The first game for iOS and the first difficulties. How not to give up and bring it to release

With a car for life

Since my youth, cars are my passion. I could read car magazines for hours on end, look at photos from the latest car dealerships and car shows. I literally watched every new car passing me along the street. It was my love for cars and became fundamental when choosing my first profession. When I was still a student, I got a job as a journalist in a young automobile magazine. One year later, I was working as an editor for one of the best European automobile magazines. This was an invaluable experience. I learned how to create products, in particular weekly prints. While working in the auto press, I realized that the team should work as a whole. Each project participant is an indispensable gear in a coherent large mechanism. Only in this way, and nothing else, the output will be a quality product.

From production to product

I transferred all these principles to my company when I founded a small studio and started digital production. With the joint efforts of my team, we have developed the development of websites and mobile applications. We tried to make each new project different from the previous one. They laid out 100%, gave themselves to their favorite work. After several years of hard work and a few dozen projects, we realized that this was not enough for us. We wanted something more than helping people with their ideas, to realize someone else's potential. We felt the strength and confidence that we are ready to release our own product. We were ready to use our accumulated experience in developing digital products, to maximize our potential.

The search for the idea was not long and partly became a coincidence. We have just completed one small non-commercial project - an icon for an iOS application.
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Initially, this project we wanted to draw the attention of potential customers to our art capabilities. As a rule, non-commercial projects are stronger and more attractive than commercial ones. Most importantly, annoying customers who intervene in the process with an endless number of edits do not participate in them.


As a rule, all these edits have a negative effect on the final result. And working for yourself, you just bring your ideas to life as you see fit. This, of course, also does not always end in success, but at least self-esteem is embarrassing.

Nothing happens by chance

So, we have a beautifully crafted icon in our hands and nothing more. By a happy coincidence, a young iOS developer got a job in our studio. He had several games in his piggy bank, one of which was a one-lap race with collecting acevok. Without hesitation, we put all the components together and got the concept of an exciting game. For the week, we traced the graphics, for another week we worked physics. And it seemed that success was waiting for us, and millions of fans were already rubbing their hands in anticipation of a new hit. However, we had no idea what game development was and what else we had to do and what else we had to learn.

Scheduled deadlines for game development have naturally shifted. Because it’s quite difficult to plan those things you don’t know about: adapting to all devices from iPhone 4 to iPad Pro, setting up in-app purchases, a lot of sound file settings, connecting and setting up a cloud service for additional cars and much more.

Pitfalls and how to fit into deadlines

The graphics were easy for us. Two designers worked on the project in parallel: one was responsible for the art part of the project, the second one designed the interaction interface itself. We were inspired by the new direction and inspired by the fact that we are developing the game ourselves. Team spirit soared to the skies.



However, programming was a little more complicated. For the planned development period, we managed only half. There remained a lot of voluminous tasks, such as connecting the cloud to add new cars that were currently under development. This decision was forced, because the launch of the game wanted to have as many variations of cars.



Therefore, we made a decision that it’s time to call someone for help. And we connected an experienced iOS developer to the project for solving more complex tasks and for a general review code. It went more fun, but we still were very limited in time, because they wanted to start the game before the Christmas holidays. As many know, this year, from December 22, the entire staff of iTunes Connect went on holiday holidays. This meant that if we did not fill in the game before this date, then we can assume that we lost the festive time on the American App Store, and the activity of people at that time on the market is very large. And even more, we needed to finish work on the game 5-7 business days before the holidays. Since, according to statistics in this particular period, the period for checking applications was 5-7 working days (we relied on data from Appreviewtimes ), the deadline automatically shifted to December 15.



And we still had time. The case remained for small - to come up with a name. Competition in the racing race is very high, it was rather difficult to choose a simple name. And we decided not to chase the short title. Maybe it was our mistake, time will tell. We stopped at the capacious, but exhaustive name OldStyleRacing . When choosing a name you need to take into account all the necessary requirements for the further promotion of the game and the landing page of the game. We even sat down to make a small but spectacular landing page for our game osr.iondigi.com , since the experience of web development allowed us to do this quickly and at minimal cost.

New challenges and new solutions

It seemed to us that everything that depended on us we had already done. But that would be too easy. As usual, we got to innovate and update the rules. This is not the first case in the practice of our company, when we do not have time to deliver the project according to the old rules and regulations. We got a reject. And the essence of the redject was as follows: we use the intermediate currency in the form of coins in the game. They can be collected in the game itself, and you can go on a simple path and buy coins in the built-in store using the in-app purchase method. For this internal currency, you can buy new cars or styling your current car. So, until recently, purchases for domestic currency did not require recovery, in contrast to the usual built-in one-time purchases (non-consumable purchases). But now clause 10.6 of the App Store Review Guidelines states that now one-time purchases, even for domestic currency, need to be renewed.



We saw the following ways to solve this problem:

• Make registration of users in the game. This is the way Apple recommends us. However, registration is quite a big piece of work, but we wanted to load the game as quickly as possible. Moreover, users are not very willing to register in such applications.
• The second method is synchronization via icloud. It has become a priority for us, because it allows users to restore purchases imperceptibly and without unnecessary gestures.

For greater certainty, we clarified in the Apple Solution Center whether this method is appropriate. Each question took from 12 to 24 hours. But as I understand it, this is the standard time interval for a response from the App Store.

After confirmation, we proceeded to work. And on December 21, they poured a new build with the possibility of restoring purchases for domestic currency. Now it was necessary to make our game checked in one day. I got on Habr for help. I found a great article on the topic “Accelerate the scan of your iOS / Mac applications in iTunesConnect from week to one day” .

Made all all the recommendations for Method 1, wrote an Expedited App Review request. The form for sending a request for an accelerated application check is located at developer.apple.com/appstore/contact/appreviewteam/index.html .

And it really worked. OldStyleRacing checked the next business day, but, unfortunately, this business day was December 29th.

New sphere is always unknown. You can read a lot of articles, ask all your friends who are doing the same, “shovel” a bunch of blogs, hoping to find at least some useful information. But any analysis and advice of even the most experienced professionals can not be compared with personal experience. For me, this project has become a kind of training. Now it remains to learn how to promote applications on the markets.