62 dias para o sucesso de US$ 125 milhões: 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.

Além dos jogos, a Kefir tem uma reputação admirável por ser aberta, reconhecendo as forças dos concorrentes e comentando sobre tendências nos blogs e em eventos da indústria. “Ser um verdadeiro desenvolvedor/designer de jogos requer compreensão, estudo e jogar os melhores jogos, independente da sua procedência”, disse Kostylev.

Ele sente que essa atitude é importante para todos, de startups a estúdios consagrados: “Se você prestar atenção às suas emoções enquanto está jogando o jogo de outra pessoa, você pode estimular muita criatividade e ter várias novas ideias.”

Kostylev também citou a importância de não apenas emular os elementos que funcionaram para outros: “Isso não leva a lugar algum – você precisa se concentrar na sua própria individualidade. Uma das razões que faz o Unity ser tão valioso para nós é a facilidade para nos expressarmos e para tentar coisas novas.”

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!”