My book will teach you everything about Android game programming with AndEngine. It describes the publishing as well. If you have bought the book and want to get some free promotion, here's a deal.

1) Take a picture with you, the book (Kindle is fine, just pick a page with some screenshots I can recognize) and your game, and post it anywhere in social media.

2) Review the book on a website, where did you buy it, or Amazon if you have bought it on Packt website.

3) Send me the link to your photo, link to the review, link to Google Play and a small 125x125px button-banner with your advertisement. Use my email android@kul.is.

I will put the ad to the right panel with the link to your game and if there will be more games, I will write an article about submitted entries.

Right now it's a perfect time to publish a game. Christmas is coming and with millions of new Android phones to be sold to new gamers, perfect chance to get your game out there.

Christmas. It's an economic phenomenon more than anything else now. A bookstore near my home used to make about 10 times more money during December than it did any other month. The owner said that it's the only reason he keeps the store. 

The game industry is definitely influenced by Christmas as well. Just think how many people are going to find a new Android phone under the Christmas tree.

And here we are. Game developers who can make a use of it. As I have announced on Facebook, Google+ and both AndEngine and Libgdx forums, I was offering a Christmas promotion for all games that feature at least something Christmasy to see the Christmas effect. It even included a free 125x125 button ad on this page.

But nobody wanted to use this promo so I had to update my own game for Christmas. Mr. Dandelion is actually ideal for this, because it has flatlined. The installs and uninstalls are the same. Let's see how Christmas in Google Play Store change it.

Stay tuned for the results and Merry Christmas to you all from Mr. Dandelion!

If you need to generate some nice promotional pictures, it's good sometimes to put them into context of a real device. You can of course take a picture of your phone or tablet with your game, but I bet it won't look good enough.

Here are two tools that can help you generate the art and make it look more professional:

1. Official Google Device Art Generator - which generates the art for Nexus Devices
2. Android Asset Studio - free tool that offers few more devices

So here I am, a month after Giftiz featuring promotion started. The question is now, does Giftiz significantly increase you downloads? The answer is: yes, if your download numbers were very small.

I believe you can make decent money from ad supported game when you reach about 100.000 downloads in the first month based on other people's experience and my own humble beginnings. Giftiz gave me approximately 2300 downloads in a month - 2000 in the first five days.

This might be enough to generate initial interest. A spike in your downloads that will make Google Play store algorithm to notice you and show your game in the Top New Free games. Moreover 20% of these installs come from France. Giftiz is a French company after all. This will give you significant boost in French store.

But it's not good for anything else. The people coming from Giftiz might be able to generate about $10 - $20 revenue on AdMob. They install your game, play until they finish the mission and leave immediately afterwards.

Because Kulíš is in fact a bird, it's only natural that it tweets! I am only now discovering Twitter, but with the help of Jason Mayes and his awesome Twitter Fetcher, I was able to add a nice and lightweight Twitter feed to the right sidebar.

Since adding new tweets is so easy, having a Twitter widget gives me an opportunity to tweet about interesting small indie games from everywhere, anytime. I am slowly getting more and more readers and now I can use that to promote your games. If you are interested to have a mention about your game here on the site for a while, read on!

How is it going to work

1. Follow my Twitter, Google+ or like my Facebook. This is required to get more readers. We have this nice proverb in Czech: "Not even a chicken rakes for free", which loosely translates as "There's nothing as free lunch"
2. Tweet about your game with a mention of my Twitter @KulisAndroid, or post it on my Facebook, or Google+. Twitter is preferred, because it is the easiest, but I undertand that not everyone has a Twitter account. Alternatively send it to my mail android@kul.is.
3. I will read your tweet/post and if it is a real tweet about a game, I will retweet it or tweet it myself
4. It will immediately appear on this site and stay until I tweet N more times, where N = 5 right now.

Requiremerents for a game to be tweeted

It should be an indie game and it should be interesting. It doesn't have to be complete. I will tweet about interesting projects as well. Your tweet should contain a link to the game in Google Play store or your website with further info. Link to a forum post where you have information about the game is fine as long as it is descriptive.

If I like your game a lot, it might be reviewed as well, but I prefer if you submit the game for review separately. Games that are reviewed will be automatically tweeted.

Giftiz is an app discovery service for Android. They offer real gifts for playing games. People are motivated by the gifts to download a game, play it for a while to complete a "mission" and earn XP points that can be spent on the gifts. This article is a review of the Giftiz service from the perspective of the game developers.

So what's in it for the developers? Giftiz has quite a large number of "players" that use the Giftiz app. Your game will be offered through this app and you can be sure the players will play it for about 5 minutes - that is the requirement of the mission. What exactly is a mission is upto you.

What's the catch?

What is the costs of this publicity? Well of course it's not for free. At least most of the time. Giftiz is a paid service for developers. Developers pay for each install coming from Giftiz. If it is worth or not depends on the deal you can get from them. But of course to create a successful game, you need to get as much publicity as you can in the first month in the store...

My story

The company behind Giftiz contacted me  first with another offer - their mobile ads AdBudiz. But I was not really interested. It was shortly after the release of Mr. Dandelion and I made a joke that the only thing I need is some publicity and they actually offered me Giftiz. For free. Since Mr. Dandelion is my research project, I said why not?

I was told that Giftiz discovers suitable Indie games and offers them Giftiz deal for free. I bet it's profitable for them, because they need to keep the players engaged. And of course the paying customers need this too - to be discovered from more places. Pyramid Mover is another example of a game that got this deal.

Implementing Giftiz was very simple. They have a SDK that does everything for you and useful example projects. A Giftiz representative just checked if everyting works and that was it. I spent less than an hour adding it to my game plus some time mailing with Giftiz.

Yesterday was the first day of "featuring" of my game - which means yesterday the people can start playing my game to complete a mission. In my case it's completing first three levels. The featuring came quite late and won't help me to get to Top New category - simply because I am already past the 30 days of being new. Giftiz said that the paying customers have priority over free deals.

Conclusion

My game has been in the store for about 2 months now and the number of new installs was slowly dropping. After the Giftiz featuring, I immediately got cca thousand new installs on the first day. I can summarize the effect of Giftiz in 6 weeks when my featuring ends. I am going to post another article about it. Right now I believe this service has a potential to help you to get you to the Top New category. It all depends on the timing and the cost.

Here's the same graph after 4 days of featuring. About 1600 new downloads from Giftiz. I will try to get the real numbers from them for the second part of the article.


UPDATE: Graph after two weeks with Giftiz:



I am not affiliated with Giftiz and I am not getting anything extra from them for writing this.

Continue to part 2...

Would you like to have your ad on this website? If yes, contact me on my email or comment on this article. There are two ad spaces available - the small ads on the right (free, 125x125) and the big banner (960x256).

Small Ads

The small ads are suitable for a game or an app. Right now I only use it for my game and to get some color to the greyish theme of the whole site. I might figure out some rotation later if needed. These will be free unless you of course want to give me money - I wouldn't object! You can use the same email address android@kul.is to send any donations to paypal ;)

But if you simply like my facebook, +1 this blog, follow it's Google+ page, or make more people come here it will be appreciated as well. If you are interested, simply send me an email with your 125x125 PNG.

Big Banners

I will use the big banners to promote my games/apps and things I consider interesting or helping me in any way. If you would like to advertise there, you can contact me with your offer too. But we will talk first :)