Show HN: Balls – Game I’ve made while I was learning Swift

http://gameofballs.co/

by ivanpashenko • 12 years ago

163 64 12 years ago

gameofballs.co

intruder• 12 years ago

Very nice, congratulations on releasing it.

Is it open source?

ts95• 12 years ago

Please say yes OP

kalms• 12 years ago

Seconded! Would love a chance to peak behind the curtains on this one.

ivanpashenko10• 12 years ago

Not yet. Probably, I should think about it.

jobvandervoort• 12 years ago

Looks 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• 12 years ago

Interesting. 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). :)

kolinko2• 12 years ago

there are other options than sensortower - like AppCodes.com. while we're not as polished, we offer a totally different approach to the process.

ivanpashenko10• 12 years ago

Yes, you are right. Somehow did not think about it in advance. I'm wondering how this could be solved.

steedsofwar• 12 years 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.

kolinko2• 12 years ago

yeah, 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.

marc4• 12 years ago

Interesting 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• 12 years ago

There'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.

cpwright• 12 years ago

Why 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.

calvin_c3• 12 years ago

I use iTunes as my primary media collection, between iTunes Radio, Movies and TV I buy or rent, and even drop in videos from other sources so that I can AirPlay to my AppleTV. I don't sync my iPhone, but I use Automatic Downloading for music and videos, which is very convenient. This works because I can listen to those songs or watch those movies on my Mac or my iOS devices, so it's worthwhile to have it in my library. That is not the case with iOS apps, which take up space on my SSD and offer no functionality. So yeah, I usually resort to texting myself links to Apps to avoid downloading them from iTunes.

pimlottc2• 12 years ago

I run it on my phone, why wouldn't I install via my phone?

nsxwolf2• 12 years ago

Wouldn't you think typing the exact name of the app should show you that app first?

It seems pretty basic. When I type the exact name of a product on Amazon, I expect it to come up right away. And it does!

afoot• 12 years ago

Very nice - had the same issues finding the app but it's the second result under 'Filedrop Ltd'.

muxxa• 12 years ago

Well 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

ivanpashenko10• 12 years ago

Nice 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• 12 years ago

Balls reminds me of Tetrisphere for Nintendo 64. Neat.

dimman• 12 years ago

I'm seeing half the phone at the top of the page in Firefox 33.0.1 :/

ivanpashenko10• 12 years ago

Fixed! Thanks!

axx• 12 years ago

Wow, 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.

ivanpashenko10• 12 years ago

Thanks!

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?

newtquestgames2• 12 years ago

Possibly 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.

newtquestgames2• 12 years ago

Also check for 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.

ivanpashenko10• 12 years ago

I wrote a story about the process: https://medium.com/@ivanpashenko/how-one-designer-was-learni...

tylermac1• 12 years ago

This 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.

ivanpashenko10• 12 years ago

Haha, nice! :) Thanks!

0942v8653• 12 years ago

Also see 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• 12 years ago

Balls 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.

ivanpashenko10• 12 years ago

I will add turn off button in the next update. Thanks!

derptacos• 12 years ago

Really interested in the resources used to learn Swift?

melling• 12 years ago

I'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

I think this is probably the best place to start.

http://www.raywenderlich.com

pmcpinto• 12 years ago

Thanks a lot for this sources

Zaheer2• 12 years ago

I made a site just for this :)

http://www.LearnSwift.tips

shubhamjain• 12 years ago

Stuff 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• 12 years ago

Very 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-...

jnardiello• 12 years ago

You should definitely price it at 0,99

ivanpashenko10• 12 years ago

I think I will do it at some point :)

leviathan• 12 years ago

If 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• 12 years ago

Really great presentation.

dimillian• 12 years ago

Technical 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.

ivanpashenko10• 12 years ago

I used SpriteKit.

billyhoffman• 12 years ago

Nice visual demonstration on the website. I'm going to guess gameofballs.com was already registered, and that it is not an iOS game...

ergl2• 12 years ago

Any specific reason why it's iOS 8+ only? I wanted to try the performance on older devices

AlexeyBrin• 12 years ago

Because of Swift I suppose.

ergl2• 12 years ago

You can deploy Swift apps to iOS7 and Mavericks [1]

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/q/24001778

goshx• 12 years ago

That'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• 12 years ago

Would you recommend any course/site/tutorials/resources etc. for learning Swift?

P.S. Nice game!

Zaheer2• 12 years ago

http://www.LearnSwift.tips

Disclosure: My site

Pinn2• 12 years ago

Are there any ads? It is unusual for a game to be on the App Store without monetization.

pimlottc2• 12 years ago

Looks 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• 12 years ago

Pretty fun, any chance of open sourcing it? Might be a good way for early Swift devs to get a foray into game development.

Show HN: Balls – Game I’ve made while I was learning Swift

Related Stories