Published.
Ship shipped
#gamedevelopment
My first iOS game hit the App Store today.
Things have been slow with work over the last couple of months — as I'm sure a lot of people are finding. Usually during these periods I'll keep occupied and engaged, learning new tools and techniques or working on the house. This time I decided to take some of my own advice.
When I was teaching I was often in charge of the game production teams, with students working on a multi-semester capstone project. The students had years of developing chops and were finally able to do something that was theirs, not just another assignment.
Naturally, they would go nuts.
So while the process of concepting and brainstorming was going on, the real lesson of the course was managing scope. The realization that their grade depended upon being able to complete the task they set for themselves meant that they were responsible for designing the task to be completed.
The most successful teams reigned in their ambitions and watched for scope creep. And they were successful not because their ideas were simple, but because they would take that simple idea and really work through it. They had the time to play, test, and refine. And they finished something.
Real artists ship. (attributed to Steve Jobs)
So I decided to do just that. I took a simple idea — possibly the simplest, if not one of the oldest ideas in video game design: Asteroids. And I played with it. I tried some things out. I cut lots of those things afterwards. I settled on one little tweak, where black holes start popping up and causing increasing degrees of chaos. Absolutely not an original idea. But that's not the point.
The point is: it hit the iOS App Store today.
In about five weeks of at most a couple of hours a weekday, with no AI, I started an idea and finished it.
I'm completely not expecting this to make any money, change anyone's life, or make any sort of dent anywhere. (Have you seen the App Store? It's nonsense.)
But I learned a lot about the process of operating in the Apple development ecosystem, managing tester expectations and feedback, good commit and branch practices, and so on.
And more than that, I've empowered myself to do it again. I know the process a little better, I know what I can do in the time I have. Let's see what the next idea could be!
And yes, it will be massively multiplayer.
