Chapter 22: Finishing Touches

Here we are! At this point, we have a fully developed game, so can we get some money now? Sadly not. A successful game relies on heavy refinement; the devil is in the details! Also, don't get too hyped about earning money yet; this is your first game and there are a lot of non-development-related tasks to accomplish. It's time to discuss what can we do now with what we have achieved so far. By the end of this chapter, you should be aware of the work you need to do to make your game reach its full potential, as well as the processes and challenges of releasing a game to the market.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Iterating your game
• Releasing your game

Iterating your game

We are about to finish the first iteration of our game. We had an idea, we implemented it, and now it's time to test it. After this test, we will get feedback on the things that can be improved, so we will formulate ideas to improve them, implement them, test them, and then repeat this. This is what an iteration is.

In this section, we will examine the following iteration concepts:

• Testing and feedback
• Solving feedback

Let's start by discussing how to properly test the game on people.

Testing and feedback

Apart from a strong marketing strategy, the success of your game relies on the first 10 minutes of gameplay. If you can't grab the attention of the player in that time, you will certainly lose them. The first impression of your game is important. Those first 10 minutes must be flawless and sadly, our perception of the game is not relevant here. You have spent several hours playing it and you know every inch of the levels...

Releasing your game

We are here – the big moment! We have the gold build, which is the final version of the game. Do we just throw it at our target store (such as Steam, the Play store, the Apple App Store, and so on)? Well… no – actually, we still have lots of work to do, work that we should have started before getting to the gold build. So, let's explore what that extra work is and in which phase it should be carried out.

In this section, we will examine the following release phases:

• Pre-release
• Release
• Post-release

Let's start by discussing the pre-release phase.

Pre-release

One thing you should do before pre-release, and ideally before you start developing your game, is decide where you are going to sell your game. Nowadays, that means choosing a digital store – selling physical copies of games is not an option for newly starting independent developers. You have several options, but for PCs, the most common place...

Summary

Developing a game is just one part of the job; releasing it so that it's successful can be a huge task. Sometimes, it can cost more than the game itself. So, unless you are making a game for fun, if you want to make games for a living, you will need to learn how to manage releases or hire people that are capable of helping with the pre-release, release, and post-release phases of your games, which can be a smart move.

Of course, this chapter just provided a simple introduction to this big topic, so I would recommend that you read some extra material if you want to take this part of game development seriously. A very well-explained and bite-sized source of information on this topic is the Extra Credits YouTube channel, which provides short videos to convey valuable information. Also, there is a great book called The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses, which provides a thorough introduction to game design.

Congratulations, you have almost finished part 3 of this...