qzervaas

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331.
by qzervaas 12y ago
I had this happen with my own submission yesterday[1], which wasn't a Show HN. Was sitting at #5 for a few hours, then suddenly dropped to page 2. It was all healthy discussion, not a flame war. Actually would've been better serve
332.
by qzervaas 12y ago
How big is the RSS reader market? If you could sell your app to every single person who subscribes to RSS feeds that also uses an iPhone, how many sales is that? My hunch is it's not a huge market, comparatively speaking. I sell public
333.
by qzervaas 12y ago
Surely the fact that he's competing against a ton of excellent free apps is an observation about the app market? (That is, how do you compete against free apps that have different financial motivations) Disclaimer: I also sell paid up-
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What Makes A Successful App Store Name?(stuartkhall.com)
13 points by qzervaas 12y ago|1 comments
335.
by 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. Th
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by 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
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Watching TV in Australia: The Australian Delay Under The Microscope(reckoner.com.au)
1 points by qzervaas 12y ago|0 comments
338.
by 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.
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by 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
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by 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 r
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by qzervaas 12y ago
Agreed on the first point. I'm glad they removed it. But we had so few tools at our disposal, and the reviews can mean so much. I'm the same though, completely averse when it comes to looking at reviews, good and bad. I hate it. Y
342.
by qzervaas 12y ago
All options are being considered. I like that idea in theory but it just adds to the complexity: - More technical debt - More points of failure - Need to host the data somewhere (plus pay for it... the App Store is basically a free CDN) Off
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by 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 Hex
344.
by 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
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by 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.
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by 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 ;)
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by 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:/&#x
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by qzervaas 12y ago
I can't find it either. I think I could reword this general topic to: "A lot more people from non-English first language countries are using our game, holy crap, we need more languages" ;)
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by 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 momen
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by qzervaas 12y ago
There is a specific field on the App Store listing that says: "Language: English" I don't think it's a valid complaint, but it's a complaint nonetheless, and their complaint holds as much weight as someone complaini
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by 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.
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by 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 p
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by 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
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by 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)
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by qzervaas 12y ago
Author here, if you have any questions about the game or blog post, I'll be here for a while.
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Apple Featured My Game, Here's Why I Changed It(zervaas.com.au)
44 points by qzervaas 12y ago|52 comments
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by qzervaas 12y ago
I'm interested to see what effect having gameplay videos in the App Store come iOS 8 has. I suspect good pay-to-play games will see an overall boost.
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by qzervaas 12y ago
Thanks! I've been programming iOS for about 5 years and Android for about 3, so the learning curve has primarily been with learning SpriteKit and general game concepts. Getting used to a lot of custom drawing, animations, juicing, and
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Here We Go Again (on being an Indie dev in 2014)(rustyshelf.org)
1 points by qzervaas 12y ago|0 comments
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by qzervaas 12y ago
Mine is http://twitter.com/HendX Mainly about iOS/Android development. About to release first game so a bit about that too.

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