About 4 months ago I began my journey as a new game developer. I had just graduated from college with a B.S. of Business majoring in Accounting, gotten married, and started a 8-5 job. Because my newly wed still had 1 more year of college left, I needed to find something to work on while she did homework, queue game development.

I spent about two months learning C# and Unity. Both of these have so many tutorials online that I decided not to pay for training and learn from Youtube and google. About two months ago, after finishing Unitys “Space Shooter Tutorial” I decided I wanted to make my own game. Queue Crossy Bridge. (Google Play)

I began working on a game where a player would control a bridge to get cars across a ravine. For each car saved, the player gets a point. Pretty simple. I spent a month coding, modeling (Thank you Magivoxel!), and finding free online sound effects. and after a month of evening work about 3-4 times a week I deemed that the game was ready to be distributed.

Now I have no idea on the In’s and Out’s of how to properly release an app. All I knew was to pay the $25 fee and upload. So I did. There it was. My beautiful Application. In-front of the world to play and enjoy. Except I forgot that literally the only other person that knew this existed was my wife. No marketing whatsoever. By the next day I had 2 downloads. My wife and I.

Soon afterwards I made a simple GIF to show game play and uploaded it to Imgur, and shared on Reddit and Twitter. To my surprise, people loved it! Over the next couple days I got 30+ downloads. Which for me was a lot. At this time my only monetization was a “Support the Developer” button that would play an ad. I got no money from that little button. For the first two weeks the Application was released I earned $0.00 from my effort!

I decided to add banner Ads into the game play in hopes of some cents to come my way. Along with this update I added achievements and leader boards, along with Halloween Characters. I shared the update in a similar was as before; Imgur, Reddit, Twitter. And I waited. To my surprise by the end of the day I had $0.01 waiting on me! This made me very excited. I continued to check my Adsense profile and the next day I earned a click! Which netted me $.09. Totaling $0.10 earned total.

Since the update I’ve earned a total of $0.20. It’s not a lot. In fact, I’m still down $24.80 from the developers license. And I need to make $100 to cash out. But I’m on my way!

I write this as a reality check to new developers. While researching potential revenue everything I was seeing just blew my away. “I made a flashlight app and get $12 daily!” “My game got me $15,000 this month!” “I sold my app for $1,000,000!” Etc. Etc. While I hope that someday I will have a success story. Mine did not come from my first App, and more likely than not. Neither will yours.

Some statistic information: Total Clicks for “Support the Developer” button = 21 Total Revenue = $.00 Total Admob Impressions = 481 Total Revenue = $0.07 Total Admob Clicks = 2 Total Revenue from Clicks = $.13 Average Fill Rate = 97.04%

If you care, Play the game here: Google Play m Sorry no Apple Support.