From Idea to App Store: My Adventure in App Development (2012) | Hacker News Reader

From Idea to App Store: My Adventure in App Development (2012)

yeahus.net

62 pointsnapolux25 comments

Didn't expect to see this pop up again! I'm Adam, the guy that wrote that. Happy to answer any questions anyone has.

Since writing that I've gone full time making games and I'm just finishing up the follow-up game, 'Pumped BMX 2'. You can see some clips on my instagram account: http://instagram.com/pumpedbmx

Not a question just a thankyou. An interesting read, im in japan atm teaching english while building my first game too haha. Currently in one of those sumps you mentioned, reading your article in the train though reminded me to break the parts im stuck at down more and get off my arse!

That's awesome to hear, glad it helped!

Keep at it!

I'm thinking about making some apps, but one concern I have which I haven't found an answer to and was hoping to find in your post was a discussion about the legal/financial aspect of it. If I make an app, is there any way I can be liable for anything? Could someone sue me if I leaked a password? I don't want to incorporate just to make some apps for fun.

For financials, how does one report those earnings?

These are the questions I have, but I don't know which country you are based out of. If you or anyone knows how this would work (or know some online resources) for people in the USA or the NL, I would really appreciate it.

I can't really answer your question directly since I'm in UK, but I can say that once the game had some success I went straight to an accountant to form a Limited company.

That accountant now deals with the money side of things, so I can stay focused on the games (plus I'm terrible with money). That separation of concerns is, I suspect, a lot easier when there's only one person in the business!

Additionally I didn't do much in terms of legal contracts with the first game (mostly stock assets with just the character art being commissioned), but for my new game I've had a lawyer draw up contracts for any major pieces of work.

Interesting read.

Question : I see that you just created your account. What notification service do you use that tells you that your app/game is being discussed on HN or any other forum? Genuinely curious !

I'd love to say I have some awesome tool, but in reality I just check HN a lot and saw it when I sat down with my coffee this morning!

I'd forgotten my normal account password so quickly created a new one!

I use HN Watcher for HN (http://HNwatcher.com).

Bookmarked. Though I wish there was one that covered every forum that matters for an entrepreneur.

Google Alerts should get you most of the way there.

http://www.google.co.uk/alerts

Seems like it supports RSS, so you could write a script to filter as needed

I've found it unreliable at times

I use https://www.feedsapi.org/ for this

I'd really like to thank you for the article. I'm in the phase of "I have an idea for a game, how can I make it a real product" and this really helped me getting the right direction!

Thanks for specifying that you made "new car money" rather than "new house money"!

No problem! However when this last appeared on HN that was taken to mean the project was a failure, which I'd disagree with.

'New car money' doesn't mean buy a new car and nothing else - it just means I'm not living in a penthouse apartment! I've been fortunate enough to earn enough to quit my 'real' job and make games full time, which is the ideal outcome as far as I'm concerned! I'm not rich, but I'm doing what I love, so I'd count that as a resounding success. :)

You've done brilliantly with that. I've written a few apps/games myself although they're mostly a bit crap [1], and I make about £20 total a month. I think I need to spend much more time on them like you did, particularly in the graphics / UI.

Could you give a bit more information on:

- how you recruited someone to do the graphics for you, was it odesk or similar? how did you choose someone? did you pay for graphics even though you didn't use them?

- marketing. This appears to be the most critical different thing you did compared to other people with similar stories. Could you give examples of the emails you sent out? How did you decide which sites to target? How effective do you think sending out emails was compared to social media?

[1] - https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=Simply+Apped

Sure, no problem.

For the graphics I began by simple searching for 'video game 2d artist', and just browsed through portfolios. Eventually I realised that I was getting a lot of the same style of artwork, which wasn't what I was looking for, so I changed tack and started looking at 'classical' illustrator portfolios which resulted in a much more diverse set of artwork. After that I simply stumbled upon Eva Galesloot's portfolio (http://cargocollective.com/skwirrol) and knew it was an awesome fit.

For my latest game I'm working in 3D so I looked at lots of portfolios on Polycount (http://www.polycount.com/forum/).

Marketing wise, I honestly did terribly at getting any coverage on video game websites. I think my success came from targeting a very specific niche, i.e. BMXers, which led to me getting good coverage on those websites. For my next game I'll be trying again to get some traditional games coverage, but I'll be spending more effort on cycling journalists than video games journalists.

Yeah that makes sense, target the market that you're game is actually about rather than just "the game market". Makes sense when you think about it.

By the way - I'm in the UK too. If you fancy someone to do the Android version I've plenty of Android, LibGDX and Java experience :). Email is in my profile.

Thank you for this amazing read. A nice long route it seems that you have covered. Keep it up!

> That technique – splitting the desired result up into tiny, tiny pieces – gave me a lot of confidence, and was how I worked for the entirety of the project. If I was stuck on something it was normally because I was trying to solve one problem that was actually several smaller problems.

I'm regularly surprised† that many people have such a revelation by themselves when it's one of the most basic ways of forming knowledge and progressing towards understanding and solving problems:

> Le second [précepte], de diviser chacune des difficultés que j'examinerais, en autant de parcelles qu'il se pourrait, et qu'il serait requis pour les mieux résoudre.

> The second principle, to divide each problem I examine, in as much fragments as possible, and as required to best solve them.

— Descartes, Discours de la méthode, 1637

† "Aghast" would be a better term. My surprise is not so much aimed at people as at an education system that fails both at making people stand on the shoulders of giants and at making them able to reason on their own.

That's a fairly ungenerous interpretation. It's very much possible to know, on an intellectual level, that it's useful to split up a problem into its component parts so as to get a grip on it, but that doesn't mean you're actually going to do it or have formed a habit to do it. And perhaps education can help there, but actually being faced with a big problem and finding out that without approaching it step by step you're going to get nowhere, seems like a pretty good way to internalize that lesson too.

> actually being faced with a big problem and finding out that without approaching it step by step you're going to get nowhere, seems like a pretty good way to internalize that lesson too.

This is what I mean by "education", not just being made to learn by rote a seemingly random quote, but being effectively trained into leveraging its core principles.

It took me two solid afternoons of work to determine this. I just had such a mental block to the whole concept. I think I was also just used to being able to hold an entire project in my head so it was new to me to have so many large projects that most of it started to pour out of my ears. Here's an embarrassing blog post about it. http://dammitcoetzee.com/2014/05/overwhelming-task-managemen...

Education is becoming more and more results-driven. Well, at least in the UK.

Tests and standardisation don't leave much room for meaningful development. Children and young adults here are prepped to recite textbook answers to pass exams, rather than build a good understanding of things. Last-minute cramming wins out.

We don't foster concepts like autonomous learning (breaking problems down, recognising where the limits of your knowledge lie), critical thinking.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com