Publishing my first game - "12345 Rotors"

"12345 Rotors" is my first game that I published.

I started learning programming and game development in April 2020. Python was my choice for a first coding language. After doing some basic code tutorials, I decided to build some simple games. I've build some simple games in Pygame, but it was very limititing to what I can do with it. After some internet research I found about about two popular free game engines - Unity and Godot. I went with Godot because of one simple reason - it is using GDscript language that is similar to Python. Unity is using C#, so I will try it at some later point of my game development journey.

After experimenting with Godot for a week, I was pretty confident to start developing my first proper game. Godot was quite intuitive and there were tons of tutorials on youtube. And every problem I faced had a resolution on forums, like Stackoverflow.

The scope of my first game was small. Like, reaaaally small. I didn't had any fantasies for it to be a commerically succesful game, but I decided to make it of a good quality. This would give me some confidence to share my project with my friends and not to be embarresed too much.

I am a fun of puzzle games, so I decided to focus on this genre. On my phone I had couple of different puzzles, and 2048 looked like a very simple game from a development perspective. So, I started brainstorming ideas for a numerical based puzzle game. And in couple of hours I had an idea for a game base mechanics in my head.

I started coding and managed to build the core game in couple of days. This was an easy part. Then, the hard and long part came, that I call "polishing". Adding sound, intro screen, final screen, improving UI, setting admob and adding ads module, exporting the game to APK file, creating Android developer account, submitting files... .

I finished the game in two weeks. The game itself took me two-three days to make. Everything else took me 5 times longer. I wasn't expecting this about game development. I thought creating the core game is the hardest and longest part. In reality, this is the easies, shortest (and most fun) element.

Anyway, the overall process was very interesting and educational for me. I've bumped into many challanges, but I don't expect to face these diffulties in my future games. Plus, I have lots of reusable materials now. All my Android Developer/Admob accounts are set up. I have some code/templates stored for UI and user input and some good modules saved on my computer. And the most important - tons of knowledge about the game dev process stored in my brain.

I published my game and had 200 downloads in the first week and an average rating of 4.84/5. These results massively exceeded my expectations. Most of downloads came from Android dev reddit, where I posted my first mini-project and asked for a feedback. I recieved a lot of positive comments and tons of ideas on how to improve the game. After implementing some of these improvements, I considered my first game project complete and succesful.

"12345 Rotors" is available for free on Google Play (link). It has ads (small banner ad), so if you want to remove it - just turn off the internet during gameplay.

Description of "12345 Rotors":

"12345 Rotors is a free, fun, number puzzle game.

Align rotors with the different numbers to sum up to a specific value in the centre. If you like number puzzle games - you'll enjoy 12345.

30 handcrafted levels were made to test your puzzle and math skills.

You can play this game offline."