Hexicon
Strategy word game with a clean experience and aesthetic
We wanted to make a game that all of our friends could have fun playing together after college. When we found that many other people also loved playing our game, we decided to push it further and form a company!
$1000 coming our way!
We have been designing and developing a digital version of a popular board game and are getting ready to announce it this summer.
This game announcement represents a big turning point for us. If we can leverage the already captive audience of this board game, we can not only set ourselves up for great app sales of the game's app, but also for Hexicon.
Marketing and spreading the word for a free to play mobile game has been challenging with no ad spend, especially in beta. This may be a huge opportunity for cross-promotion that may give us a lot of momentum. Can't wait!
We pitched Hexicon for the first time ever in Pocket Gamer's Big Indie Pitch event for upcoming mobile games. We were up against ~20 or so other teams and pitched to judges over Zoom.
It felt pretty incredible to finally speak to a receptive audience about our game, and we got some great reactions all around. Really fun to engage with people about a project that we've been working on for years.
We tied for 2nd place, and funnily enough, the other 2nd place winner also had a very sleek looking word game. Small world.
This is a smaller one, but we posted a Medium article about the tools that we use as a remote team working on a digital product.
The tools we use are awesome with exceptional free plans, and they make our indie effort possible since we're strapped for cash. At the same time, it has taken us a couple of years to establish a system that works well for us, and we went through many tools to become more organized.
While this is still a side project/business, being able to write a post about something like this makes us feel closer to being an established business, even though it's a small task. We would not have been able to speak as confidently as to what works well and what doesn't even 1 year ago, and that sounds like progress!
We recently posted to r/androidgaming about our game hitting 1500 users. Previously, we have seen our posts get 30-50 upvotes, which was true for this one as well.
However, tons of users have been flooding in a faster rate than before, and we're now at 159 new users in the 3 days since posting. Insane!
We are certain that the current quarantine mandates are having a strong effect on people seeking out mobile games - especially casual word games that they play with their friends throughout the week. All of this has been making us think that it's getting very close to launch time for us.
We began working on this game to give our friend group a fun game to play together while we were apart. We want to bring that to everyone as soon as possible now when it can bring some much needed fun and social interaction back to the coronavirus situation.
About 3 months ago, Felicia cold emailed a board game designer and asked if he would be interested in having us develop a mobile app for one of his board games. He was excited about our proposal! His games are well known in the board game community, so this is an incredible opportunity.
We have been discussing with him and his publisher for a few months, and we finally have agreed on a contract and signed it this week. Some up-front money will be paid to us upon completion of certain milestones, and we have a revenue split in place which we are happy with. We're super excited!
Over the next several months, we will be developing the digital version of this board game alongside our regular development of Hexicon. The release date of Hexicon will be SoonTM, and the digital board game will come later this year!
Recently checked our stats and we're at 1520 unique users!
Hexicon's open beta is still in progress, and we have been seeing a slow trickle of new users ever since the first few big spikes at beta launch. Phandroid recently wrote an article about Hexicon, and we have seen a larger set of spikes recently and a minimum of 3-5 users join per day. We're pretty happy with this day to day growth for a beta, but we expect even more big spikes in the future!
We added an Ad-Free version to Hexicon this month and someone just purchased it for the first time today! That's a solid $2.10 after benevolent Google's cut.
We are still in beta, so this is an extra treat! Hopefully boding well for a full release. This purchase essentially doubles our monthly revenue from ads...
Team, which brand of ramen do you desire tonight?
Anyone in the world can now play Hexicon at https://hexiconapp.com!!! We finally got to this point after many months of debugging and playtesting, but now we feel that version 0.4.3 is ready for a public beta.
We will probably let this run for at least a few months and plan to collect a ton of user feedback throughout. We also have Amplitude set up to track a ton of gameplay outcomes and user behaviors, so bring on the stats.
Can't wait for all the bugs to pop up. My guess is ~137
Scatterbrain Studio, LLC is now officially a business! We just received the entity formation certificate today, very excited.
We researched for a long time about which type of company structure we would need, which state to register in, and what forms we would need to fill out. In the end though, the process was quite painless and faster than expected. We mailed in our formation letter 2 weeks ago with our check, and that was pretty much it.
Now on to getting a business bank account!
This is the day we started on this journey in earnest. Our friend group decided we wanted to make a game together, and we decided it would be a mobile word game!
A lot has happened since this day. We made a super fast web prototype. We made a Unity prototype for Android and iOS. We played and played and played and played. And actually played so much that we burned ourselves out for a long time. We began again. We started a company. And we learned A LOT.
If we were to start from the beginning, here's what we'd tell ourselves:
- Get the game in the hands of others as soon as possible.
- Don't sweat gameplay technicalities and balance issues that the average or new player may never discover.
- Start building a community from Week 1!
- So much other stuff.
More in our first blog post about our journey: https://medium.com/hexicon/creating-the-next-great-game-ef30f3dd2436?source=friends_link&sk=c5fe9dc80c1c14fa275ac3784a7cd4e8
