Bug Tilt
Client: DadakoRole: Programmer, Artist
Date: October 19th, 2021
Bug Tilt is a free to play casual game for iOS and Android.
Play right now on your mobile here: https://bugtilt.com
After working on Infinity Pinball, I turned my attention to my old IP back catalogue. Was there something there that could be repurposed and published as a quick test of monetisation by Ads and in-app-purchase? Tilterpillar was such a simple game in my back catalogue, produced as an IP for Dadako back in 2011 as a test to see if we could make an addictive game. At the time of release, in-app-purchase wasn’t even a thing so we priced Tilterpillar at $1 and hoped for the best. It didn’t work out (to be honest we had no plan whatsoever) so we decided not to proceed any further with development.
But what if it got re-released? Under a different guise, this might work.
The result took a lot longer than I had hoped, this was meant to be a quick test but soon turned into 6 months of complicated free to play game ui mechanics, not to mention the amount of trickery going on under the hood to actually generate the graphic style. For reference, Hyper Casual Games shouldn’t take more than 2 months to make. Theres so much more in the game than a simple re-release, which might be to it’s credit, only time will tell. In some ways, it failed to be a Hyper Casual game, fitting more into the kind of production timelines of a “Casual” game (much like Infinity Pinball) – a genre notoriously hard to make money from without a lot of promotion.
In the end, I decided to release under a different name than “Tilterpillar 2”. A name that I feel people often had trouble remembering. Bug Tilt was simply chosen for its availability as a dot com.
Now comes the hard part, driving traffic to the app. Essentially it still needs to be marketed as a “hyper casual game”… albeit with a bit too much love. The goal is to capture enough players to make regular sessions for Ad support to work out. It’s a numbers game to turn a profit. Spend a few thousand dollars on ads, hope to get back more than you spend, and keep going. A very different path to selling a game for a fixed cost. Hyper Casual is a cynical genre for developers, I’ll make no bones about it. However, Bug Tilt is a cute game, so maybe it’s charm will shine through.
To be continued…
Come play along at https://bugtilt.com
