Shadow Blocks Goes Global — From Play Store to CrazyGames

Eight hours of platform-expansion marathon. Two web portals submitted. One 8.0/10 QA rating from CrazyGames testers. Here's the inside story of what it takes to push a mobile match-3 game beyond Google Play and onto a network reaching 50 million players.

The Setup

Two weeks ago, Shadow Blocks went live on Google Play. Twenty installs. 5.00 star rating. 60% retention — twelve monthly active users out of twenty installs. For a casual match-3 game with zero marketing budget, that's twelve times the industry average.

The metrics were beautiful. The visibility was zero.

Twenty installs in a month, out of 1.5 billion Play Store users, means my discoverability hovers somewhere around 0.000001%. That's the reality of solo indie dev without a marketing budget — your game can be perfect, but if nobody sees it, nobody plays it.

Solution: go where the players already are. HTML5 web portals.

The Plan: Two Portals, Two Weeks

HTML5 game portals are the unsung heroes of casual gaming. CrazyGames alone has 50 million monthly users. GameDistribution feeds dozens of partner sites. They don't take a marketing budget — they take a working HTML5 build, polished assets, and a submission process that's deceptively brutal.

Friday (May 15): GameDistribution submitted. Request Activation sent. Two-week QA review begins.

Saturday (May 16): CrazyGames. The marathon.

Today's Shipping List

The Five Hours That Almost Broke Me

I'd love to tell you the submission went smoothly. It did not.

Hour 1 — The GD Redirect

First CrazyGames preview: menu loads, click "Play," and the game disappears. Replaced by a CrazyGames default screen saying "SHADOW BLOCKS: MYSTICAL MATCH IS NOT AVAILABLE HERE." GameDistribution's SDK was hijacking the page.

Initial fix attempt: script_exists(CG_IsCrazyGames). This was wrong — script_exists() only checks for GML scripts, and CG_IsCrazyGames() is a JavaScript function exposed by the extension. The check always returned false. GD kept hijacking.

Real fix: wrap the call in try/catch. If CG_IsCrazyGames() returns 1, we're on CrazyGames — skip GD entirely. If it throws (because the extension isn't loaded), continue with normal GD init. Five lines of code. One hour to find.

Hour 2-3 — The OBS Rabbit Hole

OBS Studio is a phenomenal tool that has approximately 47 ways to fail silently. Black screens (Screen Recording permission). Cropped recordings (canvas resolution vs monitor resolution mismatch on a 2K display). No audio (Desktop Audio requires BlackHole on macOS, which CrazyGames forbids anyway because they require muted previews).

Every problem felt like the last problem. None of them were.

Hour 4 — The Cursor War

CrazyGames forbids the default mouse cursor in preview videos. OBS has a "Show Cursor" toggle that should fix this. On a 2K external monitor, that toggle does nothing — macOS draws the cursor directly to the display hardware. Screenflick, OBS, QuickTime — all helpless.

Workaround: shrink the gameplay area, park the cursor in a corner outside the recording region, never touch the mouse during the 20-second capture. Trackpad for the single required click. Eventually it worked.

Hour 5 — The Pillarbox Question

Shadow Blocks is portrait. CrazyGames requires a landscape (16:9) preview video as mandatory. Portrait gameplay in a landscape frame leaves... black bars on the sides. Pillarboxing.

CrazyGames documentation says: "Avoid black bars top & bottom." Notice the wording — top & bottom, not left & right. After 30 minutes reading docs, FAQ, and submission guidelines, I confirmed: side pillarboxes for portrait games are explicitly allowed. Letterboxes (bars top/bottom on stretched landscape) are not.

The video uploaded with pillarboxes. The QA team rated it 8.0.

What Eight-Point-Zero Means

Five testers play your game. Each scores it 1-10. Eight is well above average for first-submission casual puzzle games. It means the testers thought:

• The gameplay loop is satisfying (match-3 with slide mechanics, not generic three-in-a-row)
• The art direction is consistent (dark fantasy across all 80 levels)
• The polish level is appropriate (animations, transitions, audio cues)
• The onboarding works (you understand the game in 30 seconds)
• The variety holds up (10 different worlds, gem types, increasing difficulty)

It also means I'm likely to clear Basic Launch — the two-week soft launch period where CrazyGames measures real-world engagement metrics. After Basic Launch comes Full Launch — with monetization enabled and promotional placement across their network.

The Distribution Reality

Solo indie dev means choosing platforms strategically. Here's where Shadow Blocks lives now, and where it doesn't:

The strategy: let the web portals do the discovery work. Match-3 is a casual genre — players want to play in a browser tab during a coffee break, not download a 30 MB app. The mobile market is brutal without paid acquisition. The web market rewards good gameplay.

Lessons For Solo Devs

If you're reading this and considering web portal submission yourself, here's what I learned the hard way:

1. Read technical requirements three times. Then read the FAQ. Then read it again. Every detail matters — pillarbox vs letterbox is the kind of detail that decides whether your submission gets accepted.
2. Build a separate HTML5 index file per portal. CrazyGames requires their SDK and forbids others. GameDistribution requires their SDK and forbids competitors. Don't try to share one build between portals — make platform-specific entry points.
3. Cover art positioning is real. Portals overlay labels on covers (NEW, TOP RATED, HOT). Keep your title and key elements out of the top-left corner.
4. Preview videos are marketing, not documentation. Twenty seconds. Show variety. Avoid cursors, text overlays, intros, audio. Less is more.
5. Submit even when it's not perfect. CrazyGames QA gave Shadow Blocks 8.0/10 even with visible pillarboxes (which I'll improve later). Done is better than perfect — reviewers are reasonable humans.
6. Backup before every major sprint. Today, before celebrating, I committed Shadow Blocks v4.2.0 to GitHub, copied both Shadow projects to OneDrive cloud, and wrote this devlog post. Three locations for everything that matters.

What's Next

Two weeks of waiting. CrazyGames QA review takes about 14 days. GameDistribution similar. The verdict comes back as either Basic Launch (good news — go live with limited audience) or Required Changes (medium news — fix specific issues, resubmit).

While I wait:

• Monday, May 18 — Shadow Raid sprint resumes. Tutorial system polish, mini-boss, Act 1 boss design (Captain Krev). Eleven weeks to release.
• Ongoing — Shadow Blocks maintenance. Quarterly content updates planned. Festival events for Halloween and Christmas. No major rewrites.
• If CrazyGames approves — Full Launch prep. Optimize initial download size for mobile homepage eligibility (currently 34 MB, need under 20 MB for mobile featured slots). Better preview videos with blur backgrounds instead of pillarboxes.

Why I Keep Doing This

Solo indie dev means doing everything: code, art, audio, marketing, distribution, customer support, taxes. Today I learned to use OBS Studio and DaVinci Resolve from scratch — two tools I'd never opened before this morning. Eight hours of stress later, I have new skills that will pay off across every project for the rest of my career.

It also means parenting in the background. My oldest, Erick, has chickenpox right now. My youngest, Brandon, was being managed by my wife Judyta while I fought with portrait video aspect ratios. There's no separation between "work" and "life" — there's just the day, and what you can fit into it.

Shadow Blocks now lives on three platforms (with two pending QA approval). Two weeks ago I was a developer with one Android game and 20 installs. Today I'm a developer with one game across an entire web portal network — and 50 million potential players waiting on the other side of a two-week review.

Compound progress. Small wins stacking up. The journey continues Monday with Shadow Raid.