Nikhil Malankar

Recently my first self published book went live on Amazon. This is my second published book. The book’s title is ‘How To Market Your Game Like A Pro And Make Money’. My first book was published by Packt Publishing and it was focused on developing an Android game. I wrote that book in 2016 and the entire process was extremely fascinating for me. To see those pages of book getting filled one by one and coming together in the shape of a book was something extremely satisfying to go through. So I definitely was pulled back towards this process of writing a book because I genuinely love writing. But this time I wanted to write on something different than development and that’s when I started wondering what would be the topic for my next book. I revisited my career and asked myself what was one pain point I faced myself in the gaming industry. The one answer I got loud and clear was that of marketing games. There are tons of tutorials available on the internet related to development of games but rarely any reliable sources that talk about how to effectively market your games. I have been in this industry since 2011 and have experimented a lot related to marketing my games throughout my career. I have made many mistakes related to marketing and have learned amazing insights through them. I have also worked as a Tech Lead for a year and while working at Talking Pixels for this position I learned incredible insights related to how to improve engagement and retention for your games. When I started making games in 2011 I have absolutely no idea about how to make games, let alone market them. By 2013 I had developed my first game and successfully launch it on Google Play Store. As beginner’s luck my first game did incredibly well compared to the expectations I had for it. My first game, Kyte – Kite Flying Game, crossed over 10,000 downloads within it’s first week of launch in 2013 and since then has seen decent growth. Till date the game has crossed over 400,000 downloads and is one of the few kite flying games on Google Play Store. After this game I worked on few other titles but none of them came anywhere close to the success that my kite game enjoys to this date. That’s when I started questioning what exactly was going wrong but could not figure out exactly what it was. Things became clear when I started working at my job at Talking Pixels where I learned valuable lessons related to game analytics. That’s when I realised that all this while my games didn’t have proper analytics integrated in them and that is the reason why I could not understand how to improve their gameplay. This is when I decided of taking all of my experience of the last 7 years or so and write them all down in a book which will help developers understand the importance of marketing games. I decided for this book to be a self help guide for developers which will even tell them exactly when to start promoting their games. There is also a lot of confusion as to why games don’t get downloads and even I faced this problem many times as to how to improve my games downloads. There are many companies out there that provide fake downloads for your game but that only serves as a vanity number and does not help your game’s long term. In fact, it severely hurts the long term of your game since these users are mostly fake and are not interested in playing your game. This is why I have also mentioned the entire process of acquiring users through 100% legal ways which will get you real users that will help you improve your game’s ranking. All in all I understand what problems developers face and so I have taken into consideration all the major pain points I personally faced as well as have tried to address a lot of conf...

Virtua Cop 2 or more popularly known as VCop2 was a popular shooting game. It was an arcade rail shooter game which means that you had no control on the character’s movement and could only control when your character could shoot. It was wildly popular in the late 90s. VCop2 was released for PC in 1997 and was an absolute amazing experience to play. I would like to talk further about this game  and what made it so enjoyable. This game was also released for those old school arcade gaming machines installed in malls. I played this game on my Windows system and this was one of the early games I ever played. It featured 3 playable characters namely Rage, Smarty and Janet. Fun thing about this game was that it wasn’t an entirely linear experience. The game gave you choice at certain location to choose which path you want to go through. I found that very interesting and because of this I used to play through the same level again and again in order to see what other ways were available to play through. You pass through levels in a very linear way though as you are presented with waves of enemies that you need to shoot down. Be careful though, as you have to make sure that you don’t accidentally shoot down civilians. You have 5 lives that are represented as badges on the bottom left of the screen along with your ammo count. As you shoot your ammo decreases and you need to reload after each round gets consumed. This game mechanic made it quite an intense experience as you had to manage your ammo properly otherwise you’d get shot at. You also had various guns to collect throughout the game. These guns were hidden behind certain objects that you had to shoot down. So every time you played the game and shot at new objects in the same level you could find new guns or power ups. This exploration aspect of discovering something new every time you played through the same level added in to the intrigue factor for gamers who were ready to play through the entire game just to find these hidden objects. In total there were 3 levels in this game. At the end of each level you were faced with a Boss fight and an extra Boss battle after completing all the 3 levels. But really what made this game so fun to play was that you were offered the choice to choose two different paths at certain crossroads and each of these path offered a unique experience of it’s own. My personal favourite was the train level where you had to shoot waves of enemies while walking from one compartment to the next. After a few play throughs you become an expert and can instantly recognise which enemy will pop up from which side and there by gain multipliers for playing perfectly. This game was an absolute joyride to play as it offered so much. Nineties were so awesome. It was the time where games were these complete experiences without interruption by ad walls or in-app purchases that limit your gameplay. You used to pay a full price and for that you would get an entire experience that you would remember forever. Although the graphics of this game are nowhere near to that of games in today’s times but Virtua Cop 2 is still a really good game. Have you played Virtua Cop 2? If you haven’t then I highly recommend you to try it out. You’ll have a lot of fun, I guarantee it! Let me know your thoughts if you have played this game through the comments section. That’s it for my thoughts on Virtua Cop 2. I look forward to hear your thoughts on the same. Also, if there is some game you’d like me to talk about then let me know that as well. I’ll try to cover that in my upcoming posts. So with this thought I’ll end it here. Hope you liked my two cents. If you are a game developer I’d like to inform you that currently I’m working on a book which will talk about how to market your games to get downloads and make money through them. If you are interested in this book then make sure you sign up on my email subscribers li...

Midtown Madness is one of the first classic PC games that offered an open world experience to drive in. I remember playing this game for countless number of hours just cruising through the city of Chicago. It was an escape from reality for me and to this date I can pick this game up anytime and start playing almost endlessly. So in this post I would like to talk more about this game and what made it so fun to play. What makes this game so fascinating for me personally is that I recently found out that the game was actually developed by Rockstar Games San Diego branch. Rockstar Games is one of my most favourite game developers and their game GTA Vice City changed my life. I have written an entire post for this so you can check that out. Anyway, so that’s about the development tidbit. Let’s come to the gameplay aspect. This game was launched in 1999 which made it a transition from the 90s to the 2000s. The game had 4 game modes: Blitz, Circuit, Checkpoint and Cruise. My favourite mode out of these was the Cruise mode. This mode allowed you to roam the entire city freely without having any restriction on time or without being forced to participate in any races. You start off with 5 cars and 5 more are available to unlock. Unlocking these cars require you to complete certain set of tasks such as coming in the top 3 positions in certain game modes and stuff like that. There are two Ford Mustangs in the game, one is a cop car and another is a civilian car. The civilian Ford Mustang was my favourite car in this game as it’s controls felt great. There is also a dashboard camera view of the game that added in another layer of authenticity to the driving aspect of the game as it felt quite as if you actually in the car while driving around. My favourite dashboard view was of VW Beetle as it also had a small flower on it’s dashboard and looked quite clean as well. The weather system of this game was perfect. In Cruise mode you could actually set the time of day to play in as well as the weather. You had sunny, rainy, cloudy and snowy weathers and could play during sunrise, afternoon, sunset and night time. Blitz, Circuit and Checkpoint modes have their own specific time of the day and weather to play in. Midtown Madness included an option to remove pedestrians, as they do not alter gameplay but may affect system performance when in a group; The best part about this game is that it does not require a 3D graphics card either. The absolutely amazing aspect of this game was definitely the ability to be able to drive around anywhere freely in the Cruise mode. It was also reported that the developers of this game asked Chicago residents to actually play test the game to ensure that the city was recreated faithfully. However, of course, there are certain buildings that we slightly relocated in order to enhance gameplay. Some of the cheats of this game were also quite hilarious. There was this cheat through which you could turn all the trains into flights and flights into UFOs as well. There was also a cheat code that allowed you to throw mailboxes every time you honked. I also had a lot of fun driving my car on top speed and jumping from over the bridge that used to open and close. If you failed to cross the bridge and fell into the Chicago river then you were shown a message of “Sleep with the fishes!”. Sometimes I used to purposely used to find specific angles to launch my car into the water if my car got damaged a lot. I also remember playing this game with my cousins. In vacations they used to come over at my place and we used to take turns playing in the cruise mode. Whenever the car got completely damaged we passed on the turn to the other person in sequence. It was a ton of fun to play this way and we used to make wacky commentary while the other person was playing in order to make them laugh so they would crash their cars faster.

The Elder Scrolls V or popularly known as Skyrim has a vast open world map. This game was suggest to me to be reviewed by Amritanshu Verma. I played Skyrim in early 2012. The fact that it was an open world game was enough for me to get instantly interested in it since I am a huge fan of that genre. Skyrim boasts of a massive open world environment in which you can travel for hours and hours at end. The graphics of this game might not come off to be as realistic but surely are quite immersive for the genre. However, the modding community of this game is extremely active and there are mods that can help you enhance graphics of this game and make it hyper realistic. But perhaps what makes this game most awesome is that we actually get to fight dragons. How badass is that, right? You start this game as a dragon born who possesses these magical shouts known as “Thu’um”. Each shout contains three words in the language spoken by dragons, and the strength of the shout will vary depending on how many words have been spoken. The words to shouts can be learned by visiting “word walls” in dungeons or around the wilderness. The words to each shout are unlocked for use by spending the absorbed souls of slain dragons. A regeneration period limits the player’s use of shouts in gameplay. You actually have to travel through the rich world of Skyrim to find and defeat dragons. Skyrim is just one of the worlds of the dense Elder Scrolls series. It is set around 200 years after the events of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion but isn’t a sequel to it per say. The game starts with you being taken in a carriage to a place where you are to be executed but are saved in the nick of time because a dragon arrives at the place exactly before your execution. Now, in all honesty, I haven’t completed Skyrim since I got so lost in just wandering through the open world that I could not focus myself on the main storyline. But through what I know, the entire game is about ultimately defeating Alduin who is the first dragon created by Akatosh in order to destroy man and consume the world. Personally playing this game was also a visual treat because it has such a variety of different terrains, caves, mountains and villages to explore. There are countless number of people to interact with and have meaningful conversations as well as some repetitive memes. *insert I used to be an adventurer like you, then I took an arrow in the knee meme* You also have companions that follow you around and carry items for you, assist you in combat and more. It is overall a very fun experience and be warned that can also suck in a lot of hours away from you. The game really has a lot of depth in it with branching storylines, quests and so much to collect. It is estimated that the gameplay of Skyrim is roughly around 300 hours which is a staggering 12.5 days to finish the entire game. However, because of the procedurally generated quests it is virtually impossible to say that you’d ever truly finish the game 100% since there’s always something or the other to do in the game. And that’s what makes this game such an addictive experience. Skyrim is truly one of the best medieval games ever game. And the open world environment that the game is based in gives this game the justice it deserves. It is almost impossible to imagine this game as a linear experience since the entire game is truly about all the different choices you make that shape the game’s outcome. You can ride horses or even hire horse carriages to take you to places. The game also has a fast travel feature that helps you quickly travel to places marked on maps. Sometimes traveling such long distances can get extremely boring or may be you might encounter some other quest along the way that might distract you from the current quest at hand. In situations like this the fast travel feature really helps out.

I’ve loved playing games since I was a kid. My world basically revolves around games since I can sort of relate every year of my life with one game that totally defined it. Over the years I have played many many games and have had really special memories attached with some of them. I would like to talk about my top 10 favourite pc games of all time. Let’s begin! This is going to be exciting. I will tell you about the game as well as what made it so special. Alright, also I will be doing another list of Top 25 of my most favourite games on my birthday coming next year on 31st March, 2019 so be sure to stay updated with my posts and subscribe to me everywhere so you don’t miss out. So without further ado, let’s begin! 10. Mass Effect 2 This game by Bioware is an absolute masterpiece. I played this game in around 2012 and was absolutely flabbergasted by it’s sheer brilliance. What is more interesting is that every action you take in this game shapes your storyline differently. Every decision you take matters and the game offers you with an extremely flexible way of being either morally right or wrong. You have to face consequences for all your actions. I found that extremely interesting about this game. 9. Road Rash Of course, this game stays a classic in every 90s kids memories. I basically grew up with this game. I remember this game was so popular back in my childhood days that almost wherever I could find I computer this was the game that was always on it. It was an absolute joy ride to play this game and unlock different bikes and using cheat codes. Remember XYZZY SPOON Shift+1? 8. Midtown Madness This was another classic in every 90s kids memory. This game had a lot of game modes but perhaps my favourite mode was it’s Cruise mode. To just pick up a car and drive through Chicago city while listening to my favourite songs was an absolutely amazing experience. 7. Roller Coaster Tycoon 2 This game will be etched in my memories as one of the most social experiences for myself primarily because I used to play this game with a bunch of my school friends. We used to gather together at one of our friend’s place and start building the park of our dreams. Even when I wasn’t playing with friends I remember spending countless number of hours perfecting the economy of my park and registering profits! It was the first game that gave me a taste of entrepreneurship in a way. 6. God Of War 3 I had not played the earlier God Of War games however I had heard a great deal of good things about the franchise. I was a bit skeptical about playing a linear narrative though and so wasn’t sure if I’d actually enjoy this button mashing experience. But when I started the game I simply couldn’t put the controller down. I still have to play God Of War 4. I’ll find time for that soon. I’ve seen a few trailers of the game and it looks drop dead gorgeous! You can find an in-depth review of mine for this game here. 5. Uncharted 2 Uncharted 2 was a great experience for me because of it’s rich environments. The game is so good looking that it felt almost as if I was journeying with Nathan Drake, the protagonist of the game. Solving puzzles, collecting artefacts and exploring about history made this game extremely interesting. The rich graphics of this game kept me hooked on to it but unfortunately all good things come to an end. This game is a linear experience and so after the game was over I felt very empty. 4. Far Cry 3 I played Far Cry 3 very late. I think around 2014. Before this I didn’t have a PC that could support this game so as soon as I bought a new laptop with my first earnings this was the game I knew I had to play. And so began my quest as Jason Brody in the dense forests of Rakyat to liberate the island. The villain of this game is truly a masterpiece.