How the Game Was Created

The idea to try our hand at the children’s game genre emerged, as often happens, from analyzing the performance metrics of some existing apps. Inspired by the prospects, we began development.

Unforeseen Challenges

It’s worth noting that we initially planned to use low-cost advertising through AdMob to drive app installs. However, at the start of the third month of development, Google banned such targeting for apps aimed at children under 13. This didn’t kill the game’s potential, but it significantly complicated our plan, as the cost per install increased by 5-10 times.

Choosing the Art Style

After market analysis, we decided not to delve into complex rendered graphics and instead opted for a cartoonish flat 2D style used by many competitors. The advantages of this style include the high speed of creating graphical objects and environments, as well as the ability to quickly edit existing graphics.

Releasing the Full Game Without an MVP

Since the workload was relatively small and the graphics package was nearly fully prepared before development began, we decided to release the full version of the game, bypassing the MVP stage. After internal testing on the alpha version and fixing identified bugs, which took about two weeks, we launched the game publicly worldwide. The day after the release, we received our first paid in-app purchase.