The first game for iOS and the first difficulties. How not to give up and bring things to release

With a car for life


Since youth, cars have been my passion. I could spend hours reading auto magazines, viewing photos from the latest car dealerships and auto shows. I literally watched every new car passing me along the street. It was my love of cars that became fundamental when choosing my first profession. As a student, I got a job as a journalist in a young automobile magazine. A year later, I worked as the editor of one of the best European automobile magazines. This was an invaluable experience. I learned how products are created, in particular weekly print media. While working in the auto press, I realized that the team should work as a whole. Each participant in the project is an irreplaceable gear in a harmonious large mechanism. Only in this way, and nothing else, the output will be a quality product.

From production to product


I transferred all these principles to my company when I founded a small studio and started digital production. By the joint efforts of my team, we have established the development of websites and mobile applications. We tried to make each new project not like the previous one. They gave all the best to 100%, devoted themselves to their favorite business. After several years of hard work and several dozen projects, we realized that this was not enough for us. We wanted something more than helping people with their ideas, realizing someone else’s potential. We felt strong and confident that we were ready to release our own product. We were ready to use our accumulated experience in the development of digital products, to maximize our potential.

The search for an idea was not long and partly a coincidence. We just finished one small non-profit project - an icon for the iOS application.

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Initially, this project we wanted to attract the attention of potential customers to our art opportunities. As a rule, non-profit projects are stronger and prettier than commercial ones. Most importantly, they are not involved in annoying customers who intervene in the process with an endless amount of edits.

For example:
  • “нужно изменить цвет, сделать немного поярче, сейчас как-то тускловато”
  • “знаете нашим клиентам вряд ли понравится этот шрифт”
  • “а вы можете сделать наш логотип побольше, а то его практически незаметно”


As a rule, all these changes negatively affect the final result. And working for yourself, you simply bring your ideas to life as you see fit. This, of course, also does not always end in success, but at least pride amuses.

Nothing happens by chance


So, we have a beautifully designed icon in our hands and no more. By a happy coincidence, a young iOS developer got into our studio. He had several games in his piggy bank, one of which was a one-taped race with collecting achievements. Without hesitation, we put all the components into a single whole and got the concept of an exciting game. For a week they drew the graphics, for another week they worked on physics. And it seemed that success was just about to come, and millions of fans were already rubbing their hands in anticipation of a new hit. However, we did not even imagine what game development is and what else we have to do, and what else we will have to learn.

The planned deadlines for the development of the game naturally shifted. Because it’s rather difficult to plan those things that you don’t know about: adapting for all devices from iPhone 4 to iPad Pro, setting up in-app purchases, many settings for sound files, connecting and setting up a cloud service for additional cars, and much more.

Pitfalls and how to fit into deadlines


Graphics were easy for us. Two designers worked on the project in parallel: one was responsible for the art part of the project, the second designed the interaction interface itself. We were inspired by the new direction and were inspired by the fact that we ourselves are developing the game. Team spirit soared to heaven.

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However, programming was a little more complicated. For the planned development period, we managed only half. There remained a lot of voluminous tasks, such as connecting the cloud to add new cars that were currently under development. This decision was forced, because by the start of the game I wanted to have as many variations of the car as possible.

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Therefore, we decided that it was time to call someone for help. And we connected an experienced iOS developer to the project to solve more complex problems and for a general code review. Things went more fun, but we were still very limited in terms, because we wanted to launch the game before the Christmas holidays. As many people know, this year, December 22, the entire staff of iTunes Connect went on holiday. This meant that if we did not fill the game before this date, then we can assume that we lost holiday time on the American App Store, and the activity of people at this time on the market is very large. And even more than that, we needed to have time to finish work on the game 5-7 working days before the holidays. Since, according to statistics, during this specific period, the application verification period was 5-7 working days (we focused on data fromAppreviewtimes ), then the deadline automatically shifted to December 15th.

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And we still managed. The only thing left was to come up with a name. The competitiveness in the racing race is very high, choosing a simple name was quite difficult. And we decided not to chase the name korotnik. Maybe it was our mistake, time will tell. We settled on the capacious, but comprehensive name OldStyleRacing . When choosing a name, you need to consider all the necessary requirements for further promotion of the game and the landing page of the game. We even sat down to make a small but effective landing page for our game osr.iondigi.com , since the experience of developing the web allowed us to do this quickly and with minimal cost.

New challenges and new solutions


It seemed to us that everything that depends on us we have already done. But that would be too easy. As usual, we got to the innovations and updates of the rules. This is not the first case in the practice of our company when we do not have time to deliver the project according to the old rules and standards. We got reject. And the essence of the reject was as follows: in our game we use an intermediate currency in the form of coins. They can be collected in the game itself, or you can go the easy way and buy coins in the built-in store using the in-app purchase method. For this domestic currency, you can buy new cars or styling your current car. So, until recently, purchases for domestic currency did not require recovery, in contrast to the usual built-in one-time purchases (non-consumable purchases). But for now, paragraph 10.6 of the App Store Review Guidelinesstates that now one-time purchases, even for domestic currency, must be renewed.

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Ways to solve this problem, we saw the following:

  • Make user registration in the game. This method was recommended to us by Apple. However, registration is a big enough piece of work, and we wanted to eupload the game as quickly as possible. Moreover, users are not very willing to register in such applications.
  • The second way is synchronization via icloud. It has become a priority for us, as it allows users to restore purchases discreetly and without unnecessary gestures.

For the sake of confidence, we specified in the Apple Solution Center whether this method is suitable. Each question took 12 to 24 hours. But as I understand it, this is the standard time period for a response from the App Store.

After confirmation, we proceeded to improvements. And on December 21, they uploaded a new build with the ability to restore purchases for domestic currency. Now we had to make our game checked in one day. I got on Habr for the help. I found a wonderful article on the topic “Speeding up the verification of your iOS / Mac applications in iTunesConnect from one week to one day” .

I did all the recommendations for Method 1, wrote an Expedited App Review request. A quick application verification request form is available at developer.apple.com/appstore/contact/appreviewteam/index.html.

And it really worked. OldStyleRacing was checked the next business day, but, unfortunately, this business day was December 29th.

A new sphere is always unknown. You can read a sea of ​​articles, ask all the friends who are doing the same, “shovel” a bunch of blogs, hoping to find at least some useful information. But any analysis and advice of even the most experienced professionals can not be compared with personal experience. For me, this project has become a kind of training. Now it remains to learn how to promote applications on the markets.

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