4. Yes, You Need Testers!
Toward the end of wrapping up the game, my wife and I were pretty happy with the result, to the point where we started saying stuff like “Meh, we don’t need testers, our game is awesome, what could possibly go wrong?!”
Little did we know.
Luckily we enlisted the help of some friends and family (including my three awesome cousins Drew, Blair, and Ry) with wide age ranges and skill levels, and had them try out the game. And they discovered bugs – lots of them – that would have been embarassing to have shipped with!
Not only that, but they gave us a lot of great ideas too!
So lesson learned – no matter how good you think your app/game is, get some testers. You won’t regret it! :]
5. The Last 10% Is The Hardest
Back before I started on this game, I remember a friend of mine telling me how with the game he was working on, the last 10% was the hardest.
He was definitely right about that!
I found estimating the amount of time it would take to make Math Ninja extremely difficult. I feel like I’m pretty good at estimating how long it will take me to make applications, but for games it’s a completely different story.
I think the difficulty resides in the fact that a game is never really done. There’s always one more feature you could add, one more level you could include, or one more visual effect you could have to make things that much better.
So how do you know how long you’ll need to get it done? To me, that is an open question. I honestly had no idea, so just worked on it until I was happy for it, even though there are a bucket of features I could have potentially added.
But just getting to that point where it was ready to submit was definitely the hardest part. There were many times I was convinced it was “almost done”, and then found myself still working on it a week later!
Not to mention as the project dragged on, the more and more I wanted to “just be finished” and the more tired I was of working on the project. But yet it wasn’t quite ready and needed more polish, so there were many days of mentally forcing myself to finish up the remaining work to get it out the door.
So to make a game you need stamina to see it through – and you need to realize that no matter how much work you think it will be, it will probably be a lot more :]
Promo Codes!
If you’re interested in a promo code, I’ll give them out to the first 5 people to comment on this post. Just leave a comment with a valid email address and I’ll send one to you!
What Have You Learned?
Making my first iPhone game was one of the most fun and rewarding experiences I’ve ever had. I’m extremely happy with how it turned out and had such a great time developing it, and I feel like it taught me a lot of lessons along the way.
I’m really interested to hear others experiences developing games, and any useful lessons you may have learned. Please share below! :]
