62 дня до успеха в 125 млн $: Last Day on Earth

Most game reviewers note LDOE’s smooth-running gameplay. To achieve this, Kefir used a variety of techniques, including combining meshes to optimize the number of draw calls and simplifying the UI with a minimum number of atlases.

According to Technical Lead Roman Romanenko, “The most important thing is to focus on creating project architecture at an early stage of development. For example, our basic design patterns solved the inventory system and building mechanics.”

To save more time, Kefir’s developers used a custom “combined sprite” component to draw multiple sprites at once. They also reused objects from fixed pools when possible, minimizing the number of instantiated objects, and enabled automatic user-graphic settings based on device configuration. The Unity Memory Profiler was an important tool that helped them regularly ensure optimal performance across all Android and iOS devices by measuring the impact of all aspects of the game in the device memory.

Помимо своих игр, студия Kefir известна открытостью, готовностью признавать сильные стороны конкурентов и аналитикой тенденций игровой индустрии в блогах и на различных мероприятиях отрасли. «Игровой разработчик или дизайнер должны понимать лучшие игры, изучать их и играть в них, кем бы они ни были разработаны», — говорит Костылев.

Он считает, что таким подходом должны руководствоваться все, от начинающих до уже заявивших о себе компаний. «Анализируя собственные эмоции от чужой игры, можно прийти к очень интересным идеям и найти вдохновение».

Также Костылев отмечает, что важно не просто воспроизводить удачные моменты игр других студий. «Это ни к чему не приведет — нужно сосредоточиться на собственной индивидуальности. Одна из самых сильных сторон Unity — это простота самовыражения и простор для экспериментов».

In addition to game creation, Kefir uses Unity to monetize their game through ads and in-app purchases (IAP), and to grow their game with UA strategies. While Kefir integrates advertisements into LDOE using Unity Ads, they try to minimally impact their game world by fine-tuning the frequency of impressions, and they especially appreciate how Unity Ads minimizes external calls in Android environments. The bulk of LDOE’s revenue, however, comes from IAP. According to Andrey Kulakov, Kefir’s Head of Marketing, “By design, ads only make up perhaps five percent of our game revenue. Our priority is the game and IAP, and Unity IAP makes that very easy for us.”

A small in-house team is dedicated to UA, focusing mainly on performance marketing. “We recently started running Unity Audience Pinpointer campaigns as part of our UA strategy with Unity Ads. This has helped us meet our return-on-ad-spend (ROAS) goals while also letting us scale campaigns and increase volumes. We’re moving a larger portion of our acquisition budget towards it,” said Kulakov.

However, he added, “Our top positions in the charts are the direct result of the work and excitement we put into our games – which we believe is ultimately the best UA strategy possible.”

Once LDOE became a beloved game with millions of players battling zombies in a nightmare landscape, another Kefir team took the title into a time machine and emerged with Grim Soul: Survival, a dark Middle Ages fantasy replete with castles, dungeons and plenty of impressive medieval weapons and tools.

So, with these huge successes under their collective belt, what does the future hold for Kefir? On the Unity front, Romanenko mentions that the LDOE team is looking forward to using the Scriptable Render Pipeline (SRP) to “have more control over their shader systems. We’ll also start using Cinemachine, the procedural camera system, because I know we’ll get some great effects from that,” Romanenko added. “Unity was key for building and launching Last Day on Earth. And it’s our most successful game to date. As for the future, our new projects will be daring as always!”