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Show HN: Balls – Game I’ve made while I was learning Swift
- intruder 12y agoVery nice, congratulations on releasing it. Is it open source?
- ts95 12y agoPlease say yes OP
- kalms 12y agoSeconded! Would love a chance to peak behind the curtains on this one.
- ivanpashenko 12y agoNot yet. Probably, I should think about it.
- jobvandervoort 12y agoLooks great. The name got me thinking about App discovery however. I search for 'Balls' and got many hits, most irrelevant and uninteresting. Then I searched for the exact title of your app and got about 13k hits. None of the first 100 which was your app. I downloaded it through iTunes eventually. That makes me wonder: how do you promote (iOS) app discovery? There are plenty of analytics startups for this, but is anyone trying to improve this process? edit: Searched around for curated app websites / stores. There are some, but lack in depth and quality. I'm starting my own.
- hdivider 12y agoInteresting. Would love to see some innovation on this, beyond just SensorTower. Too many great apps get ignored. Add me to your list (email in profile). :)
- kolinko 12y agothere are other options than sensortower - like AppCodes.com. while we're not as polished, we offer a totally different approach to the process.
- ivanpashenko 12y agoYes, you are right. Somehow did not think about it in advance. I'm wondering how this could be solved.
- steedsofwar 12y ago"The name got me thinking about App discovery however." This is exactly what came to my mind, as i added more terms to the search, to whittle down the results.
- kolinko 12y agoyeah, the search kinda sucks. for app discovery there's xyo.net and there used to be chomp.com - the latter one was bought by Apple, but it might be worth for you to review their story. now, on the developer's side there are also dedicated tools for app store seo - for finding good phrases and keywords to use for positioning, and for tracking your position. That's AppCodes.com . you might also want to check out some of my slides here: slideshare.net/kolinko . we've outlined the search basics over there.
- keesj 12y agoInteresting to see so many people having problems finding the app. What's wrong with clicking the 'App Store' button and downloading it from iTunes? You can configure your iPhone to then automatically download it. Serious question. I'm sure you all have some good reasons to not use iTunes and wanting to download it from your phone. Curious to hear what those reasons are.
- obviouslygreen 12y agoThere's nothing wrong with that for people who choose to use it that way. But it kills discoverability (well, more accurately, there is no discoverability) for people who may hear about it without being given the direct link to this particular site or the page itself and attempt to search for it, only to find... they're not really sure what.
- keesj 12y agoValid point on worth-of-mouth. Since the app is relatively new, it might take a while for it to rank. (Not sure that's how the App Store works, but can imagine the more downloads/reviews the higher it will rank for its keywords)
- freebs 12y agoExactly. If I were the author I'd come up with a more unique name.
- cpwright 12y agoWhy would I want iTunes on my computer? I installed it only after losing and finding my phone to restore the phone; and it is annoying. It always pops up music whenever I plug my phone into charge. It also did some nonsense Outlook integration. I never buy media through iTunes, I always use Amazon; so iTunes provides little, if any value on an ongoing basis.
- keesj 12y agoAh yes, if you don't use iTunes for anything else it wouldn't make sense installing it just for this.
- afoot 12y agoVery nice - had the same issues finding the app but it's the second result under 'Filedrop Ltd'.
- muxxa 12y agoWell executed, original, emergent and possibly highly addictive! I imagine you'd get the rotational equivalent of Tetris Syndrome after playing this for too long! The gravity mechanism is cool and the number of colors appears to be about right. Tweaks: - I reached a point where the circle was almost full and then I got a lucky cascade whereby most of the circle was cleared. Unfortunately this must have levelled-me-up as the difficulty (speed and frequency of ball entry) suddenly increased and it was game over pretty soon. Maybe you could implement a limit on the maximum rate of increase of difficulty, so that it eventually reaches the same level of hardness, but at a slower rate. - I had no inkling of what the 'special' balls did, I imagine they cause something of a cascade. Could you implement a 'slow-mo' effect when they explode, whereby the action is paused and it can become clear what the hell is going on. This would also give welcome breathing room as the action can be quite unrelenting. - add a cascading popping, bubble wrap effect (sound + appearance) to the balls for some additional addictiveness
- ivanpashenko 12y agoNice feedback, thanks a lot! Special balls are bombs. When you burst set of balls with a bomb it explode all balls of the same color on a stage. Slow-mo indeed could help with the explanation. I'll think about it.
- pwenzel 12y agoBalls reminds me of Tetrisphere for Nintendo 64. Neat.
- dimman 12y agoI'm seeing half the phone at the top of the page in Firefox 33.0.1 :/
- ivanpashenko 12y agoFixed! Thanks!
- axx 12y agoWow, great game! I can image this being a hit on the app store. Sometimes the rotation feels a little awkward, but with a bit more polish this could be a huge hit. I also think, that it's getting too hard too fast. You should tweak the "difficulty curve" a little bit :) BUT, it's _really_ hard to find. I had to search for your company to have a chance. (German App Store) Renaming it could be a wise decision.
- ivanpashenko 12y agoThanks! When the rotation feels awkward? I see the issue with a search in the App Store, but I have no clue why this is happening. It shows the name in search suggestions, but when I'm clicking on it, there is no my app in the results. Any idea why?
- newtquestgames 12y agoPossibly because your title contains popular keywords so your game is still in a large list. Balls Falls or Balls Blitz might do better. From what I've read so far about ASO I think it's all about individual keywords not phrases.
- newtquestgames 12y agoAlso check for blacklisted keywords : http://blog.worddata.com/app-store-optimization/discover-app-blacklisted-keywords/ http://blog.worddata.com/app-store-optimization/discover-app.... Worddata has lots of great articles about ASO. There are tools out there that show you if your chosen keywords are highly competitive and should be replaced with less popular keywords so you have a chance at showing in search results.
- ivanpashenko 12y agoI wrote a story about the process: https://medium.com/@ivanpashenko/how-one-designer-was-learning-swift-cc2d99658895 https://medium.com/@ivanpashenko/how-one-designer-was-learni...
- tylermac1 12y agoThis is totally unrelated but we have such similar handwriting that I could convince myself I wrote your sketches at the beginning. Love the game! Great job.
- ivanpashenko 12y agoHaha, nice! :) Thanks!
- 0942v8653 12y agoAlso see https://medium.com/@ivanpashenko/how-one-designer-was-learning-swift-cc2d99658895 https://medium.com/@ivanpashenko/how-one-designer-was-learni... How hard was it to learn Swift without much programming experience? I've had more than a little trouble figuring it out, mainly due to the cryptic error codes, but also because I just want to write Objective-C or use NSString or type @{} when I should be using String and [:] and all that.
- chrisBob 12y agoBalls has an interesting game play that I haven't seen before. The physics work very well. My only issue is that there is no option to remove the sound and haptic feedback. I know a lot of people think the sound is an important part of a game, but I probably won't play again until there is an option to turn that off.
- ivanpashenko 12y agoI will add turn off button in the next update. Thanks!
- derptacos 12y agoReally interested in the resources used to learn Swift?
- melling 12y agoI've collected a bunch of Swift resources on my site that might be useful if you're trying to learn. http://www.h4labs.com/dev/ios/swift.html http://www.h4labs.com/dev/ios/swift.html I think this is probably the best place to start. http://www.raywenderlich.com http://www.raywenderlich.com
- pmcpinto 12y agoThanks a lot for this sources
- Zaheer 12y agoI made a site just for this :) http://www.LearnSwift.tips http://www.LearnSwift.tips
- shubhamjain 12y agoStuff like this blows my mind - such simplicity and yet great elegance and feel. Although, as a programmer you are always surrounded by stuff which you feel is amazing and far beyond your capability but you still have an impression that you can still do the same, given you put an equivalent amount of work and passion. However, designing something like this, seems like an innate ability of very creative people. I find myself far away, imagining something alike and putting it together.
- bliti 12y agoVery nice twist on the Bust a Move[0] gameplay. It reminds me of something that the creator of flappy bird said about how he looks to develop games that can be played with one hand while waiting. The name, though, is not very good. Given that "Balls" is a generic word that is hard to search for and it can also be interpreted as inappropriate. [0]http://www.neo-geo.com/reviews/neo-reviews/bust-a-move/bust-a-move1.html http://www.neo-geo.com/reviews/neo-reviews/bust-a-move/bust-...
- jnardiello 12y agoYou should definitely price it at 0,99
- ivanpashenko 12y agoI think I will do it at some point :)
- leviathan 12y agoIf you want to, you should do it yesterday. Download rates are not the same as when you release, and you need to capitalise on that.
- artursapek 12y agoReally great presentation.
- dimillian 12y agoTechnical question here, since it's not open source. Do you use only UIKit components (like UIView with UIKitDynamics) or are you using SpriteKit/Coco2D? I'm impressed with the quality of your app/game, I'll be even more impressed if you don't use any game related libraries.
- ivanpashenko 12y agoI used SpriteKit.
- billyhoffman 12y agoNice visual demonstration on the website. I'm going to guess gameofballs.com was already registered, and that it is not an iOS game...
- ergl 12y agoAny specific reason why it's iOS 8+ only? I wanted to try the performance on older devices
- AlexeyBrin 12y agoBecause of Swift I suppose.
- ergl 12y agoYou can deploy Swift apps to iOS7 and Mavericks [1] [1]: http://stackoverflow.com/q/24001778 http://stackoverflow.com/q/24001778
- goshx 12y agoThat's very nice! I am in the process of learning it as well. When the balls "disappear", do you simply set them as alpha = 0 or actually remove them from the view?
- jhadi 12y agoWould you recommend any course/site/tutorials/resources etc. for learning Swift? P.S. Nice game!
- Zaheer 12y agohttp://www.LearnSwift.tips http://www.LearnSwift.tips Disclosure: My site
- Pinn2 12y agoAre there any ads? It is unusual for a game to be on the App Store without monetization.
- pimlottc 12y agoLooks neat but please don't forget about colorblind people. Adding additional distinguishing features like textures, patterns, borders, etc will make the colors easier to distiguish for all users. tinyurl.com/colorassign
- niix 12y agoPretty fun, any chance of open sourcing it? Might be a good way for early Swift devs to get a foray into game development.