim, isn’t programming a very geeky, technical thing, that also takes years to learn well and has it’s own creative needs?
Yes, that is true, but what is different here, specifically with reskinning games, is that the game itself has mostly been written and tested. Probably 99% of the source code does not need to be looked at or touched in any way.
The only real thing you need to do is enter your “personal” settings in the game. That is things like entering the “Id” characters into the source code so that when a specific action is taken in the game (like buying some coins, or clicking an ad) that it ultimately ends up in your hands, and no some else else’s.
Here is a simple example
#define REVMOB_ID @“32423942394dsfjsdf439″
This is a special set of characters given to you from www.revmobmobileadnetwork.com when you set up your account.
Once you setup your account you would open the source code and replace the code between the @“ and the ending “.
So if your character string was
5056934005934r9043590
The line in the source code would become
#define REVMOB_ID @“5056934005934r9043590”
See what happened there?
As you can see with a bit of practice you could probably learn to do that. Depending on the game you may have several of these to do, but usually its not that hard.
Unfortunately the programmers of the games that you can buy the source code often do not provide great information.
There instructions might say:
“Replace your Revision mobile network id.”
From that you are meant to figure out what I typed above. But usually this can be solved with an email or two to the developer if you are that way inclined.
There are also courses you can purchase that help you by showing you step by step how to do this type of thing.
The point I am making is that it is possible to do this yourself if you have time and are prepared to experiment.
To get an idea of this in video format, check out this video I did showing how to add the Applovin network to a game.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzFW2t-NdTg
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But should you do it yourself?
Ok, so I have mentioned you can do this yourself, but the next question is, should you do it ?
I equate it to something like wanting to drive a car and deciding if I want to know how it works under the hood.
You don’t need to understand the internal workings of a car to get the advantages of using one right? The same thing applies here, but with an additional point.
Lets say you decide to do this yourself, and it takes you twenty hours of messing around, exchanging emails with the developers, and tearing your hair out in frustration, but you finally figure it out.
You could have been doing something else (probably more productive) in that time.
If you had a programmer able to make the change for you for $50, then basically you have decided your time is only worth $2.50 per hour (20 hours work @ $2.50 per hour).
This, of course is one of the major benefits of outsourcing, freeing up your time to do the more important things.
For example for that $50 investment to get an outsourcer to do this, you could have put those 20 hours to good use in perhaps creating a marketing plan for your app, or getting your 2nd reskin underway, or some other higher level function.
Only you can decide what your time is worth, and what your budget is, the point here is get you thinking so you don’t just make the decision to do it yourself without considering the other options you have.
Saving time (by outsourcing) should not be underestimated, especially if you are holding down a full time job while you try and make this work.
If you are like the average worker these days, you are probably putting in fifty hours a week or more at your regular job, and by the time you add sleeping, family time, you are not left with many hours left to focus on reskinning are you?
So it makes sense to utilize the hours you do have available in the most effective way possible.
The bottom line is that you are probably going to need to outsource at least some of the process, so lets talk about…
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