In deep childhood, like most children and adolescents, I got acquainted with a rather fascinating world, which at that time had the opportunity to immerse myself in such a way that it resembled a new reality.
The gray elephant Dandy became the first guide to the virtual universe. As I got to the sunset of eight bit consoles, entertained me, the console is not too long and it was replaced by a Sega mega drive 2 in which game I sometimes play to this day as a classic console and the portable console Gopher 2
game development I began to get involved in his student years. So my thesis was a desktop application for learning Russian for Kazakh groups with elements of gamification written in Delphi.
A little later, while studying in one online academy on a JavaScript course, I had to implement a small game - a snake as the final project work.
After successfully completing the training, I uploaded the source code to GitHuband forgot about the project.
More than half a dozen years have passed since I returned to the repository to adapt the game to the KaiOS mobile operating system. So, years later, a project from the past saw the light of the present.
This mini-game unwittingly became the debut project out of many that I developed this year for the mobile operating system KaiOS
Today, when the outgoing year is hastily striving for its completion, I would like to summarize this experience through a short story about each of them released by me during this period applications.
The snake project, which was published in April, was not the only application built using the DOM model. Another game that borrowed from " Simple Snake " DOM matrix became " Simple Pac Man "
The basic idea behind the game is pretty simple. Pac-Man must collect as many fruits as possible. Every fifth eaten fruit spawns one ghost, respectively, the more fruit eaten, the more difficult it becomes to dodge enemies. If the ghost comes into contact with Pacman, then the game ends and the number of points earned (fruits eaten) is displayed.Some
time after the release of the project, I especially did not expect that it would be in demand and attention would be paid to it, but it was nice to see the application in the review on the phone , as well as a banner from KaiOS
Already today, observing the general statistics, it was a pleasure to contemplate that in the USA alone, the application was installed by more than 13,000 people in a six-month period.
While Pac-Man was trying to eat as much fruit as possible while running away from ghosts in people's phones around the world, I was already working on a new project in which I completely abandoned the architecture built on DOM and started using canvas.
Being a lover of skiing activity, I have implemented my hobby into a gaming application which I later named “ Alma-Mountain skiing ” in honor of the city of Almaty where I live.
The skier goes down the slope of the mountain, whose starting speed at the beginning of the game is very low, but over time it constantly increases. On the way, an amateur athlete gets in the way of ate and the more speed becomes, the more difficult it is to dodge them.
The skier should try to develop as much speed as possible. The game is interrupted by the screen with the maximum speed of the character immediately after the collision with the spruce.Like
last time, I did not expect a big conversion from the project, but I was still pleasantly surprised that during the six months of the application's existence in the KaiStore market only in Nigeria the number of installations exceeded six thousand.
After the end of the "Alma-Mountain skiing" project, I began to think about how else to please users of the mobile operating system KaiOS, as well as improve their skills in the field of game dev. This is how the idea of a new project “ UFO Cow Thief ” appeared.
For the basis of the game I decided to take a rather entertaining myth about the abduction of cows by unidentified flying objects.
The idea is simple enough. The action takes place in the countryside at night. Cows wander in the pasture. The player controlling the flying saucer must steal as many cows as possible in the allotted time.
Hovering clouds can refract the UFO beam and the cow will fall to the ground.
To make the game more fun, I added the function of getting a small amount of time in the reserve for each stolen cow.
Already in the first month of publication, I noticed that the game did not become popular. Half a year later, two and a half thousand people downloaded the game in the USA, in Nigeria it was a thousand fewer, and in other countries the number of installations did not even reach one thousand.
I was upset, but did not lose motivation. The next project that saw the light of day is " Flight on the Buran ". By the way I wrotearticle on habré about the full development cycle of this application from inspiration to the first conversion
The goal of the game is to put the spacecraft into the nearest orbit.
The speed of the rocket plane is constantly increasing, but the player has only 4 tanks of fuel in stock, which must be properly distributed to reach outer space.
Also, Buran is equipped with four boosters that can be used during the gameplay.The
difficulty of passing is not only that you need to adequately distribute all resources during the gameplay, but you also need to maneuver between falling meteors, which, when hit, reduce the speed by several indicators
Although this application is my favorite, the audience did not like it. The largest number of app downloads in a six-month period was more than 2,000 in the United States and Nigeria, and in countries such as Uganda, Pakistan and Tanzania, just over
1,000.While Buran was rapidly flying into Earth orbit, I was thinking about a new project in a completely different genre. I have long wanted to create a game in which the virtual world would be pre-designed, and not generated on the fly. This is how the Lost in the Woods app was born .
A local school professor goes home after evening classes and decides to take a shortcut to home through the woods. But suddenly he realizes that he is lost.
The task is quite ordinary - you need to find a house in a dense night forest.
For six months this walker has already shown a better result compared to the previous applications I have developed. So in Nigeria alone, the number of downloads reached eight and a half thousand.
Answer to the question "What's next?" was not long in coming. Since in the future I wanted to create a full-fledged platformer, I had to learn how to work correctly with gravity and collision. So the new project " Builder " was released .
Shipping boxes fall onto the platform. The builder needs to clear the area of the boxes by dropping them into the empty holes on the sides of the platform.
For everything about everything, the player is given only three lives, which he can dispose of during the gameplay. The heart disappears if a box falls on the builder's head.
The game keeps track of the discarded boxes. The task is quite simple - try to reset as many boxes as possible.
After the publication of the application, there were no significant differences between the previous games. For six months of the project's existence in the application market, the maximum number of game downloads exceeded 22,519, where Nigeria is in the lead in horse racing.
A bit tired of releasing gaming applications, I decided to try changing the format a little and at the same moment learn how to interact with the device's sensors. Since, despite my age, I am still waiting for a letter from Hogwarts, I decided to implement an application for fans like me. This is how another project called " Harry Potter Camera " got into my portfolio .
With the help of Web APIs, I began to display everything that the device camera shows in the “video” tag, and on top of the element I displayed various frames on the theme of the franchise.
When the user pressed the "shutter" button, the frame from the video was pulled out, the path to the active frame was taken and everything accumulated was drawn in two layers on the canvas, then saved in the device's memory. Thus, users received a finished photo with a frame in their gallery.
The app was well received. The maximum number of installs reached more than eight thousand in Nigeria alone in a period of six months.
The following app also became a slight departure from the gaming theme. Since I wanted to get the skill of working with the permanent memory of the phone (both external and internal), I launched the project “Simple file manager ”, which, by the way, became the first third party file manager for the mobile operating system KaiOS.
The manager can display the hierarchy of directories, both internal and external, open images of various formats, play both video and audio formats.
In future releases, it is planned to introduce permission to write to directories to implement the functions of deleting and moving files
The total number of downloads of the application was almost 65 thousand over a five-month period, where in Pakistan alone more than ten and a half thousand people used the manager
In my student years, I began to be interested in the topic of self-development. On my bookshelf were literary works by authors such as Dale Carnegie, Robert Cialdini, Joaquim de Posada and Ellen Singer, Napoleon Hill, etc. I also really enjoyed watching the project “ Life in Kaizen Style ” by Evgeny Popov.
Once I came across a method for calculating harmony. This method allows you to fully study life, identify the weak points that need to be worked on. This solution is called “The Wheel of Life Balance.”
Recently I thought, why not create a mobile application that would help those who wish to create such a wheel and contemplate their problem areas that need to be worked on in order to achieve balance in life?
No sooner said than done, this is how the project appeared “Wheel of life balance ”
I implemented a handler that collects all data set by the user and feeds it to the Chart.js library , which outputs a full-fledged chart of the“ Polar Regions ”type.
If we look at the statistics on app downloads, they don't look impressive. The maximum number of downloads by country barely exceeds the two thousand mark in Nigeria in the 4 months of the application's existence. But the conversion was not small, the number of clicks on ads surpassed many of the previous apps I developed.
The final work of this year was a series of intelligent applications “Guess” that work stably in offline mode
1. Guess the movie by frame
2.Guess the Sega game by frame
3. Guess the country by the flag The
user is shown a frame or a flag and given the time. Only three misses are allowed.
Together, all three applications have been installed nearly 80,000 times. In terms of conversions within ad clicks, the “Guess” series occupies a leading position among my apps.
With this article, I wanted to close the season of developing games and other applications and take a short break in anticipation of the Christmas and New Year holidays. The year turned out to be very busy, and the path from a simple snake to a series of intellectual games was incredibly exciting.
On this path, I encountered many difficulties that were challenges for me to cope with. This experience gave me a lot of knowledge and applications that I launched, I believe, have contributed to the development of the KaiOS ecosystem.
Happy Christmas and New Year gradually coming everyone!
PS: the statistics may differ slightly from the actual ones, since when I checked again I noticed that they tend to "float"