Lifescape

Hello there and welcome to the official Lifescape page!

The story of how I developed a mobile game alone as a 16 years old high-school student starts in May 2017 with an idea: I'm going to make a version of GTA for mobile devices. 

Creating A Story

    With the summer holiday around the corner, you inevitably start thinking about the next 3 months and usually you come  up with some goals you never achieve, at least I never do (I'm still looking for a place where I can go skydiving, hit me up on facebook). There's no doubt the programming experience I accumulated from my last project influenced my decision when I opted for a summer filled with coding and ending with me sitting on a huge pile of money. Spoiler alert: I never achieved the second part. 

   One day this friend of mine calls and tells me about this workshop some guy from Amber was hosting on mobile game industry, and considering the fact that I was sitting home on a Saturday night, I accepted his invitation. It wasn't a surprise to find myself the youngest person in that meeting room full of programmers and  people who actually relate to the things that the speaker was talking about, such as profit, retention rate, fremium vs paid apps and so on. However, I raised my hand when some guy asked who has a community of more than 30.000 users ( I got a youtube channel with 37k, in your face amber!). Anyway, the meeting made me realize I could earn a lot of money by creating apps on a daily basis, and with the summer goal in my mind I decided to start creating that game. 

Hatching An Idea

  I wanted to build the game in one month, spend one more month testing and improving it, and use august to promote it and get a lot of active users playing it ( I am writing this on 23 September and the app is not 100% ready). I thought maybe I could get a few thousand downloads and make a couple of hundred bucks. 

  After running a 3D unity project on some android phone I was using to test things, I decided the GTA will have to stay in 2D for now and will have to use Game Maker Studio, the very best 2D game engine out there. For graphics, I was planing to use Gimp, but I ended up using the integrated gm:s sprite editor most of the time. 

Key features for the app:

• A big open world you can fully explore
• Vehicles such as cars, planes and helicopters
• Combat system and NPCs spawning around
• Real life replicas of famous buildings 
• Storyline

The Building process 

The project started as Summer2017.gmx, based on my own physics and collision system and 2 weeks later I had my first prototype version:

Summer2017.exe - 18 june

Since then, I took pictures every 18th, this is the july one with some level design going on and a very bad UI.

The 18 august was already called Lifescape, and it was the bug-fixing period, since I added a lot of content and I didn't bother checking if it works well with the previous mechanics and scripts (Tip: Don't do that)

18 September is the current version of Lifescape, minus the last encryption and advertisement changes I did a couple nights ago, so if you want to see it in action download it and knock yourself out.

Final Words

Lifescape was and still is a project I enjoyed working on, from start to finish. Although I would change a few things I did here and there, I am satisfied how this game turned out. The most important thing I would change is the graphics: next time I want to create a game I will pay some freelancer 100$ and get a very nice sprite pack in return + the hours I've spent trying to do the graphics myself. 

I had to cut some features that went through my head such as combat and multiplayer, mainly because this project was eating far too much time and the possible  revenue I may get from it is very low.But hey, if it turns out this game will be profitable, I will buy a reskin for it and continue working on adding even more content, maybe expand worldwide, who knows?

Thank you for reading this article, I truly hope you enjoy your time in Lifescape, and if you don't or you have any idea for a new feature I can add in the game email me at screepyplays@gmail.com

PS: You can support me by buying the ads-free PC version. Thanks!