I’ve been building my new game Icing Addict over the past month and it’s now live! Check out how I built it and plan to make money below.
Throughout the month I did a few mini releases for friends and family. I was able to test some features, fix some bugs, and gauge its ‘funness’ before launch. I made a bet with my Mom to release certain features at various stages which was a great way to keep me focused on the goal. By the end of April I had finish on time was ready to release!
I heard this site was great for launching so gave it a go. There was a week lead up time before I could post so I made sure to sign up ahead of schedule. Come launch day I gathered some colourful images, wrote a positive post, shared the story leading up to app, and then… nothing.
For a full day the post was dead. What happened? Was it something I said? I couldn’t even find the post on the site. It got 1 upvote the next day but overall died a lonely death.
I had seen other games on there and I reckon my images looked as good as any. From what I’ve read I guess that it ended up in the abyss - a hidden, back alley basement where newcomers are sent to. Oh well.
I enjoy lurking here and there’s a section where people can post their projects. It’s a techy site so I knew I needed a techy pitch. Unfortunately my game doesn’t quite project that image. I decided I would try talk about the technology behind it briefly and get people interested via comments. It got a few likes but had a similar fate to PH. Definitely not the right audience but at least I got my account setup for next time.
Now Reddit was an interesting one. Last year I tried to post some of my open source tools and got my account banned… god knows why. I appealed a bunch of times and thought it got reinstated.
So I made a post in the morning along with Product Hunt. When I checked on them a couple hours later, the Reddit thread was dead too! These are two massive sites and neither of my posts got a single like. I was feeling pretty down. I wanted to chat to people, get some interest, but nothing was happening.
Was my product that bad?
Determined that the account was bad I made another. That afternoon I posted again and had a nap. To my surprise I was getting upvotes! Within 2 hours it had like 30 upvotes and a couple of comments. By the morning it rocketed to almost 400+ with 30 comments baby 🤙 I was happy again.
The overall vibe was very positive and I would consider it a decent enough launch.
Here’s what I did right (I think):
It’s been less than a week since launch and this is how it’s going:
Whelp pretty bad, but it’s a start.
I’m actually pretty happy with the launch. I got good feedback to improve the game, people reacted really well to it, and it has users! To me it seems like there’s potential.
But it needs improvements. I want to grow it, retain users better, and convert them into paying customers. This is what I’m going to do:
Oh yeah, I’ll be releasing another game this month too! I think the drawing concept could work for another style of game - snake! That’s right, Squiggle Snake will be a snake-inspired game using my icing drawing algorithm. I think it’ll be fun.
Also I’m in the zone with Flutter right now. I’ve already built the algorithm, the game scope is much smaller, so I reckon I’ve got time alongside the Icing Addict improvements.
Let’s see how it goes!
Check out the app here!
