Author Topic: Any other iOS game developers?  (Read 3598 times)

NewStachian

  • Stubble
  • **
  • Posts: 216
  • Age: 40
  • Location: DC
    • VarsityFinances
Any other iOS game developers?
« on: January 24, 2014, 12:46:05 PM »
Nothing says Mustachism like a hobby turned into passive revenue! I've recently picked up programming for iOS and was wondering if anyone else out there has been developing games in their free time. I'm about 50% done with the one I'm working on now, porting it over to Sprite Kit once that dropped in September. (It's not that good, but it's my first one).

I found two cool websites/sample projects that have helped me get going.

http://www.raywenderlich.com/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0H1yn8UbUSs

Anyone else have any links or tips for new iOS developers?
« Last Edit: February 13, 2014, 08:33:53 AM by NewStachian »

NewStachian

  • Stubble
  • **
  • Posts: 216
  • Age: 40
  • Location: DC
    • VarsityFinances
Re: Any other iOS game developers?
« Reply #1 on: February 13, 2014, 08:33:36 AM »
Awesome, thanks, I'll have to check that one out.

So, I took yesterday off from work for the final push. Code sesh started at 7am and i hit 'submit' at 2am this morning. I'm super pumped... although I'm sure Apple will reject my first submission due to some minor technical issue =P

dragoncar

  • Walrus Stache
  • *******
  • Posts: 9923
  • Registered member
Re: Any other iOS game developers?
« Reply #2 on: February 13, 2014, 08:47:33 AM »
No, but it's something I'd like to do when I retire (well, probably not just iOS).  How long would you say a simple game like FlappyBird takes to program?  I have no game programming experience, just engineering programming (basically no GUI) -- is most of the framework in standard libraries?

NewStachian

  • Stubble
  • **
  • Posts: 216
  • Age: 40
  • Location: DC
    • VarsityFinances
Re: Any other iOS game developers?
« Reply #3 on: February 13, 2014, 12:46:06 PM »
I've had a good experience so far with Sprite Kit. The Ray Wenderlich link I posted at the top of this thread is a great place to start if you haven't done stuff before. Sprite Kit is easy, but limited to only iOS and OS X, so you won't be able to do Android. Although Android is a higher market share, iPhones are a much larger percentages of revenue generation.

The designer of Flappy Bird said it took him about 3 days. He appears to be more of a hardware guy and more of a software hobbyist, but he's published several games before, so I'm sure he's talented. I think it's easy to overlook the brilliant simplistic design of Flappy Bird, but he did a great job making it retro and difficult while still adding small touches that go unnoticed to many.

I'd recommend going through Ray Wenderlich's tutorials and just blindly follow his code (or download the projects and load them yourself and tinker).

For Android, you can get a plugin for Eclipse and probably other IDEs that brings in the SDK for that. It's all done in Java. Professionally, I'm a Java guy and Java is probably much easier to understand, but the Objective-C syntax for iOS isn't too bad once you get the hang of it.

Fu is exactly right that it can take a long time to perfect something and remove all the bugs before publishing. My approach was get to a minimum viable product and try to publish. It might get rejected because of that, but that's okay. I've read it is infinitely simpler to push patches than get the app published in the first place, so that was my goal.

gooki

  • Magnum Stache
  • ******
  • Posts: 2917
  • Location: NZ
    • My FIRE journal
Re: Any other iOS game developers?
« Reply #4 on: February 14, 2014, 01:30:16 AM »
I've got a couple of games I want to make. I'm a UI/UX designer who's worked on a fair few mobile apps, and if there's one thing I've learned is to avoid HTML5 if you want a great user experience.

You're better of targeting one platform, get some feedback, work through any bugs and then port to the next platform.
« Last Edit: February 14, 2014, 01:32:08 AM by gooki »

NewStachian

  • Stubble
  • **
  • Posts: 216
  • Age: 40
  • Location: DC
    • VarsityFinances
Re: Any other iOS game developers?
« Reply #5 on: February 27, 2014, 04:50:44 AM »
So, my game's been on the iTunes store for a week now and I've gotten 630 downloads. I accidentally messed up the code to display ads in my game, so unfortunately, I have no idea what kind of money it could be making. I submitted  a patch Sunday to fix this, but it looks like there's an average of 6 day wait for a new app or patch release. Doing some research, my guess would be under 10 cents a day at this point in time (I have an over/under bet with my friend at 5 cents). This is obviously not FIRE material, but any positive revenue is good I guess. I also added a lot of new content to my game last week which is showing up in patch 1 which adds a lot of replayability to my game.

That got me thinking about supplemental income in general and how it affects FIRE. The marginal increase in savings can be dramatically different from the marginal increase in income with supplemental sources. For example, if a household makes $6k a month and has expenses of $5k, they're putting $1k toward reaching FIRE (one would hope). If they get a side business and bring in another $1k a month, while that is only a ~16% increase in household revenue, it is doubling their savings rate. Obviously, this hypothetical couple might not be too mustachian to begin with and it might be easier to just trim another $1k from their budget, but I'm just trying to show the numbers here. Imagine how much they could increase their savings rate by attacking it from both angles.

I guess I'm trying to say that hobbies that have the potential to bring in small amounts of money may have a much more meaningful impact on retirement savings than is initially apparent. If you've got a hobby that you can monetize by even a small amount, without detracting from the enjoyment of that hobby, it might be worth taking a look at.

If anyone's interested, I'll keep you updated with my stats on downloads and how much my game brings in. Come on 10 cents!