How I Made $2 in 3 Months as a Beginner (solo) Mobile Game Developer

tl;dr YouTube.

Recently I decided to see what it took to publish and monetize a mobile game. It took me 3 months of inconsistent evenings and weekends, when I wasn't exhausted from my full time job. Full disclosure, I do have a degree in computer science so I wasn't starting completely from scratch. However, it was done in a programming language that I was unfamiliar with and I do not use my CS skillset in my 9-5. I don't see this as anything close to a prerequisite; I do strongly believe that you can learn anything from YouTube with a little dedication (and many programmers are self-taught now anyways).

In case any of you have ever toyed with the idea of self-publishing an app, I'll outline my steps here and the things I wish I had known from the beginning. Everything I did was trial and error, so hopefully if you ever decide to venture down the same path this will save you some time.

The game is called Truckstop Mania for anyone interested (shameless plug). It's hardly a masterpiece, but it is published, monetized, and has that addicting time-waster mechanic/feel (I think, anyways) which were my only criteria during this little side project. It's only available for iOS (I'll explain why later).

If you are proficient in any of the areas I will be discussing, before you start screaming internally I'd like to reinforce that this is not a post about the correct or optimal way to do things. This is a recounting of my journey as a complete beginner, without guidance, and the areas I feel I could have saved the most time on my path to a minimum viable product.

My total investment was around $300. The minimum required investment is around $175.

Other prerequisites:

• A website (I'm not kidding, this is an absolute requirement). I'll briefly explain some of the cheapest ways to overcome this if you're simply not interested in putting energy into this part
• A laptop (and access to a Mac if this isn't your primary development platform)
• A network of a few family and friends that you can annoy
• At least a good mouse, but I highly recommend investing in a pen tablet instead
• Some form of stubbornness, motivation, or masochism will do. This is a long, frustrating road.

So, here we go.

1. Download Unity, the program in which you will create your game. It's free if you're a hobbyist developer until you surpass $30,000 in revenue (only $29,998 to go!). Yes there are other options. No I haven't tried them, so I can't speak to their comparability. Unity has tons of YouTube tutorials and is one of the most popular planforms. I found it relatively easy to learn and the online support community is good, so that's all I needed.
2. Spend a week watching dozens of YouTube videos with titles similar to "Build a mobile game today from scratch" and "How to build an Android game in Unity". Find videos that include a link to download the assets (artwork) for free in the description to save yourself some time. Follow along, step-by-step and recreate the games. At first you will just be copy-pasting without much understanding of what is going on. I felt this way until I was at least 50% of the way through my first game.
3. After you're deep into the rabbit hole, capitalize on any inspiration you come across and try to come up with a somewhat-unique concept for a game. It doesn't have to be an original masterpiece, but it should be low-complexity and not overly ambitious. My inspiration was a game I played 10+ years ago that is no longer available from the app store. As I started to learn the different concepts, I had an idea for a game using the same mechanics, but I thought that I might be able to do it a bit better than the game I remembered.
4. Start to build a bookmarks folder of all the little concepts you come across that you would like to use. Timestamp the videos (some are 7+ hours long) to quickly find the relevant content you need when you circle back.
5. Start to cobble those unrelated concepts together into a Frankenstein of crap.
6. By now you will be in desperate need of your own artwork. Download Krita, which is an open-source (free) drawing program not dissimilar to Photoshop but for digital painting/drawing.
7. Invest in a drawing pad/stylus. I used a Wacom Intuos that I found on Amazon (the smaller one) which was $50. This is optional, but after trying to draw with a mouse for a while I can't recommend it enough.
8. Also look up YouTube videos for how to use Krita. As someone who sucks at drawing, this was by far the most difficult and frustrating part for me. Stick with it, do a little bit every day and you'll get better. It took me 4 full iterations to get artwork that I was even somewhat happy with. Use base layers with thin lines and decreased opacity to serve as a guide, then trace over them in a new layer with a thicker brush and a stabilizer. Learn the keyboard shortcuts (erase, pen size, pan, zoom, rotate, undo, copy, paste), use new layers for everything, and take advantage of the mirror/symmetry tools.
9. Around this time, you'll have realized how inefficiently you were doing things. Start a new project from scratch and re-build your scripts properly and cleanly. Do this 2 more times before you even start to think about publishing.
10. Choose a deployment platform. I'll make this easy for you: you choose Apple iOS. Why? Because I tried to be cheap and go with Android development first, but Google has decided to stick up a big greasy middle finger to solo developers and implement some policies that make it essentially impossible to self-publish. The Google Play developer console costs $25 to use and you only have to pay once, whereas Apple charges $100 per year, so starting with Google was obvious for me before I realized how difficult it would be.
11. To elaborate a bit, Google requires a closed internal test with 20 Android users that must run for 2 weeks. I thought I could overcome this, but of my entire network of family, friends, work colleagues, and friends of friends, I only managed to scrape together about 11 people with Android devices. Of those 11 who agreed to participate, only 9 actually opted in. Of those 9, only 4 actually played the game, and of those 4 only 2 gave any sort of meaningful feedback. So this was the end of the road for my Android development journey. I considered using the test-for-test subreddits, but my game is relatively low-complexity and although it's nothing special, I was worried about IP theft and someone with more resources beating me to the punch. It's a piece of crap, but by-golly it's my piece of crap. As an aside, I did appeal Google after my game was published for iOS to see if they'd waive the rest of the testing requirements given the app being live for iOS. They told me to pound sand.
12. Set up Google AdMob (or another monetization platform) to serve ads. I just did a simple banner ad because I hate intrusive advertisements and it's the simplest to implement. Again, YouTube videos for how to do this. There's lots of documentation and it requires some trial & error. I tried using Unity ads because it's build-in to the development program, but it broke my entire game so I jumped over to Google which I found much easier to implement. Make sure you identify your test devices in the portal so that you don't end up with policy violations.
13. Build your game for iOS / Apple. You can find YouTube tutorials for how to do this. It's convoluted, and there are a lot of steps including stuff for keychain, building in Unity and then building again on a Mac in Xcode, and a whole new world of errors trying to get a test version deployed locally on a test device (HIGHLY recommended before uploading to the app store).
14. Set up an Apple Developer account and pay the registration fees.
15. Get everything set up in your App Store Connect account for your App Store page. You'll need to take screenshots in different resolutions for different devices, so make sure your game scales nicely for tablets and run the simulator in Unity on all sorts of different devices.
16. When filling out your questionnaire for the app, you will be faced with a lot of very confusing questions about location tracking, analytics, and sharing information with third parties. You might think to yourself "it's a dumb, basic game and doesn't use any of those things, mostly because I have no idea how I would even implement or take advantage of that." Save yourself the policy violation and spend some time researching the implications of using AdMob. The Google overlords do all of those things in the background. Here's a resource for how to answer those questions: https://github.com/Privado-Inc/SDK-Privacy-Report/blob/main/Apple%20App%20-%20SDK%20Privacy%20Report.csv
17. -Build a website! Yes, it's a requirement for your app store page. Make sure you have a privacy policy, an app-ads.txt file and that the marketing URL is filled out with the link to your site's main page. Google AdMob has a crawler that will look at these things, and Apple requires some of them too.
18. Free privacy policy generator, to be dumped onto a blank page on your website: https://app-privacy-policy-generator.firebaseapp.com/
19. I used NameCheap to purchase a website domain. I think it was like $6 per month, billed annually. Hosted a website on WordPress with drag & drop customizations. Again, lots of YouTube resources here. This part took me about a day and required no coding. There are other ways to do this with even less effort if you want to pay a bit more, but I was going for cheap, not easy.
20. Run a beta test through App Store Connect. Annoy your friends and family by desperately pleading with them to install several apps onto their phones that will make them official testers and get them to provide feedback through the official channels. There is no minimum number of testers with Apple but have at least a handfull, depending on the complexity of your game. I think I had 4-5 opted in. Fix any issues, re-build and re-upload a new version (even with minor changes, this shows initiative to the Apple reviewers).
21. Submit your app for review. Wait patiently while you contemplate all the effort you just put in and how you may want to rethink your impulsivity when it comes to valuing your own time. Google "What is an ROI?"
22. If you were successful, congratulations! Your game is now published. Tell all your family and friends, who won't care because they were the Guinea pigs for the early, broken versions of your app and no longer want anything to do with downloading another version despite your pleas of "It's better now, I promise!"
23. Now go back to AdMob and link your app to the app store. You should now officially be able to start collecting revenue

I have done absolutely zero marketing beyond word of mouth (and this post, if you count that). So far, I have earned $2 from the family and friends that still play occasionally. I am considering some paid advertisements to attempt to hit the "Trending" charts in the store at which point organic growth may start to take over (combined with some ASO). But this whole journey has given me a better understanding of the whole process, and I already am working on a new attempt with a better monetization, gameplay, and marketing strategy built in from the start. Overall, I strangely found this to be a lot of fun and am very proud of my accomplishment.

If you've made it this far, you truly are a sucker for punishment. But I commend your dedication and thank you for lending me your eyeballs.