4 ms·

Apple Featured My Game, Here's Why I Changed It

44 points by qzervaas 12y ago

qzervaas 12y ago
Author here, if you have any questions about the game or blog post, I'll be here for a while.
- waps 12y ago
  What tools did you use to write this game ?
  - qzervaas 12y ago
    It's all written using SpriteKit. We didn't like the standard Game Center pop-in notifications, so we designed our own - these use normal UIViews, and we use the built-in Twitter/Facebook sharing view controllers. The loading spinners, alerts / dialogs are all in SpriteKit. I'm not sure if this is optimal (I believe other developers lean on UIKit a bit more), but it all fits together nicely this way.
    - waps 12y ago
      So it does not in fact run on android ? One of the youtube movies on your linked page is titled "Hexiled Gameplay iOS & Android iPhone & iPad HD" and uploaded by "AndroidGameTech".
      - qzervaas 12y ago
        Correct, iOS only. I have no idea what their motivation was for posting the video. I simply used that as an example since it taught me a few things we hadn't encountered yet in our 2+ months of testing.
        waps 12y ago
        I am wondering what most of those game developers use for writing apps. Your app looks pretty minimalistic, and I do think it could use at least some additional decoration. But writing my own game apps, I do realize why you're not doing that when implementing games directly in things like SpriteKit. Are they using flash ? Unity ?
        prawn 12y ago
        I am a web developer/designer and certainly not a game designer or illustrator so I guess in tackling a word game, we avoided 3D models or other things we couldn't do ourselves. We abandoned our initial game concept because it was going to require more challenging artwork. The music was something we used a freelancer for, however. Hopefully if Hexiled continues to prove successful, we're in a position to get help on the visual side!
        qzervaas 12y ago
        I think Unity is pretty common. There's tools for converting cocos2d code to Android, so that one too. Being the first game I've ever made I wanted something I could jump into really quickly just to play around. Got a bit of momentum on it and kept going. I do wonder about the future of SpriteKit because of this, since having to code it two or more times is a huge effort. Apple seem to be all-in on it though, especially with SceneKit coming soon.
        aptwebapps 12y ago
        There are a ton of cross-platform frameworks, both proprietary and OS. Here are a few of the bigger ones: Marmalade, Cocos2d-x, LibGDX, Xamarin, and Unity (you can 2d with Unity now, I believe).
        CmonDev 12y ago
        In comparison to Unity, Monogame is a good option if you would really like to write a complete game in a high-level cross-platform language (C#/F#) rather than scripting pre-made chunks: http://monogame.net http://monogame.net
      - iloveshw 12y ago
        I "like" that they used the music with AudioJungle watermark
- sredmond 12y ago
  How did you iterate on the game mechanics in the early stages of development? Was the original version of the game significantly different from the final released product?
  - qzervaas 12y ago
    It's actually remarkably similar now to what it was really early on. There's a lot more refinement and polish now. Here's a video from about 2 weeks into the project (it was codenamed Fractured at that time): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BeMt9UJIPS0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BeMt9UJIPS0 One key mechanic in the game now that isn't in this video is the auto-panning after the user makes a word (there's a bunch of other stuff too, like the timing mechanism, size of tiles, size of game grid, etc.., but that's more gameplay rather than mechanics)
- aptwebapps 12y ago
  This is interesting, especially the bit about getting featured right off the bat, because I'm just getting started with mobile game development and had for long time an idea for a pretty similar game. Similar in the sense that it was a hex-tiled spelling game where you need to string together words to get somewhere. However, my partner and I are looking at a different game right now. Also, I know there are worse reviewers than this, but man ... "The vocab in this game needs a serious update, I have no idea which words to go for due to the fact that it does not have some retry basic words built in. Not toention the selection process needs a tad bit rethink. Overall it is a pretty great idea, it just needs to be fully realized. I would give it more stars but I'm a pass or fail kinda guy, and this did not pass... Not yet anyway :)"
  - qzervaas 12y ago
    Yea, it can be confronting reading reviews. There's over 250,000 words in our dictionary (that's not to say you can necessarily make all of them in the game). Most people just query "Zen" not being in there though ;)
    - aptwebapps 12y ago
      Are you using SOWPODS? I had thought to stick with TWL being somewhat of an old school Scrabble player. Also, little technical question if I may: what sort of data structure do you use for your dictionary?
      - qzervaas 12y ago
        We're using CSW12. It's stored in a single-table Sqlite database with some techniques to make word lookup really fast. I believe it could be faster still, but this is likely beyond my technical expertise. Next problem is to scale the game to multiple languages without bloating the download size of the game too much. Haven't decided what's best yet for this: either compressing the dictionaries for distribution (and decompressing on first launch), or an in-game download (this seems like so much effort though and just adds more friction)
- wgx 12y ago
  What sort of daily install numbers are you seeing?
  - qzervaas 12y ago
    I don't want to give out that kind of info just yet. We may do a debrief post in the coming weeks once we get a better idea of everything. Having said that, as noted at the top of the post, at time of writing about 600,000 games of Hexiled had been played in the 3 days since the feature started, which has totally blown us away.
- wtracy 12y ago
  Regarding the drawing delay on older devices: Is there no way to start that process concurrently while the countdown is running? It looks like you could perform 50%-75% of that work before the countdown even finishes.
  - qzervaas 12y ago
    It does start immediately when the countdown happens, it just can't do it quickly enough for the number of tiles there are. There's three modes in the game: Escape, Survive, Explore. The Explore mode uses a much smaller radius and no countdown, and doesn't suffer from the same issue. Instead of thousands of tiles on the board there's hundreds. It was interesting playing with different mechanisms for drawing the tiles though. Between pre-generated letters, real-time letter drawing and everything in-between, the solution we have works well on most models of Apple devices. Some of the issues were also with how SpriteKit did certain things (such as how inefficient cloning a text node object is)
JohnTHaller 12y ago
A user being able to give a negative review for a game not supporting language X when the game, like every single app in the app store, lists exactly what languages it supports on the download page devalues legitimate reviews and is the sign of a broken app review process.
- qzervaas 12y ago
  Totally agree. Even the ability to respond as on we can on Google Play would be a massive improvement (or even up/down vote like on HN)
  - interpol_p 12y ago
    I think there is a down/up vote mechanism in iTunes ("Was this review helpful? Yes/No"). But I'm not sure if that's visible on actual devices.
    - qzervaas 12y ago
      Oh right. Very rarely do I view the App Store in iTunes. The only legitimately useful reason I have for doing so is to quickly see rankings in a specific country's store (but doing so removes all Genius & iTunes Match data, so is pretty annoying also). Before Google switched over to Wallet and allowed responses to reviews, you could get a fair bit of info about each sale (for a paid app), including often their email address. I would often email people seeking clarification when they would review "XYZ doesn't work for me" in a bid to fix it. On one hand it might seem a bit creepy, but on the other hand, they were my customer and I was provided with information about them. I never asked for a better review, just for information to improve the product. They rarely replied.
      - interpol_p 12y ago
        I think giving customer emails to app developers is plain wrong. I'd be creeped out if a developer emailed me after I reviewed his or her app. Developers shouldn't be so concerned with reviews. Reviews are for other customers, not for developers to read. I say this as a developer who has received reviews that contain misinformation about my product (lying that it's going to be pulled from the App Store, for example). I made a decision to stop reading reviews and just focus on building something I'm proud of. This has paid off for me. I also make it easy for customers to email me directly in my apps. I get a lot of good feedback this way — and I can send a response that is actually solicited.
prawn 12y ago
I'm Quentin's co-creator on Hexiled. If you're interested, we had a woefully unsuccessful Show HN the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8088223 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8088223 And note that at the end of Quentin's blog entry, there's a link to our blog series about creating the game. We've been talking to friends about the general aspects of the game so always keen to chat with other game developers and entrepreneurs about specific challenges.
SoapSticky 12y ago
From the title I inferred that you changed your game because apple featured it, as a way of implying that you didn't like the exposure. The post revealed something completely different of this.
- qzervaas 12y ago
  It's more so that the feature gave us such a huge amount of data early on in our game's lifetime that we noticed some things we needed to quickly iterate on.
dwkns 12y ago
Didn't you do any usability testing? It seems to me that most of the problems you encountered would have been caught if you had.
- qzervaas 12y ago
  We did, but there were elements that weren't tested as well as they could be. Here's an example. Referring to the "tap an empty tile to drag around" section of the post. This step was added because a lot of our testing revealed people wanted to move around the board but didn't know how. The problem was, we didn't test that tutorial step extensively enough. It's hard though, we're independent developers making our first game. We have limited time and limited budgets, so compromises need to be made, otherwise instead 3.5 months of development turns into 6 or 12 months. One mistake is we talked often with our 15-20 regular testers so most feedback was confined to regular gameplay, not on-boarding. Really need to continually bring in new people on an ongoing basis that had never seen the game before. We did this to some extent but there's always more that can be done.
- codeka 12y ago
  Usability testing is a bit of a luxury for a two-man team...
  - prawn 12y ago
    Especially when we are running our existing businesses/clients concurrently. In my case, my sole employee is overseas for four months so it was a pretty intense period juggling things. Quentin handled the lion's share with the programming side. That said, we would pay a lot more attention to the on-boarding next game. I was quite happy with our tutorial so it's frustrating we left holes and fell short. As Quentin said in another reply, one big mistake we made was that a lot of testing was with a beta group that had played the game dozens of times before the tutorial was fully fleshed out. Huge mistake! Another mistake was watching someone play it for the first time where we were in a position to coach them. We should've been silent and seen what they did. Easy to spot the issues in hindsight!
    - 12y ago
abhimir 12y ago
I am curious about the Apple process for a feature. Did you write to Apple pitching your game?
- qzervaas 12y ago
  I don't definitively know what caused it, but I did notify my local Apple dev relations team while it was pending review.
  - abhimir 12y ago
    any tips on how to get in touch with the Apple dev relations team? We generally send emails to app_store_promotion@apple.com around launches, but they don't seem to get any response.
    - qzervaas 12y ago
      Go to WWDC if you can and there's a range of people you can meet. I'm not even sure if my emails had any effect
      - abhimir 12y ago
        I do plan on going next year. I decided to skip this year as I was not sure how valuable it will be, but now I feel I was wrong about that. Good luck with continued success for this and future games.
        qzervaas 12y ago
        Definitely go if you can. I went in 2013. I wish somebody told me ahead of time how important / valuable the one-on-one sessions with Apple engineers are though. I realised though only during Day 3 and barely had any time with them. The sessions are a small part of the week (I mean, you can watch those online at any time).
joshdance 12y ago
Complaining about the review process is complaining about human nature. Is a normal user going to find you site, find your contact form, and then send a nice email to you asking for their language? No. There are things that Apple could change, that may or may not help. Adding the ability to respond to reviews might help the developer feel better. What developers need to do is make it easier for a user to give feedback, than it is for a user to leave a review. Give them a way to vent to you, and they might not vent in a review. Is this easy? No. Does it work? Yes.

44 points by qzervaas 12y ago

qzervaas 12y ago

Author here, if you have any questions about the game or blog post, I'll be here for a while.

waps 12y ago
What tools did you use to write this game ?
- qzervaas 12y ago
  It's all written using SpriteKit. We didn't like the standard Game Center pop-in notifications, so we designed our own - these use normal UIViews, and we use the built-in Twitter/Facebook sharing view controllers. The loading spinners, alerts / dialogs are all in SpriteKit. I'm not sure if this is optimal (I believe other developers lean on UIKit a bit more), but it all fits together nicely this way.
  - waps 12y ago
    So it does not in fact run on android ? One of the youtube movies on your linked page is titled "Hexiled Gameplay iOS & Android iPhone & iPad HD" and uploaded by "AndroidGameTech".
    - qzervaas 12y ago
      Correct, iOS only. I have no idea what their motivation was for posting the video. I simply used that as an example since it taught me a few things we hadn't encountered yet in our 2+ months of testing.
      - waps 12y ago
        I am wondering what most of those game developers use for writing apps. Your app looks pretty minimalistic, and I do think it could use at least some additional decoration. But writing my own game apps, I do realize why you're not doing that when implementing games directly in things like SpriteKit. Are they using flash ? Unity ?
        prawn 12y ago
        I am a web developer/designer and certainly not a game designer or illustrator so I guess in tackling a word game, we avoided 3D models or other things we couldn't do ourselves. We abandoned our initial game concept because it was going to require more challenging artwork. The music was something we used a freelancer for, however. Hopefully if Hexiled continues to prove successful, we're in a position to get help on the visual side!
        qzervaas 12y ago
        I think Unity is pretty common. There's tools for converting cocos2d code to Android, so that one too. Being the first game I've ever made I wanted something I could jump into really quickly just to play around. Got a bit of momentum on it and kept going. I do wonder about the future of SpriteKit because of this, since having to code it two or more times is a huge effort. Apple seem to be all-in on it though, especially with SceneKit coming soon.
        aptwebapps 12y ago
        There are a ton of cross-platform frameworks, both proprietary and OS. Here are a few of the bigger ones: Marmalade, Cocos2d-x, LibGDX, Xamarin, and Unity (you can 2d with Unity now, I believe).
        CmonDev 12y ago
        In comparison to Unity, Monogame is a good option if you would really like to write a complete game in a high-level cross-platform language (C#/F#) rather than scripting pre-made chunks: http://monogame.net http://monogame.net
    - iloveshw 12y ago
      I "like" that they used the music with AudioJungle watermark
sredmond 12y ago
How did you iterate on the game mechanics in the early stages of development? Was the original version of the game significantly different from the final released product?
- qzervaas 12y ago
  It's actually remarkably similar now to what it was really early on. There's a lot more refinement and polish now. Here's a video from about 2 weeks into the project (it was codenamed Fractured at that time): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BeMt9UJIPS0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BeMt9UJIPS0 One key mechanic in the game now that isn't in this video is the auto-panning after the user makes a word (there's a bunch of other stuff too, like the timing mechanism, size of tiles, size of game grid, etc.., but that's more gameplay rather than mechanics)
aptwebapps 12y ago
This is interesting, especially the bit about getting featured right off the bat, because I'm just getting started with mobile game development and had for long time an idea for a pretty similar game. Similar in the sense that it was a hex-tiled spelling game where you need to string together words to get somewhere. However, my partner and I are looking at a different game right now. Also, I know there are worse reviewers than this, but man ... "The vocab in this game needs a serious update, I have no idea which words to go for due to the fact that it does not have some retry basic words built in. Not toention the selection process needs a tad bit rethink. Overall it is a pretty great idea, it just needs to be fully realized. I would give it more stars but I'm a pass or fail kinda guy, and this did not pass... Not yet anyway :)"
- qzervaas 12y ago
  Yea, it can be confronting reading reviews. There's over 250,000 words in our dictionary (that's not to say you can necessarily make all of them in the game). Most people just query "Zen" not being in there though ;)
  - aptwebapps 12y ago
    Are you using SOWPODS? I had thought to stick with TWL being somewhat of an old school Scrabble player. Also, little technical question if I may: what sort of data structure do you use for your dictionary?
    - qzervaas 12y ago
      We're using CSW12. It's stored in a single-table Sqlite database with some techniques to make word lookup really fast. I believe it could be faster still, but this is likely beyond my technical expertise. Next problem is to scale the game to multiple languages without bloating the download size of the game too much. Haven't decided what's best yet for this: either compressing the dictionaries for distribution (and decompressing on first launch), or an in-game download (this seems like so much effort though and just adds more friction)
wgx 12y ago
What sort of daily install numbers are you seeing?
- qzervaas 12y ago
  I don't want to give out that kind of info just yet. We may do a debrief post in the coming weeks once we get a better idea of everything. Having said that, as noted at the top of the post, at time of writing about 600,000 games of Hexiled had been played in the 3 days since the feature started, which has totally blown us away.
wtracy 12y ago
Regarding the drawing delay on older devices: Is there no way to start that process concurrently while the countdown is running? It looks like you could perform 50%-75% of that work before the countdown even finishes.
- qzervaas 12y ago
  It does start immediately when the countdown happens, it just can't do it quickly enough for the number of tiles there are. There's three modes in the game: Escape, Survive, Explore. The Explore mode uses a much smaller radius and no countdown, and doesn't suffer from the same issue. Instead of thousands of tiles on the board there's hundreds. It was interesting playing with different mechanisms for drawing the tiles though. Between pre-generated letters, real-time letter drawing and everything in-between, the solution we have works well on most models of Apple devices. Some of the issues were also with how SpriteKit did certain things (such as how inefficient cloning a text node object is)

JohnTHaller 12y ago

A user being able to give a negative review for a game not supporting language X when the game, like every single app in the app store, lists exactly what languages it supports on the download page devalues legitimate reviews and is the sign of a broken app review process.

qzervaas 12y ago
Totally agree. Even the ability to respond as on we can on Google Play would be a massive improvement (or even up/down vote like on HN)
- interpol_p 12y ago
  I think there is a down/up vote mechanism in iTunes ("Was this review helpful? Yes/No"). But I'm not sure if that's visible on actual devices.
  - qzervaas 12y ago
    Oh right. Very rarely do I view the App Store in iTunes. The only legitimately useful reason I have for doing so is to quickly see rankings in a specific country's store (but doing so removes all Genius & iTunes Match data, so is pretty annoying also). Before Google switched over to Wallet and allowed responses to reviews, you could get a fair bit of info about each sale (for a paid app), including often their email address. I would often email people seeking clarification when they would review "XYZ doesn't work for me" in a bid to fix it. On one hand it might seem a bit creepy, but on the other hand, they were my customer and I was provided with information about them. I never asked for a better review, just for information to improve the product. They rarely replied.
    - interpol_p 12y ago
      I think giving customer emails to app developers is plain wrong. I'd be creeped out if a developer emailed me after I reviewed his or her app. Developers shouldn't be so concerned with reviews. Reviews are for other customers, not for developers to read. I say this as a developer who has received reviews that contain misinformation about my product (lying that it's going to be pulled from the App Store, for example). I made a decision to stop reading reviews and just focus on building something I'm proud of. This has paid off for me. I also make it easy for customers to email me directly in my apps. I get a lot of good feedback this way — and I can send a response that is actually solicited.

prawn 12y ago

I'm Quentin's co-creator on Hexiled. If you're interested, we had a woefully unsuccessful Show HN the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8088223 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8088223 And note that at the end of Quentin's blog entry, there's a link to our blog series about creating the game. We've been talking to friends about the general aspects of the game so always keen to chat with other game developers and entrepreneurs about specific challenges.

SoapSticky 12y ago

From the title I inferred that you changed your game because apple featured it, as a way of implying that you didn't like the exposure. The post revealed something completely different of this.

qzervaas 12y ago
It's more so that the feature gave us such a huge amount of data early on in our game's lifetime that we noticed some things we needed to quickly iterate on.

dwkns 12y ago

Didn't you do any usability testing? It seems to me that most of the problems you encountered would have been caught if you had.

qzervaas 12y ago
We did, but there were elements that weren't tested as well as they could be. Here's an example. Referring to the "tap an empty tile to drag around" section of the post. This step was added because a lot of our testing revealed people wanted to move around the board but didn't know how. The problem was, we didn't test that tutorial step extensively enough. It's hard though, we're independent developers making our first game. We have limited time and limited budgets, so compromises need to be made, otherwise instead 3.5 months of development turns into 6 or 12 months. One mistake is we talked often with our 15-20 regular testers so most feedback was confined to regular gameplay, not on-boarding. Really need to continually bring in new people on an ongoing basis that had never seen the game before. We did this to some extent but there's always more that can be done.
codeka 12y ago
Usability testing is a bit of a luxury for a two-man team...
- prawn 12y ago
  Especially when we are running our existing businesses/clients concurrently. In my case, my sole employee is overseas for four months so it was a pretty intense period juggling things. Quentin handled the lion's share with the programming side. That said, we would pay a lot more attention to the on-boarding next game. I was quite happy with our tutorial so it's frustrating we left holes and fell short. As Quentin said in another reply, one big mistake we made was that a lot of testing was with a beta group that had played the game dozens of times before the tutorial was fully fleshed out. Huge mistake! Another mistake was watching someone play it for the first time where we were in a position to coach them. We should've been silent and seen what they did. Easy to spot the issues in hindsight!
  - 12y ago

abhimir 12y ago

I am curious about the Apple process for a feature. Did you write to Apple pitching your game?

qzervaas 12y ago
I don't definitively know what caused it, but I did notify my local Apple dev relations team while it was pending review.
- abhimir 12y ago
  any tips on how to get in touch with the Apple dev relations team? We generally send emails to app_store_promotion@apple.com around launches, but they don't seem to get any response.
  - qzervaas 12y ago
    Go to WWDC if you can and there's a range of people you can meet. I'm not even sure if my emails had any effect
    - abhimir 12y ago
      I do plan on going next year. I decided to skip this year as I was not sure how valuable it will be, but now I feel I was wrong about that. Good luck with continued success for this and future games.
      - qzervaas 12y ago
        Definitely go if you can. I went in 2013. I wish somebody told me ahead of time how important / valuable the one-on-one sessions with Apple engineers are though. I realised though only during Day 3 and barely had any time with them. The sessions are a small part of the week (I mean, you can watch those online at any time).

joshdance 12y ago

Complaining about the review process is complaining about human nature. Is a normal user going to find you site, find your contact form, and then send a nice email to you asking for their language? No. There are things that Apple could change, that may or may not help. Adding the ability to respond to reviews might help the developer feel better. What developers need to do is make it easier for a user to give feedback, than it is for a user to leave a review. Give them a way to vent to you, and they might not vent in a review. Is this easy? No. Does it work? Yes.