Show HN: My first game Hexiled is #1 free word game in UK App Store | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: My first game Hexiled is #1 free word game in UK App Store

itunes.apple.com

9 pointsprawn9 comments

Back at the start of April, a friend and I started building our first ever game - a word game called Hexiled for iOS. Quentin's "regular" work is building transit apps and I run a two-man web development business.

We soft launched about a week ago and got a little bump from Apple yesterday. The game is free and ad-supported but with an IAP to remove the ads and get a few bonus features.

I woke up this morning and we're #1 in the UK for free word games, #2 in Australia and #4 in the US. There are hundreds of new games being started every minute. It's been a pretty exciting process so far.

I'll be online for a while if anyone has questions. We have a series of blog posts in progress about the experience too - more on that later.

Congrats on the release. Will check the game out.

Curious, what type of numbers you were seeing (downloads and play counts) before getting a bump from Apple?

Pre-bump was mostly pushed through Twitter and a few friends sharing it socially. I wasn't unhappy with the numbers considering it was a soft launch by fresh developers but knew we needed to hit review sites and more to get traction.

After that first week, our paid upgrades were around 8-10% of installs - family, friends, clients, etc.

We tripled our first week's install figure within the first hour or so after Apple put us in the Best New Games list of 100+ countries. Currently relying on Analytics' figures as iTunes' numbers lag, but it looks like about 2% are using the IAP to upgrade.

We're currently seeing 2-3 games started every second though obviously the figure rises and falls depending on time of day in major markets.

Thanks. It's good to compare vs our pay-to-play app. We've been getting consistent downloads and plays and broke into the top 50/100s in some countries over the past week.

Hoping for an Apple bump as well.

I'm interested to see what effect having gameplay videos in the App Store come iOS 8 has. I suspect good pay-to-play games will see an overall boost.

Congratulations. Looking forward to the blog posts too. What was the learning curve like starting work on a game with your respective backgrounds?

Not to add to the learning curve but if you have any plans for an Android version I'd be interested in one! I love word games but have no iDevices.

I did concept/design which I felt was largely commonsense, though we made mistakes that we could avoid next time. I think we underestimated on-boarding and how many people would ignore our tutorial. I'll get Quentin to answer the technical side.

Thanks! I've been programming iOS for about 5 years and Android for about 3, so the learning curve has primarily been with learning SpriteKit and general game concepts.

Getting used to a lot of custom drawing, animations, juicing, and trying to choreograph various scene transitions (and trying to time data processing and scene loading to work seamlessly).

One of the toughest things (that I'm still gradually improving on) is reducing glitches (drops in frame rate, for instance) during game play. Mainly an issue only on older devices (iPad 2, iPhone 4, 4S)

Definitely interested in making an Android version, but everything would need to be rewritten due to it being written in SpriteKit. A lot of resources can be reused though so it would take far less time.

Why did you decide to use SpriteKit rather than a cross-platform framework which would've made it easier to target both iOS and Android?

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