If you've never played Hoplite. Go download it right now. It's a wonderful turn based strategy game. As I've said before, you have to research other games and see what they do well. Hoplite is a great example of a pickup and put down mobile game with high replayability, no IAP or Ads.
I reached out to the creator to see if I could get an interview with him about his awesome game. He was kind enough to oblige:
Doug. Doug. I'm addicted to Hoplite. I know that isn't a question, but I thought I'd just publicly say it.
:)
How old are you? What's your professional and educational background?
I studied electrical/electronic engineering and worked in that industry for a few years. I went on to do some postgraduate engineering study, which I dropped out of shortly before Hoplite was made.
What technologies/frameworks did you use to build Hoplite?
It's written in java and uses libGDX. At the time, I was only making it for Android as that's what I used.
How long did it take to build?
Hoplite was originally made for the seven day roguelike challenge. I'd spent a month or so working on a previous game that didn't really go anywhere. I took the "engine" from that previous game and used it to make the basic mechanics during the challenge. Releasing the commercial version for Android and the iOS port took quite a lot longer.
How big is the code base?
It's 35k lines of java. I'd estimate the (vast?) majority of that is for features and content that never made it into the playable game, though.
Care to give us some insight into revenue?
I'd rather not make [exact numbers] public. iOS was much greater initially but mostly dropped away, while Android has remained fairly steady. To date, the total revenue is split around 2:1 between Android and iOS.
During the sale and development of Hoplite, what was one of your happiest moments?
At the time, I was quite excited to see it played and enjoyed by people in the game industry who had made games I really enjoyed playing.
Your saddest moments?
I guess trying to force the game out when I didn't feel like working on it. I sometimes seem to believe it's necessary.
You went for a premium game as opposed to a game that was free with IAP. Why?
It might be sentimentality. That's the way the games where when I grew up and that's the way I like them.
Given hindsight is 20/20, would you have done anything differently with regards to building and selling Hoplite?
Sure, just about everything. Maybe some kind of final boss. A different scoring system. A framework/engine that makes building and testing on iOS easier. Probably separate free and premium versions for Android instead of the current upgrade system.
The difficulty of Hoplite is perfectly brutal. How did you go about play testing that and fine tuning it?
Lots of experimentation, basically. Trying to figure out what the best/worst strategies were and tweaking things to balance them out. People would still find combinations I hadn't considered that completely broke the game so the process would take several iterations each time new abilities were added.