Hello world! In this article I will tell you about myself and how I started creating games.

My name is Vladimir, and as a child I lived in a wonderful world of my own fantasies. My parents worked late, and after school I was left alone with my thoughts. I’ve never been bored! I had a wild imagination, and I was constantly fantasizing, inventing games, rules for them, fairy-tale characters, dragons, robots, princesses, constantly getting into trouble. I have created whole worlds with beautiful animals and amazing nature. By the end of school, my childhood years had passed, and I began to think seriously about adulthood. After entering the institute, I decided to connect my life with computer technology. I got a diploma of a system administrator and started working in a hospital in my specialty. Having adjusted my life and workflow, I got bored… The soul demanded a fairy tale and self-expression. Sports, dancing, music, books and computer games could not quench the thirst for adventure. Childhood fantasies began to visit my head more and more often. And once I woke up with full confidence that I had to create my own game. This thought was like a bolt from the blue. There is no experience, no knowledge, but there is an irresistible desire to CREATE a GAME!

I immediately realized what kind of game I wanted to create, and the thought of it excited me. I’ve thought it through to the smallest detail. The story of the character, his amazing adventure and the stupid situation he got into and with which the game will begin. But fantasies alone are not enough… We need experience! I began to study how games are created. I have a little experience in programming. I studied Unity – the program where games are created, I learned how to animate, but I can’t solve the issue with graphics on my own. I probably don’t have a “drawing gene” 🙂
After studying the experience of people who created games, weighing the pros and cons, calculating my budget, I realized that I would not pull such a large-scale game either in time or money. It is impossible to create such a grandiose project alone! I concluded that I needed to create my first but small game. To test your strength. Without hesitation, I chose the Tower Defense genre. My choice is simple – I love games of this genre. The only thing they are monotonous, finite and soon get bored. I decided to change that.

For a whole year I created the game, designed, wrote code, animated, I had to buy game sets of graphics, menus and icons. I ordered the maps from the artist. Created enemies, calculated the balance, Placed objects.
On December 1, 2020, I uploaded the game to Google Play and gave it the name Tower Defense – GOLDEN LEGEND.

This was a common strategy where you need to repel waves of enemies by building towers on the field. There were 40 maps and 3 locations, a forest, a swamp and a city. The only thing that was unusual in my game was the Slavic theme with its attributes, characters, and style. This was my first ready-made version of the game that I’ve been working on for so long! The players immediately liked the game and a lot of reviews began to appear. And many wrote that it was boring. I understood that.

My next steps are to work on the uniqueness of the game. I decided to add unusual mechanics and diversify the gameplay.
And, as in the best stories, things can’t go well… To complicate the defense of the towers, I decided to add an enemy bomber. Since towards the end of the level, the player has a lot of gold left, and the towers are already all pumped up. I thought it would be nice to add a character who can blow up towers. And here he is – a demolition troll with a huge burning barrel on his back.

He runs up to any tower and blows it up, killing himself. The user can kill the demolition troll by simply clicking on it several times. On top of the troll was the inscription “click”. And so on… The game is developing fast in the Google Play store, and I’m adding a new opponent in the first update. And then something went wrong! Growth dropped, the score began to decline, comments began to appear about the game hanging. I didn’t immediately understand what the problem was, I was testing a new opponent, and everything was fine with me. It turned out that the problem does not always occur and only after repeated testing I caught this error. The worst part is that I didn’t know how to fix it. And I had to give up this cute kamikaze. During this time, the rating of the game has decreased, the score has decreased, the settings have decreased. I realized the cost of my mistake…

to be continued…