My iPhone game

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Jelle Belgium. Jan 14 2021 18:47. Posts 3476

Hello sirs,

Please check out my brand new game for iPhone/iPad!

link

So yeah, I lost my mind and actually spent my time on this ridiculous idea.

When I was a kid many decades ago, some of the games I enjoyed the most were games like 'Heroes of Might & Magic II' and MTG which seemed like they wouldn't be as hard to make as other game genres.

Because of the nature of cards, I didn't need to have any animation skills to make a card game.

For example, here's my buddy Harry posing for the 'Majestic Aura' aura card in the game. I mostly used stock photography in the same way to get some 'art' for the cards. It's tough sometimes because you need to find something that's for sale and/or has explicitly abandoned its copyright claims, so you don't have an infinite choice of images to work with, but for your first game I think it's a fine option compared to pouring money into an art studio.

Next, I tried some existing games on the app store to see what I'm up against. This can be pretty disheartening because the popular games on the app store are made by actual companies (not by 1 dude in a basement), use powerful game engines like Unity to get a head start on the tech, and invest on getting great looking visuals with cool animations.

I knew that none of these I can possibly compete with - but I did notice some imperfections I thought I actually could improve.

Idea 1: screen sizing

A lot of the games I saw seemed to be designed for PC (where games can actually make money) and ported to iPhone later. Something that commonly bothered me was how tiny the assets looked on my screen, probably exacerbated by my terrible grandpa-level eyesight.

Plenty of games were 'borrowing', from the HOMM series like me, so they had 8x8 tile battle maps on the screen like in the classic games. I decided really early on that I wanted to have tiny maps.

The smallest battle maps in my game ended up having only 4x4 tiles, and the largest (which starts getting too small for the screen to my taste) are 7x7

Idea 2: complexity ramp

One leading game I tried had me start out with 4 different troop types, a hero, a city with 3 building types, and some resources to acquire even more stuff. It all looked great and pretty much like what I wanted to play, but introducing all that stuff at the same time made it feel like studying instead of playing.

On top of that, because of the complexity, they had me go through a tutorial where I didn't have any options (I just had to tap next-next-next to indicate I understood the lesson). This experience seemed to me to take away from their otherwise sweet game.

This gave me the idea to have the player start with 0 cards instead of some kind of 'beginner deck'. Even then, after asking some of my friends to test it, they commented that it became too complex too quickly, so I slowed it down even more.

Idea 3: a harsh game

So another game I really enjoyed as a kid was Diablo II. The game had a 'hardcore' mode where, if you die, you're actually dead and lose the countless hours 'invested' in your character.

Idea 4: No pansy end-boss

Another thing about Diablo II was that even though the game itself was pretty difficult, the final end-boss, you know, the one that the game was named for, was a total pansy. What the hell? I always remember feeling disappointed when contemptuously wiping the floor with him. No such nonsense in my game! The hardest fight is the boss fight.

Idea 5: Secrets

Another easy thing I could do is add secrets everywhere. This doesn't take any great programming skill, so I thought it would be a great fit for my 1-man mission. I tried to mimic the classic 1993 game 'Doom', where players get rewarded for pushing walls randomly until they discover some secret bonus.

Idea 6: Boomer references

So if you read this far, you probably noticed that nostalgia was a pretty big motivational factor for me. During the design, at one point I noticed I had the cards 'Doom' and 'Earthquake'. If I just renamed the 2nd card to 'Quake', it'd become a reference that some boomer gamers out there would appreciate.

I did, and I started renaming cards everywhere in this manner. I even had a card named 'Craft Star' at one point, but I think that was taking it a little bit too far, so I ended up cutting it

I still have a lot of things to be disappointed about.
- I don't understand anything about how networking happens, so my game is single-player only. That's really a shame, because it would probably lend itself pretty well to multiplayer.
- Because I'm all alone, the content is pretty sparse (there are only 8 levels to go through for now).
- I'm good at AI, but I had so much trouble making the basic game and it took me so much longer than I expected that I didn't end up actually making a proper AI. The computer follows some basic rules while playing and that seems to give a reasonable enough result most of the time.

And I could list a lot of other disappointments. But at the end of day, I'm stoked because I actually released a game. That's pretty crazy!

Thanks so much for reading!

0 votes

GroT	Last edit: 17/01/2021 10:06

lostaccount Canada. Jan 14 2021 21:28. Posts 6250

Cool I’ll check it out

Tian xia tai ping, Paradise on earth as in heaven

Jelle Belgium. Jan 14 2021 22:09. Posts 3476

Thanks a lot I appreciate that!

GroT

lostaccount Canada. Jan 14 2021 23:32. Posts 6250

Hehe here to repay u 4 ur guide that help me make lots of money from poker ty

Tian xia tai ping, Paradise on earth as in heaven

Jelle Belgium. Jan 15 2021 01:43. Posts 3476

lmao ty sir

GroT

hiems United States. Jan 15 2021 01:44. Posts 2979

Why are you wearing tshirt/shorts the size of your entire body in your profile pic lol. How do you know all this programming/ai stuff but cannot pick out basic t-shirt size.

I beat Loco!!! [img]https://i.imgur.com/wkwWj2d.png[/img]

Last edit: 15/01/2021 01:49

Jelle Belgium. Jan 15 2021 03:31. Posts 3476

LOL I forgot I had a profile pic. I just never had a real bro like u who gave it to me straight. You can imagine how I did with the ladies... FML

GroT

hiems United States. Jan 15 2021 08:25. Posts 2979

Haha

I beat Loco!!! [img]https://i.imgur.com/wkwWj2d.png[/img]

tapatapaz Brasil. Jan 15 2021 16:30. Posts 1279

That's fkn awesome man!

And what does self awareness have to do with anything you retard? srsly stfu. - baal

Jelle Belgium. Jan 15 2021 20:02. Posts 3476

thx tapatapaz <3 appreciate it

GroT

lostaccount Canada. Jan 15 2021 20:48. Posts 6250

On January 15 2021 02:31 Jelle wrote:
LOL I forgot I had a profile pic. I just never had a real bro like u who gave it to me straight. You can imagine how I did with the ladies... FML

Lol never too late to change to be a ladies man haha

Tian xia tai ping, Paradise on earth as in heaven

Shenny Canada. Jan 22 2021 04:17. Posts 1514

Hey, I've been making iOS apps for a while as a side hobby. I've learned a ton of stuff along the way. Let me know if you want to discuss anything iOS related!

Hoping to hit 10k proceeds this year. Keep it up, it takes time but you'll improve everyday.

Last edit: 22/01/2021 04:23

Jelle Belgium. Feb 02 2021 19:21. Posts 3476

On January 22 2021 03:17 Shenny wrote:
Hey, I've been making iOS apps for a while as a side hobby. I've learned a ton of stuff along the way. Let me know if you want to discuss anything iOS related!

Hoping to hit 10k proceeds this year. Keep it up, it takes time but you'll improve everyday.

wow 10k that's super impressive to me! I had like 500$ proceeds (my first year) and I basically worked fulltime so I'm blowing through my savings and ruining my life lol. But it's so much fun to be able to actually build & release something you want to make instead of droning a depleted extractor in an office

Yeah absolutely. Maybe I can follow u on twitter or github or whatever else you use for promotion?

GroT