In August 2017, I was looking for a game to invest a little bit of my time when I wasn’t working. My requirements for this game were very simple. I wanted to play something that was extremely easy to use and required very little time or dedication. To put it bluntly – it had to be something I could play while sitting on the toilet. That was my ultimate goal here.
my quest for greatness
I started exploring this incredible game. Hours and hours later… I was still no further in my search. Every game I watched was basically the same. They were all huge, clunky full blown RPGs/MMOs that seemed to be copies of each other. I think the closest I came to getting the game I wanted was a game called “RPG for Destiny”, although it never interested me for two reasons; I’ve never played with Destiny, and I remember feeling overwhelmed at first when loading it up. It was quite crude in terms of UI.
I realized that no such game existed. They were either too ugly, or the UX was atrocious.
Then the idea of making my own game came to my mind. I wanted to create something that a player could “pick up and carry” in a matter of seconds. Minimal loading screens, no splash screens, unnecessary filler content, an extremely simple UI, etc. I wanted to create something that made the purpose clear as daylight. It should be sleek, modern and attractive, yet self-explanatory and require little in the way of tutorials.
I know I’m in the minority here, but I definitely am. Hatred Tutorial. I recently played “Call of Duty: Mobile” and the amount of hand-holding the game gives you during your first few levels is absolutely disgusting. In my eyes, this was the epitome of bad design. If a game is needed that much Just holding hands to explain what everything means makes me lose interest almost instantly. In fact, as soon as I play a game that requires a mandatory hand-holding tutorial, I immediately uninstall it. I like to learn while playing. I like things to come naturally.
That’s when I came up with the idea of creating SimpleMMO…my “solution” to this gap in the market.
Well…. I say this as if I was making a strategic business decision to take advantage of said difference when in reality I just wanted something to play with. In my mind, I thought I would create something that I would play myself.
During this time, I was working a full-time job and thought it was a perfect opportunity to improve my development skills on the weekends. However, at that time, I had definitely tried my hand at developing Android apps, but it was on a different level in terms of scope.
Morning of SimpleMMO
On August 23, 2017, I sat down and started developing SimpleMMO. I developed it using “Laravel” framework. This was the first time I used Laravel.
I had a very weak prototype ready within 8 hours. the code was brutalIf I look back at what I’ve written, I’ll probably mention last night’s dinner, However, I did not know this then, After all, I only had 8 hours of experience working with Laravel and, to be honest, I didn’t really care, I had no intention of pursuing this game beyond a hobby/side-project/playground, To be fair, it was garbage essentially held together with duct tape and glue, However, it was My Trash and I couldn’t be more proud of it.
Fast forward a few months and I finally had a working game. I was ready to release this f̶r̶a̶n̶k̶e̶n̶s̶t̶e̶i̶n̶ beauty into the world. I quickly mocked up the Android wrapper using FitIgniter and BOOM’s source… SimpleMMO went live on February 2, 2018.
My creation was available to the world.
At that time, SimpleMMO was In fact Easy. It’s even simpler than that now. It essentially had four bits of functionality: travel, PvE, PvP, and an inventory system. that was it.
The downloads were pretty solid. In the first month itself I got more than 100. It was a really strange feeling to see people playing my game. I essentially built something relatively entertaining with a box of scraps in my cave.
I worked on it every weekend. Several new features were introduced to help give the game a little more depth. Friends, search, messaging, new items, the player market, achievements, an updated travel page, and a bunch of other features that still exist today. Many of these properties suffered from shortsightedness and lack of preparation for the future. The issues arising from said short-sightedness are certainly something that plagues the game today. Problems like terrible inventory implementation, or misuse of energy/quest-point refills were something I never really considered at the time. Despite what people’s opinions of the game are, the “P2W” aspect was ultimately a result of said shortsightedness rather than being a financial trading strategy. This is a topic I want to expand on in another blog post.
Even though the game was live and accessible to anyone, it was still my playground. At the time, I really didn’t expect this game to become as popular as it is now. The truth is that I had not even dreamed of it.
By then a few months pass… bounceThere was a huge increase in downloads, When I say huge, I really mean it On a large scale. Let me pluck this graph from my repository of “happy moments.”
At that time, I violated 50,000 Total downloads. I could not believe it. What I created was being played by thousands of people all over the world. This was the point where I thought this game could become something really special. It’s always been a passion project, but this started feeling like it could be something more.
…then disaster struck the game. Mr. Google decided to wake up one day and tell the board of directors, “I’m going to destroy this guy’s entire career”.
They changed the Play Store algorithm.
Downloads dropped literally overnight. It went from 3,000+ downloads per day to less than 80.
To be honest, it didn’t really affect me that much. I fully expected this to happen. It’s not that common to consistently have over 3,000 daily organic downloads, especially for a small indie title.
From that moment on, the downloads stopped. It was around 80 downloads per day for about 2 years. However, from that moment on, I realized that the game had the potential to become something great.
the hole that keeps growing
Three years later and here we are. SimpleMMO has even more 500,000 Downloads and it is continuously increasing. The roadmap is public, the community is active, and the game is getting the love it deserves. I never thought it would be in this state, but here we are.
Isn’t this a bad first blog post? I am not much of a blogger. Actually, I’m not a writer in general. I almost failed English in school. I was just lazy and was more concerned about playing Call of Duty than studying. If you’ve played SimpleMMO, you know that typos are almost guaranteed. A wise man once said, “There are three things in life that are guaranteed: death, taxes, and type errors in SimpleMMO”. That intelligent person was me.
I have a few topics I want to cover regarding SimpleMMO but I thought I’d get this out of the way first. Before I delve deeper, I thought it would be appropriate to explain how SimpleMMO came to be.
Let me know what you think in the comments below!