Hello, everyone!
I am going to make a kinda short not-post-mortem for Unblocky.

Basic concept

The basic concept for Unblocky was to make a simple game for mobile. The goal was to make it simple to understand and not complex at all regarding the gameplay. I had been thinking about this gameplay similar to the classic “Simon” but using cellphone block screen patterns.
A few months ago, I created a quick prototype to try it out and showed it to Juan. We both thought that it could have potential and decided to try it out. In the worst case scenario, we could easily discard it, if necessary, because it wouldn’t be months of work.

Development

The cool thing about the game was that we had a phase of “discover” where we made the special nodes for Arcade and try it out different things that may mess up the player’s mind.
For example, when you play arcade mode, you have a special node that suggests you follow a path. If you were doing a different pattern, following that one would result in you overthink the move and maybe forget about the next pattern. This gave a nice feeling of risk/reward.
My original vision was just the Zen mode, but adding the timer bar in Traditional and these special nodes for Arcade was a great addition and most of the credit goes to Juan here.
For last, the last update has an online version which I think is a nice addition, even you most likely need to tell your friend to play with you since there is no player base. This mode, called Versus, came from me learning Photon from one of my following games. I told Juan, as a joke, that we could add a multiplayer mode to it in order to make a nice update. Somehow, I ended up coding most of it in an afternoon ¯_(ツ)_/¯.

What went wrong

I think the biggest thing that went wrong is that the game doesn’t have replayability. Without this, people would only play it over and over again if they have a real attachment to the minimalistic gameplay. Given that is a “niche” game, this was almost impossible to keep it up.
Even more, the current mobile market is saturated with games, especially on Android, so becoming visible without marketing is almost impossible.

What went good

I really liked the fact that even being a really small game, we got featured on Newgrounds and even won an award. Other than it, regarding the game itself, I am not sure if more things went good.
But! Apart from the game itself, there are a few good things I can point out:
We added a new game to our portfolio. In my case, the first mobile game I publish, and I learnt a lot of things about:

• Publishing a game in the play store (steps, legal, etc).
• Using AdMob in order to show ads (I had used a lot of different APIs for ads but is the first time that I use this one).
• Using Photon Network in order to make an online multiplayer mode (I never made an online multiplayer game so it was a nice thing learn about this).
• Using Newgrounds.io in order to add Newgrounds’s medals and leaderboards in a html5 Unity game. (Added medals and leaderboards in lots of my games but never using html5).

Resume

As a balance, I am very proud of this game even it didn’t get too much popularity. A game of which you learn that much, even it isn’t a financial success, I think it will always be a success in the balance.
From now on, this game isn’t dead yet, we will keep adding updates, mostly visual ones. So, if you are interested in trying it out, download it here!