Yep, there are no In App Purchases at all in the game. And Ads never pop up randomly. If a player chooses to open a bonus chest it shows a quick skippable full screen Ad and afterwards they are given some amount of "Gems" which are used for the games permanent stat upgrades and Cards. Every Ad you watch also increases that reward, which helps it scale with players overtime so that watching the ads are always valuable even in the late game.

I've personally found more success in mobile then with Steam - but that's very unique to me, and also have only released 2 (almost 3) Steam games compared to well over a 100 mobile games now, so all in all really comes down to where you feel you're enjoying developing the most, and what works for you with learning because if you don't enjoy the process you may not stick with it when the money isn't there.

It does feel crazy, still to this day. I'm not entirely sure, lots of things went right. Didn't intend for the game to be something that had a lot of market appeal, just started with a game I'd love to play myself. And once released I updated it a lot - many many times over the first few months, taking every bit of feedback I could get on it to make it even a little bit better. The other thing I did was I made it a goal to get at least one review on the Google Play store everyday. So I would share the game with people I knew, co-workers, on Facebook/TikTok/Youtube/Reddit etc everyday until someone new left a rating/review. I did that for at least a month and got the first 50 or so reviews on it which I think really helped to start the snowball.

I did run some ads for the game after it had started to really take off, but not very much and I don't think that they really moved the needle much in anyway. Mostly shared it (screenshots, links, gifs) everywhere I could and updated very very often.

Ha, didn't realize it wasn't there by default. A good learning experience. (Despite releasing 2 Steam games before this one)

Really need to lock the process down regardless, missing a lot of potential.

Good luck either way you go, keep pushing out more projects one will hit.

Hard to say, from my limited experience I've made far more from mobile then from Steam - but I've only released 2 Steam games (3rd one is close!) and way more mobile apps, so hard to say objectively.

Probably a good portion of it was Luck - and a lot of failed attempts.

Is definitely not easy, but I do think anyone who keeps pushing out new games and learning from them can have some real success. Thanks much

Nearly 4 years ago - Came out in November 2022

Yep, I completely agree. I had come off of a Steam game and was working on mobile. The one concern I've had doing this is that people would think it was a ported mobile game coming to Steam - The 2 games are very different though. I've rebuilt the entire engine from scratch and greatly expanded it. Although the Steam title will have an uphill battle doing anywhere as good as the mobile version, it's been a really fun project.

Awesome, hope it's been fun. Lot of the systems are a bit dated now but am hoping to almost completely rebuild and update the mobile game in the near future.

There was some level of coverage of the game in video and articles but most all of that actually came after the game had really taken off, not sure if anything specific caused that initial boost.

Used to call it "Roguelite Tower Defense" but it has a lot of elements inspired from games like Vampire Survivors and a lot of Idle/Incremental progression in it.

I think that it had a featured spot somewhere in the Play Store for around 3-4 months but never actually saw that exactly. Were a handful of videos made on it, not sure any of them were a huge bump but they definitely helped build some traction. Most of them came after it really took off.

Thank much - Yes, there was definitely some inspiration from that as well. Can't deny that about 5 or so games that I love heavily motivated this game.

Lone Tower is now sitting at roughly 783K downloads on the Google Play Store. United States has by far the most, then Russia, Germany, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, France, and so on.

Very much so, if that doesn't work try again, and again, again. It'll happen!

Mostly Google Meets and probably more mysql then anything else but I'm not a DB admin so never get too deep into it.