Evert's website

Shark Escape - 10th Anniversary

Back in 2014, my brother and I developed and published an Android game called Shark Escape. To celebrate its 10th anniversary, I thought it would be fun to look back at the game and do a bit of a postmortem.

As part of the anniversary I’ve published the game as an HTML5 project, so everyone can play it without needing to install it on an Android device. Check it out here!

Note that the achievements and leaderboards do not work, as they depend on Google Play Game Services. Also, the backgrond music will only start playing as soon as you interact with the game by clicking inside the canvas.

Development #

We originally developed Shark Escape in GameMaker Studio over the course of a few weeks1. Obviously, it was somewhat inspired by the mobile hit of the day, Flappy Bird. My brother handled the sprite work in GameMaker, while I coded the gameplay in GML. Although I had been experimenting with GameMaker for a few years, this was my first project fully written in GML rather than using the drag-and-drop functionality. The background music was created by a friend using an old version of Magix Music Maker, if I remember correctly.

Release #

We released Shark Escape on the Google Play Store on August 22, 2014. We included ads using the Google AdMob SDK, setting ourselves the goal of earning back the Google Play developer registration fee (which was $25 at that moment).

The original build, version 1.0.0.
The original build, version 1.0.0.

Updates #

While the game was feature complete at launch, we did release several updates over the years. Based on what I could recover from the Google Play Developer Console history, running old APKs in an emulator2, and checking the Git history, the highlights are as follows:

User acquisition #

Although the game was released back in 2014, we saw the largest increase in user count only seven years later, during the pandemic. To our surprise, somewhere in mid-2021 the number of installs suddenly increased.

User acquisition 2020-2024. Unfortunately Google doesn't provide statistics from before 2020.
User acquisition 2020-2024. Unfortunately Google doesn't provide statistics from before 2020.
Over its lifetime, the game has had a total of 12.981 unique users - not too bad if you ask me! At its peak (May 2022) it was installed on 541 devices concurrently.

Expenses and income #

While we did achieve our goal — earning back the registration fee — this is, of course, far from a livable wage! That said, most (amateur) game developers never make a single dollar from their games, so I think it’s pretty cool that two teenagers managed to make a hundred bucks 😄

Remarks #

1: Exactly when development started is unfortunately lost to time. Back then, our version control was nothing more than an external hard drive containing a ZIP file for each build of the game.

2: This unexpectedly presented a bit of a challenge: early versions of the game were built for ARMv7 and Intel Atom (both 32-bit targets), meaning they wouldn’t run on the AVD emulator (at least on ARM64 macOS hosts), even when using the oldest available image (Android 9). To run the older builds, I used a physical device, in this case a Pixel 6a as newer devices like the Pixel 7 also do no longer support 32-bit apps. Even then, I had to pass the --bypass-low-target-sdk-block parameter to adb, or it would complain about the targeted SDK version (which of course was severely outdated). The original builds date back to 2014, and GameMaker was never known for their quick support of newer SDK versions.