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

http://zervaas.com.au/blog/hexiled-feature.html

by qzervaas • 12 years ago

44 47 12 years ago

zervaas.com.au

qzervaas18• 12 years ago

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

waps3• 12 years ago

What tools did you use to write this game ?

qzervaas18• 12 years 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.

sredmond• 12 years 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?

qzervaas18• 12 years 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

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)

aptwebapps4• 12 years 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 :)"

qzervaas18• 12 years 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 ;)

wgx• 12 years ago

What sort of daily install numbers are you seeing?

qzervaas18• 12 years 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• 12 years 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.

qzervaas18• 12 years 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• 12 years 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.

qzervaas18• 12 years 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_p2• 12 years 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.

baddox• 12 years ago

How would you fix this? Would you want Apple to have to approve every review? Even if they did, people could just lie about their reasons.

prawn4• 12 years ago

Having the ability to respond to a review would be helpful. (TripAdvisor allows this.)

We currently have reviews implying that our dictionary is missing basic words when in fact I think many people would think there are simply too many words that are valid in English and will surprise people.

Review replies would at least improve context even if it didn't change the ratings themselves.

CmonDev2• 12 years ago

You think that is bad? How would you like this type of Android/Windows Phone reviews: "It's a good game, would give it 5 star if it was free :)))))"?

prawn4• 12 years 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

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• 12 years 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.

qzervaas18• 12 years 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.

dwkns2• 12 years 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.

qzervaas18• 12 years 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• 12 years ago

Usability testing is a bit of a luxury for a two-man team...

prawn4• 12 years 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!

abhimir3• 12 years ago

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

qzervaas18• 12 years ago

I don't definitively know what caused it, but I did notify my local Apple dev relations team while it was pending review.

abhimir3• 12 years 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.

joshdance• 12 years 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.

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

Related Stories