What Happened to Kyra's Light?
- 3 days ago
- 8 min read
Every independent game studio has one project that teaches it how to build the next one.
For Raviosoft, that project was Kyra's Light.
If you've found this article because you played the game years ago, first of all—thank you.
The fact that people are still discovering Kyra's Light, leaving reviews, or asking whether we'll continue developing it means more to us than you might imagine. Today, we'd like to tell its story honestly. Not because it became a huge commercial success. But because it taught us almost everything we know about building mobile games.
Our Very First Mobile Game
Kyra's Light was the first game we ever decided to build at Raviosoft. At the time, we had ambition, enthusiasm, and plenty of ideas. What we didn't have was experience and we had plenty of confidence based on our prior software development experience - only we did not know developing games and developing SaaS solutions focus on very different aspects.
Like many first-time indie developers, we believed our first public release needed to be a polished, feature-rich game that could compete with the best titles on the App Store and Google Play.
That assumption would eventually become one of our biggest mistakes. Instead of building a tiny prototype and validating whether the gameplay was fun, we spent more than two years planning, designing, programming, polishing, redesigning, adding features, and trying to perfect every aspect of the game.
Only after all that work did we ask the market a simple question:
"Do players actually want this?"
In hindsight, we should have asked that question on day one.
The Players Who Stayed
Despite everything, Kyra's Light found its audience. It never attracted millions of downloads. But it attracted something we value just as much: loyal players.
We received encouraging reviews, thoughtful comments, and positive ratings from people who genuinely enjoyed the experience.
Some players completed every level. Others sent suggestions for improvements. Some simply thanked us for making something different. Those messages kept the team motivated during difficult periods. Even today, they're one of the reasons we continue maintaining the game instead of removing it from the stores.
Players who stayed genuinely seemed to enjoy it.
We didn't receive thousands of reviews, but the ones we did receive were encouraging, thoughtful, and, above all, honest.
Some of our favorites still make us smile today.
"It's great so far! The gameplay is nice and smooth, and the game is a great time-killer."
"Fun and addictive gameplay loop."
"A very good, relaxing game, the graphics and controls are really good. The only thing I don't like is that if you die you have to start over."
"Beautiful game, very inspiring, from visuals to music."
One review in particular perfectly captured what we had hoped to create:
"I like this game so far! It's hard, which makes me annoyed when I lose, but honestly, I think it's a good thing! It makes me wanna try again and do better!"
As developers, reading comments like these is incredibly rewarding. They remind you why you started making games in the first place. They also make what happened next much harder to accept.
The Difficult Truth About Mobile Games
Here's something every indie developer eventually learns:
A good game isn't always a successful product.
Players can genuinely enjoy your game. They can leave positive reviews. They can recommend it to friends. And yet the game can still struggle commercially.
That was the reality of Kyra's Light. The players who remained often loved the experience. The challenge was that not enough new players stayed long enough to become those loyal fans.
When we looked beyond the reviews and into the analytics, we saw a very different picture. Retention rates were below the level typically needed for profitable user acquisition.
Advertising costs were difficult to recover. Monetization remained modest. The data wasn't telling us that players hated the game. It was telling us that the game wasn't convincing enough people during its first few sessions.
That realization changed the way we build games today.
When Reality Meets Metrics
Unfortunately, enjoying a game and building a sustainable game business are two very different things.
Mobile games live and die by their metrics.
Publishers and investors don't ask whether a game is beautiful first.
They ask questions like:
How much does it cost to acquire a player?
Do players come back tomorrow?
Do they still play after a week?
How long do they stay in each session?
Can the game eventually generate enough revenue to support further development?
Those numbers tell a story that emotions alone cannot. For Kyra's Light, that story was mixed. Players who stayed often liked the game.
But not enough players stayed.
Our First Market Test
Once the game was finally ready, we launched our first acquisition campaign through Google Ads in Tier-1 countries.
These were the results:
Metric | Result |
CPI | €0.60 |
Day-1 Retention | 15% |
Day-7 Retention | 2.5% |
Average Session Length | 3 min 43 sec |
Average Sessions per User per Day | 2 |
At the time, we were excited simply because people were downloading the game.
Looking back today, we understand what these numbers really meant.
The cost to acquire users wasn't disastrous for a first test, but player retention was far below what is typically expected from top-performing mobile games.
The game wasn't giving enough players a reason to come back.
Our Second Test
Instead of giving up immediately, we made improvements and ran another test.
This time we targeted second-tier countries using Google Ads.
The results improved:
Metric | Result |
CPI | €0.21 |
Day-1 Retention | 17.5% |
Day-7 Retention | 2.9% |
Average Session Length | 6 min 18 sec |
Average Sessions per User per Day | 2 |
This was encouraging. Players stayed longer. Retention increased.
However, the improvements still weren't enough to reach the performance levels required for scaling the game profitably.
Somehow, a post in LinkedIn attracted two distinct publishers. The end was near but not there yet and we managed to secure a testing run with Appodeal.
They were incredibly supportive and we tested the game one last time through Appodeal's user acquisition platform, where the overall trends closely matched our second Google Ads campaign.
Different traffic source. Same conclusion. The issue wasn't advertising. The issue was the product itself.
We Learned That Metrics Never Lie
One of the hardest lessons in game development is accepting that players don't behave the way you expect them to.
As developers, we naturally see all the work that went into the game. Players don't. They only experience the first few minutes. If those first minutes aren't compelling enough, they leave.
No amount of beautiful art, sophisticated code, or polished animations can compensate for a core gameplay loop that doesn't immediately hook new players.
That realization changed the way we think about game development forever.
Development Took Too Long & Too Much
Looking back, perhaps our biggest mistake wasn't a design decision.
It was our process.
Kyra's Light took more than two years and more than €100K budget including salaries, licenses etc. from the initial concept to publication.
For a first-time indie team, that's a very long time and a very large budget to work without receiving meaningful market feedback.
During those two years:
the market changed,
the investor sentiment and ecosystem has changed,
competing games evolved,
our own expectations changed,
and, perhaps most importantly, our team changed.
By the time we released the game, we had already invested so much emotionally and financially that making radical changes felt almost impossible.
We had become attached to the product. That's a dangerous position for any startup.
Building a Team Is Harder Than Building a Game
Technology wasn't our only challenge. People were.
Like many first-time studios, we underestimated how difficult it would be to synchronize a multidisciplinary team.
Our designer had to adapt to a Unity-based production pipeline. Our lead developer—despite being an experienced senior software engineer—had to learn Unity and many aspects of game development from scratch. Much of the early development time was spent building knowledge rather than building features.
As often happens in small teams, progress in one area depended on progress in another. The developer sometimes had to wait for art or audio assets; at other times, designers had to wait for technical implementations. Those dependencies created bottlenecks and slowed the entire project.
None of these problems were caused by a lack of talent. They were caused by a lack of experience working together on a game production pipeline.
Today, we'd solve many of those challenges with better planning, clearer milestones, faster communication, and much smaller development cycles.
Marketing Was an Afterthought
Another major lesson came after launch.
We had built a game. But we hadn't built an audience. Our marketing budget was extremely limited. We barely used social media. We didn't consistently share development updates. We weren't building a community while developing the game.
Instead, we followed a common indie assumption:
"Once the game is finished, people will find it."
They rarely do. In today's mobile market, visibility is built months before launch—not after it.
If we started again today, we'd share prototypes, behind-the-scenes videos, development diaries, artwork, and gameplay clips from the very beginning.
We'd use every iteration as an opportunity to engage with players and gather feedback, rather than waiting until the game was "finished."
When the Money Runs Out
Indie development is exciting. It's also unforgiving. Eventually, the financial reality caught up with us. The budget became smaller. Progress slowed. Motivation faded.
The original team gradually dissolved, investors lost confidence, ant the management lost hope —not only in the project but also in our ability to turn it into a sustainable business.
That was difficult to accept.
But sometimes the hardest lessons become the most valuable ones.
What We'd Do Differently Today
If we started Kyra's Light again from scratch, our process would look completely different.
We wouldn't spend two years trying to build a perfect game before showing it to players.
Instead, we'd aim to answer one simple question as quickly as possible:
"Is the core gameplay genuinely fun?"
We'd build the smallest playable version imaginable—one mechanic, one level, one loop—and put it into players' hands within weeks, not years.
Then we'd measure, learn, and iterate.
We'd repeat that cycle over and over:
Build a prototype.
Test with real players.
Measure retention and engagement.
Improve the weakest part.
Test again.
We'd also invest much earlier in community building. Rather than waiting for launch day, we'd share development updates, artwork, experiments, and design decisions regularly on social media, inviting players into the journey. A game shouldn't start building its audience after release—it should grow one while it's still being created.
Most importantly, we'd fall in love with learning, not with our first idea.
So... Is Kyra's Light Dead?
Not at all.
The game is still available, and we continue to maintain it with essential updates such as SDK upgrades and compatibility fixes. We want existing players to keep enjoying it without technical issues.
At the moment, however, we are not actively developing new gameplay features.
That could change under the right circumstances. If we found a publisher—particularly one with experience in Asian markets, where we saw some of our most loyal players—we'd be open to exploring new content and improvements. Likewise, if we started seeing a meaningful increase in organic installs or the game began generating a few hundred dollars in monthly revenue on its own, we'd gladly take another look.
Until then, Kyra's Light remains available exactly as it is: a finished chapter that anyone can still enjoy.
What Kyra's Light Really Gave Us
From a business perspective, Kyra's Light didn't become the hit we dreamed about. But from a company perspective, it may have been our most valuable project.
It taught us
That speed beats perfection,
That metrics matter more than assumptions,
That a prototype is worth more than months of speculation,
That marketing begins before launch,
And that the best teams learn to iterate quickly rather than trying to predict everything in advance.
Those lessons shaped every game we've built since.
When we later developed titles like Reveal It! and Rubi Blast, our approach was fundamentally different because of what Kyra's Light had taught us.
In that sense, Kyra's Light never really ended. Its DNA lives inside every Raviosoft game we create today.
Thank You
If you were one of the players who downloaded Kyra's Light, left a review, reported a bug, or simply spent a few minutes exploring the world we built...
Thank you.
Your support mattered.
It helped a small indie studio learn, improve, and continue creating games. We hope you'll join us on the next chapter of that journey.
