Brainstorming Ideas #
The idea of Valorant Gun Simulator comes from
App Development #
Valorant Gun Simulator was developed in Unity Engine 2019.4.12f1. The gun models used in Valorant Gun Simulator are taken from the official Valorant PC game. These models are cleaned up in photoshop and turned into compressed game ready PNGs. The muzzle flash sprites used in Valorant Gun Simulator come from the Unity package Sprite muzzle flashes. All of the sounds in the game are recorded and sampled from Valorant then cleaned up into MP3 files.
The main menu consists of Unity Button GameObjects that enable or disable parts of the menu. These menu elements of seperated into GameObjects like categories, so if the user navigates from rifles page 1 to rifles page 2, rifles1 will be disabled and rifles2 will be enabled. Inside rifles1 and rifles2 are jpegs that represent the menu interface, and buttons overlayed over the menu interface jpeg.
Publishing #
Valorant Gun Simulator Version 1.0 was released on…
The first version of the game utilized a short and sweet description. There wasn’t too much though on search engine optimization. I wanted to get a product out on time and didn’t have enough resources to perfect the marketing for the game. The icon was thrown together quickly in Photoshop and consists of the Reaver Vandal gun, a gun I didn’t include in the game at the time, and a promotional graphic as the background. The images for the app listing showed screenshots with no added graphics.
Future Updates #
Version 1.5 was release on May 10 2021
Previously, in version 1.0, any device with an aspect ratio different from 16:9 would display the app improperly. This was due to the app using a JPEG image to display the menus in the game. For example, the main menu was a JPEG with invisible button objects over the navigatable pages. If you clicked on the rifles menu, the page would enable the riflesMenu object, which was made up of the buttons for each rifle and the riflesMenuImage under it. It would also disable the mainMenu object. The problem with creating a menu this way is that the menus would not be dynamic. The menus would be locked at the menu image size which was at a 16:9 ratio. The image and buttons lined up, but they did not use the same anchor points. A device with a different screen resolution, such as a tablet, would have trouble navigating the menu.
This bug was fixed using a script attatched to the camera that would measure the maximum size of a 16:9 resolution on the device screen. This would become the new outputted resolution, and anything outside of the output would appear as black bars.
Reception #
At first, the rate of user acquisition for Valorant Gun Simulator was very slow. This can be attributed to the few poor reviews related to the aspect ratio bug. After I fixed this, the rate of user acquisition grew much quicker and eventually balanced out to a linear rate of about 300 downloads a day. The game maintains a 3.9 star average rating despite being a bit dated in terms of content.
This is a line chart for the cumulative unique user downloads for Valorant Gun Simulator (counting user downloads not device downloads). The data was taken from the Google Play Developer Console.