Nikhil Malankar

Today I will be talking about one of my favourite game series. Grand Theft Auto or popularly known as the GTA has been one of the most popular game series ever made. I have been playing this game since 2008 and this is the story of how this series changed my life in a drastic way. I’ve been a gamer since the age of 3 when my Dad had bought a computer and together we used to play Doom on that system till 2 am.

Since that time I have played a lot of games that included Mario, Mortal Kombat, Virtua Cop, Road Rash and almost all of the classics you can recall. I have grown up in the 90s so I’ve seen the gaming trend shift from those old NES consoles to PCs and then onto mobile phones. I was pretty much enjoying the games that I was playing but most of them were closed experiences and were not much of open world. I didn’t even know what open world games were for a very long time. GTA was there since a long time but until 2008 I hadn’t played any of the games in that series.

Everything changed in 2008, I got my hands on GTA Vice City and immediately after starting the game I realised the sheer brilliance behind this experience. It felt so empowering to simply do anything in the game. The game offered unparalleled freedom to the player which was an amazing feeling for me. I was hooked to the game and it’s vibrant world. The other interesting thing this game offered was it’s community. GTA Vice City had been out since the year 2002 so by this time it had a very strong community. The game was successful in establish a connection with the player which ensured that anyone who played the game would recall it as one of the most memorable experiences of all time.

It had everything! The game was based in the 80s, cars had radio stations, you were not restricted by strictly mission based gameplay. It was simply mind blowing. So as I was talking about the community, this brings me to my next point.

MODS:

Modding this game was super easy. Anyone could download some free tools from websites dedicated to modding this game and the user community actively contributed interesting models, scripts and other interesting things that could change the entire game itself. I was instantly fascinated by the tools that offered an extra layer of freedom. I could actually change certain things of the game according to my liking, it was the best feeling ever! This is when I made my mind that when I grow up I’d join this company that made this game. So this made me research a bit about the company that made this game. I found out that the company name was Rockstar Games. Immediately I started looking up their website and got excited to join there as a programmer. I was around 14 years old at that time and had absolutely no idea about how a game gets developed but whatever, I was excited nonetheless.

The next year is something that changed my life for good. I was in my 9th grade in 2009 and we had gone on a school trip. I had clicked a lot of photos during the trip and there was a friend of mine who wanted these photographs from me. So I invited him over at my place to give him all the photos in his pen drive. Yes, it was the age of slow internet speeds so instead of uploading it online we used to meet up and transfer files to each other.

Anyway, so when this friend came over at my place while the photos were transferring we started talking about games. I told him about everything I did in GTA Vice City and this is when things got interesting. I showed him all the cool stuff I had modded in the game. After almost an hour of having fun showing him around in the game he asked me one question that stuck in my mind, he asked, “If you can mod a game then why not make a game of your own?”

This changed the way I looked at things entirely, suddenly from working for Rockstar Games I was shifted to a mindset of creating my own games. I questioned myself, what was really stopping me from doing so?

If you are in the business of making games you know how difficult it is to get discovery for your game. I’m currently actually writing an entire book on how to market your games and make money through them which will be coming out next month but recently I got a comment on my podcast from Rajesh asking me to provide some insights on ASO. I have covered this topic in great detail in my book however I’d be more than happy to share a summary of this topic here so it can help you out to get started with this. We will be talking about how to improve your game’s ranking based on title, description and screenshots for your game.

Alright so before I tell you about what is a good ASO strategy let us first understand what ASO is exactly. In a world where literally thousands of apps and games get uploaded on the Google Play Store you have to be extremely competitive in order to make your game stand out. App Store Optimisation, or more popularly known as ASO, is what helps you stand out from the crowd of apps and games being uploaded to the store. ASO for games is what Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is for websites.

General principles for ASO are very much similar to SEO but with a slight twist. Let’s understand why is it so important to get this part right for your game. User’s decision to download your game is a 3 step process:

Search

Discover

Download

Each of these steps is crucial and your game needs to satisfy all these 3 points for the user to download your game. Your users need to search for your game, they need to discover your game after searching for it and then download it. This entire process can be termed as “User Acquisition”. Companies spend millions of dollars on acquiring users to their games.

To be able to win the battle of discovery you got to be prepared with the knowledge of how to get your game in front of your target audience. Which brings us to the next point.

Know Your Audience

In order to acquire users you first need to understand who exactly your audience is. You’ve made a casual game and you think that the target audience for your game can be literally anyone in the world. That’s not true in reality though. You need to be able to define your audience properly. You have to know their age, gender, interests and also the type of games that interest them. You must also be aware of your competition.

Here are a few questions to ask yourself to know your audience:

What is the gender of my TG?

What is the age group of my TG?

Where do my TG live?

What games do your TG play?

What genre is your game?

What does your TG do? School student, college student, working somewhere, etc.

What device do you TG have?

ASO generally involves a lot of factors such as taking into consideration your game’s visuals, title and description and more.

Let us dive into each of these starting with your game’s title and description.

Your game’s title and description plays a huge role in getting discovered by users. It’s true that most of your users won’t bother reading your description in the first place itself but that does not make it any less important. If anything, it is extremely important to have a proper description. For this you need to work on understand how to pick the right keywords for your game. Selecting keywords itself is an extremely important task in order for your description to be relevant and I will be covering more about it in another post.

Let’s consider your game’s name is Subway Train Surfer. In order for your game to be downloaded you will need to be in the top search results of your game’s keywords. Let’s consider your target keyword for this game is ‘subway’. So general rule is that your keyword should get repeated in your description at least 3 times and should exist in the title you choose. It’s keyword density, which means the number of times it gets repeated i...

Almost all of us have played or at least heard about Candy Crush Saga. It is one of the most addictive games ever made. It was reported that the developer of this game makes as much as $1 million per day from Candy Crush Saga through in-app purchases alone. But what makes this game so insanely addictive? Let us explore in-depth to understand the same.

But before that let’s dive into the history of this game a little. Candy Crush Saga’s game mechanics are based on an old match 3 game titled Bejewelled. It was first launched in 2012 and ever since has been rapidly expanding. Remember those annoying Facebook notifications from your friends constantly asking for lives in this game? That is what made this game go viral. I think the law of averages worked to the advantage of this game.

The law of averages is a simple law that states that future events are likely to turn out so that they balance any past deviation from a presumed average. In case of Candy Crush Saga it was the number of times people used to get those notifications that sort of forced them to at least try this game out once and when they did install the game they also got trapped into asking their friends for lives when they ran out of free chances. This catapulted the number of downloads and engagement of the game.

Dissecting Candy Crush Saga:

Furthermore, the gameplay of Candy Crush Saga isn’t just random. It is carefully thought through and perfected over the years. Why do you think this game constantly ranks in the Top 10 list on all app stores? Everything including the artwork, sounds and game mechanics have perfectly balanced out to make sure you are addicted to the game.

Here’s how it works basically, the game has seemingly endless number of levels so every time you complete level you are forced to finish one more psychologically and so on and so forth. You are trapped into a constant circle of completion and a feeling of accomplishment runs through you every time you complete a level. They also go as far as branding levels based on their difficulty. You can easily find out whether a level is easy or hard as they display it right before you start that particular level.

So if a level is displayed to be hard then it poses a challenge to our brain and our brain does not like to be challenged. It sort of becomes a matter of pride. And on the same thing they prey. Not only this, but the level map of this game also shows you which level your friends are on. If you have a large number of friends on social media you will find that many friends have completed more than 100 levels. This gives you an inferiority complex and gives you a reason to push harder and keep finishing levels.

It catapults you into an endless loop where you keep completing, completing and completing. It doesn’t matter if you are on the top of levels completed list among your friends. Because sooner or later one of your friends passes you through and is now 10 levels ahead of you. What do you do? You get back to the grind! You play further and further and this is where it gets worse. By this time you don’t even realise how badly addicted you are. Now you aren’t playing the game. The game is playing with you.

Plus the sounds used in the game are extremely carefully handpicked. They always touch upon your emotions perfectly by encouraging you when you make a good move. The game visually tells you that you have made a good move which increases the dopamine levels in your brain. It feels good when you get that chain reaction or create a special candy by matching 5 candies in a row.

Also, the game makes you wait for lives. If you complete 10 levels and lost the 11th level more than 5 times then you lose your lives and need to wait for a certain time before you can start playing again. Don’t want to wait? Either buy lives or ask your friends to send you lives through social media notifications and invites.

Back in 2014 I had started this website tellmenothing.com that focused on light hearted content. I also saw it as a great platform to get in touch with budding entrepreneurs, actors and almost anyone who had a story to tell. I had put up a lot of interesting interviews of many people on that website after starting it and one fine day I struck gold! I interviewed Billionaire investor Mark Cuban. Yes, that actually happened!

At that time he was promoting Cyber Dust, an application that allowed you to send destructible messages. Kind of like WhatsApp meets Snapchat. It was indeed an amazing experience to get to interview him. I got in touch with him through Cyber Dust itself. It is a well known fact that if you reach out to Mark he will revert back to you.

He has also kept his email ID public so anyone can reach out to him. I talked with him for a couple of minutes and he gave me his email id on Cyber Dust. The problem was that the android version of the app didn’t allow you to take screenshots of the conversation so I quickly took a paper nearby and wrote down his email id on there.

This was gold to me. I had just got Mark Cuban’s email address. The Billionaire investor who I used to watch on Shark Tank, I had just made my first contact with him. I talked to a billionaire, wow! I was extremely happy by just receiving his email address. And it was really him.

After this I sent him a questionnaire regarding some interesting questions. You can find the interview here: http://tellmenothing.com/2014/08/25/getting-candid-mark-cuban/

I sent him this questionnaire on 24th August, 2014 and got a reply from him after midnight 25th August, 2014. Here are a few things I learnt from interviewing Mark Cuban.

First and foremost, be the consumer of your own product. This is an extremely valuable lesson to learn and implement. If you have created a product then you must be the first person to use it. Because truly, if you yourself aren’t using your product then why would someone else?

Secondly, no matter how big you grow always communicate with the consumers of your product or clients you work with so you can understand their requirements and how to improve your product or service. This is perhaps the single most factor that differentiates a successful entrepreneur from the crowd. I would say that even I need to keep reminding this to myself time and time again. It is the consumers or your clients of your product or service that are going to be the reason for your company’s success or failure.

Third lesson is that business is the ultimate sport. After interviewing him I was even more fascinated about Mark and so I started consuming all the content related to the Dallas Mavericks owner. I read his book “How To Win At The Sport Of Business” and learnt about how he thinks of business. He compares business to sports. According to him business is a game that you play 24x7x365xforever.

Fourth lesson is something that keeps me motivated every single day. You only have to be right once. If you know about Mark Cuban then you know how his billion dollar net worth was created. It was through his venture broadcast.com which was bought by Yahoo! during the time when tech stocks were hot. He worked extremely hard and had to face extremely tough times during his time as an entrepreneur. But with that one moment his life changed and now he can do whatever he wants to with his life without having to worry about money ever.

I started playing games at a very young age. I have always loved playing games. Right when I was around 3 years old I remember my Dad had bought a brand new computer which had Windows 95 on it and one game: Doom. That was the first PC game I ever played and I remember playing it with my Dad till 2 AM late nights at times. That was the moment that fascinated me to the world of games. Years later, in 2013 I would be launching my first game that me and a few of my friends had developed. The game was made for android and was made entirely in python based framework pygame.

The game is titled “Kyte: Kite Flying Game” and is still available to play on Google Play Store. It was a remarkable journey for me primarily because I was young and dumb and had absolutely no idea about how games are made or promoted. At the time I had a bunch of friends who were equally enthusiastic about just one thing: making games. We thought that only that desire was enough, and we were right. Initially we struggled for almost 1 year. This game was in development since early 2012 and we had to see a lot of ups and downs since we were learning while developing the game and the technology we used to develop our game required us to write even the basic functionalities from scratch. We didn’t rely on a game engine as we were from an engineering background and wanted to create the game using code entirely.

But what a truly fascinating process it was, I remember staying up late till 4 am with my friends basically converting my grandparents’ house as our office and we had an absolute blast during the development of the game. The core programming of the game was done by me and an incredibly talented friend of mine named Prasad Thakur. The art side of the game was handled by my friend Prasad Kajarekar who along with a bunch of folks that we found from our animation learning institute came up with amazing kite designs for the game. It was a truly joyful experience to develop this game and the biggest learning from this was that things take time.

Of course, years later I’d realise that this wasn’t the best game I ever made. Not even close to being called a good game, but it’ll always be special to me since it was my first game and it gave me exposure to a lot of things which wouldn’t have been possible if the game wasn’t developed and launched in the first place itself.

I remember we launched this game in the month of March 2013 and on the night of the launch we went for a late night drive in Prasad’s car. I was so stupid at that time that I didn’t even inform at my home and it was super late. We were extremely young at that time, I was 18 at that time and was going to turn 19 that month end. My Dad came searching for me that night and when he found us hanging out in the car he shouted a lot. At that moment it was quite embarrassing to get shouted on in front of my friends but looking back I think if given a chance, I’d not change my behaviour. It felt great. It was one of the best nights of my life. We had launched a game that we worked on for almost more than a year. I felt like the King of the world!

What followed after the launch of the game was pure surprise. Of course I wanted the game to do well but the game didn’t just do well, it did AWESOME. In it’s first week of launch the game got more than 10,000+ downloads. YES, 10,000+ downloads. And by the time my birthday the downloads kept increasing. Looking back I realised that we had this early mover advantage. Our game was among the only 3 kite flying games on Play Store at that time and we had a huge friends circle who were super supportive. All of them downloaded our game which sort of helped us get ranked higher on the charts. Till date this game has crossed almost 400,000 downloads!

I felt as if I was on Cloud 9. The downloads kept increasing and guess what? We didn’t care about money through our games at all at the time. We had put out this game for FREE on the Play Sto...

Hello friends my name is Nikhil Malankar and you are listening to my podcast Nikhil Malankar Mind Canvas. Through this podcast I talk about some of the things that fascinate me as well as things I have learned over the years by being in the gaming industry. My topics include a wide variety of stuff such as gaming, travel, business and current tech trends. I love playing as well as making games and have been developing games since 2011. So if you are listening to my podcast for the first time make sure to subscribe for some interesting content related to gaming, business and travel. With that, let’s begin our podcast.

This would be episode number 1 where I would be giving you a brief introduction about myself and what you can expect from this podcast in further detail.