10 things I taught my kids about creating an iPhone game
The adventure of pic-a-pic — the addicting game created with ❤️ by my family
As a mobile architect and strategist with over 20 years development experience, my family is highly accustomed to seeing me attached to my laptop. They have learned the “techy-lingo” and put up with years of listening to me talk about the latest technology and trends. As my four kids have grown older (the oldest being 16), I wanted them to experience first-hand what it was like building an app — all the way from conception to app store (and beyond)!
There are a lot more than ten steps involved with creating and releasing a mobile app, but I involved the kids in 10 important phases as we began the process!
1. The Idea
So pic-a-pic began as an idea a couple of years ago as my son and I began coming up with the idea for a game for mobile devices. It got the name “pic-a-pic” from “pick-a-picture”. It was going to be a game full of icons and the challenge was going to be picking the right ones.
The target audience was going to be older kids and adults. It was to have a slower and easier start but the gameplay would gradually get much more difficult with challenging levels and unusual twists.
2. The Look
We were looking for a clean, flat look for the game. Since the icons were going to be a major part of the UI, we decided on those first. It didn’t take long to decide on icons8 (icons8.com) for the icons. There really isn’t anyone even close to producing the amount of high quality icons that they do!
With the icons taken care of, next came finding an appropriate font for the game. We experimented with a few different fonts before settling on Amatic. It had just the right fun and light feel that we were looking for.
To get a general feel of the what our idea would look like, we turned to justinmind (www.justinmind.com). With this software we were able to create some basic working UI prototypes and get some immediate feedback on proposed features and functionality.
3. The Experience
We played quite a few games as a family and pulled out some of the features and qualities that we liked about each experience. We ended up going for the 80’s style experience:
- Game starts at beginning when you lose all your lives
- Retro sound effects that go along with losing lives, achievements, etc
- Leaderboard with high scores
We also added some more modern features such as haptic feedback (vibration) when tapping on an icon and a couple quick vibrations when you lose a life.
4. The Technology
We evaluated several technologies to use in building this game.
Native vs Hybrid
I didn’t have to spend any time on this decision. 6+ years of mobile app development has taught me: Friends don’t let friends release hybrid apps.
Platform Native vs Axway Titanium vs Xamarin vs NativeScript vs React Native
These are pretty much your options for creating native mobile apps.
- Creating the app in Platform Native (Objective-C and Swift) would take longer and not help at all with a future Android release.
- Having used all of these cross-platform native products in the past, I wasn’t willing to gamble my family’s time and the game’s performance to anything less than the best. Axway Titanium is the most mature product of the bunch and the one I knew would allow us to make an awesome game.
I was right! Axway Titanium made it dead-simple (and quick!) to create a native iOS mobile game using JavaScript code! In a matter of a couple hours we had an early working version of the game on our phones using their open-source mobile tools.
For back-end data, Sashido provides a very reasonably priced Parse server API to use with your app.
For delivery of the app to testers, Microsoft HockeyApp stood out as an excellent solution. It has a great free plan and it allowed us to push a LOT (100+) beta releases with release notes to all the testers. Did I mention it was all automated as well?
5. The Code
Coding was fast and furious and took up many nights and weekends! Using Axway Appcelerator’s LiveView allowed us to use our devices to rapidly see changes we had made in the code.
Most of the code inside the app was custom but we were able to take advantage of some great libraries like RESTe (by Jason Kneen) for quickly connecting to APIs. There are several other coding tips that I will probably share in a separate post.
6. The MVP (minimal viable product)
This step was, by far, the most painful step. To get the game out the door in a reasonable amount of time, we had to cut a lot of features from the initial release. We didn’t want to change the spirit of the game but we had to decide which features would go into our MVP. There are some things I really wish we could have gotten into the first release but my wife is an excellent project manager and did a super job of facilitating this! Without her, this game would probably be in a perpetual state of not-done.
7. The Tests
Once we completed a certain number of levels, we started testing it on various devices. Using HockeyApp, we could push updates to friends and family that were willing to test for us. All kinds of reports, both defects and suggestions, started flooding in and we made several changes to game play as a result. The kids learned a lot about how methodical and documented testing has to be to work properly. Communication was critical between the testers and development during this stage as an updated version of the game might be released just minutes after a previous one!
We finally got to a Release Candidate (RC) build, re-tested everything and (after a few tweaks) declared it done!
8. The Release
The day came to do the final build and publish it to the iOS App Store. We captured the necessary screenshots and my oldest daughter helped with writing the necessary descriptions. We decided to release it initially at $1.99 so there were a few more legal documents that needed to be filled out (compared to releasing a game for free). Once it was submitted, Apple took less than 24 hours to have the game live in the App store!
9. The Marketing
The kids put their word-of-mouth campaign into action and started getting their friends to try out the game. We also posted it on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook to spread the news to others. Since the kids were directly involved in whole process, they were watching sales and analytics closely to see what was working well.
10. The Updates
As I mentioned earlier, there were a lot of features that didn’t make the final cut. We have already started prioritizing which ones to put in the next few releases. Some of their ideas are: sharing on social media, more levels, special lightning round levels, individual challenges, team challenges, push notifications (for high score updates), more analytics, and more!
The Summary
All in all, the costs for this project were very low:
- Justinmind — Free
- Axway Titanium — Free (and open-source)
- Microsoft HockeyApp — Free
- Icons8 — $19/month (for unlimited access to 54,000+ icons)
- Apple Developer Account — $99/year
- Sashido — $5/month (Parse API server)
While I will continue to manage the designing, building and testing of many more enterprise and commercial mobile apps for clients, this app will hold a special place in my heart because of the opportunity to do it with my family!
I know they’ve learned a lot but I think I have learned even more! If you haven’t gotten a chance to try the game out yet, you can find it on the app store here! If you get a chance, give the app a review… my kids are watching!
