What is Golden Sum
Overview
Golden Sum is a mobile game that was designed by myself, and developed by my cousin Alex. My cousin and I had worked on various projects together before, and had always mused about one day building a mobile game. It was an industry that we were both intrigued with, being mobile gamers ourselves, and had always dreamed about creating our own idea.
The goal of the game is to add adjacent numbers until you arrive at the required sum, the "Golden Sum". Then you beat the level and can advance to the next round. It is an amalgamation of the genre puzzle and math game.
The game was designed in Adobe XD and developed in Flutter which is an open-source UI software development kit (SDK), and the programming language Dart. We also used Facebook SDK code to track the amount of downloads our app received through a facebook add.
Background Story
My cousin and I are big fans of the game 2048. We found it a fun game that also made you exercise your brain. We played 2048 when it first came out years ago and from that were inspired to one day create our own idea.
Finally when our experience in app design/development had grown with the years that followed, we decided to pursue our own idea in 2019.
Preliminary Research
In our market research we discovered that there wasn't many games that combined puzzle with math. There were plenty of puzzle games, and plenty of math games, but very few that combined both genres. Most math games are simply adding or subtracting from tables like you did when you were young in school. We found this a boring (and consequently ineffective) way to teach math to kids.
This was our USP - a math game based around addition, that also incorporated a fun puzzle to solve, with a reward system upon completion.
Top Competitor
Important to Note
Golden Sum is a personal project of ours that we are still in the process of working on. We pursued Golden Sum strictly as a personal hobby. Our goal was to make mistakes, learn, grow, and have fun building our own idea. Monetization was never the end goal, just a benefit if achieved. We knew that the mobile gaming industry is an extremely competitive industry, and that you have to release many games before you get a hit. Due to this fact we did not approach this undertaking in a way that one who would want to profit from their app would take. We could've spent much more time on market research, competitive analysis, marketing efforts, app store optimization etc. however our primary goal was just to enjoy the process of building a game, and learn a lot in the process.
This being said, after we started showing our finished app to various friends, family, acquaintances, and random strangers we received positive reception. It was after this reception that we decided to take a more serious approach about the future potential for Golden Sum. With that in mind below are our future steps.
Next Steps
• Further market research on mobile math and puzzle games
- Who are our competitors?
- What are their strengths and weaknesses? How can we differentiate ourselves and add value they're not? What is our USP?
• Define our target audience (Customer Profiling)
• Deploy more tailored marketing efforts
• Select the right monetization method
• Utilize app store optimization
• Continue designing, testing, and refining model
2023 Status Update
The above case study was written in 2019. Over the years we have worked together to continually update and improve the app. We even decided to change it's name to "Burning Num". You can find it on the App Store below.View Here.
