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Comment by dreamweapon | Hacker News Reader

Finally, someone who has the guts to admit that their app wasn't built in a weekend!

Honestly and the claims seem to be getting shorter and shorter all the time. First it was "we built this in a month," then a week, and on to just a weekend.

Recently people have been saying they built the entire app in a single "hackathon" (basically one day).

If you really look at almost all of these claims they're false. Often times people would have built three similar apps and for their "new" one they just combine elements of the three and call it done.

Eh I don't know, I've been on HN for years and feel like people have stopped posting articles like this. The look-at-my-app-I-built-in-24hrs is definitely past it's heyday. The programming languages, design frameworks, and PaaS infrastructure that allowed people to start making apps quickly has been around for a very long time now (2007?).

Well, I did write my app when I was waiting for the food to cool down after I put it out of the microwave.

So you wrote yours in a singe snackathon? Congrats!

Depends on the food, there're things I've heated in the microwave that have been cooling down for the past two weeks

I've actually build the first version of Planets Multiplayer game and looks like in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fAwL1Pv48A in 2 weeks. The code was a mess and took me another 2 weeks only to refactor properly.

Now looks like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SANFF5FYYHE

Looks good. This is a Canvas/WebGL based game? What libraries did you use?

I've done a couple of apps as a hobbyist - I find they take about 6 months from idea to deployed with a couple of updates. I try and do everything myself for the interest and challenge of it.

Unfortunately, google banned the free version of my latest masterpiece yesterday. I even called it Bikinis vs Zombies rather than Strippers vs Zombies to make it less inflammatory. I designed it to be compliant with the sex and nudity guidelines but it got banned anyway. The paid version will get banned shortly I'm sure! Currently looking at other distribution routes - anyone got any suggestions?

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.neddiejam....

I'm guessing that "Whores vs Hordes" and "Bimbos versus Zimboes" would only make it worse.

Have you considered that the name is not the bulk of the problem?

Just change the art assets a little. Turn one side into nurses, and the other into infected patients, and call it "Ebola Nation". You're welcome.

Yeah I'd thought about that, but I figured it's no worse than gta - which you can get on google play. Lots of good fun ideas there, unfortunately the Christmas edition's going to have to wait

I built a game with a few other people that took... 30 weeks! We built an infographic to show progress that I'm quite proud of. (This is ~2 years old now)

https://outland-live.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/media/downlo...

Your game is awesome ! I just took part in a GAME Jam this weekend and it was my first time attempting a serious game. I had written some mock side scrollers in pygame before.

your art work looks amazingggg ! Few quick questions ... Do you have sprites in the iOS world too ? Is your player , coins and enemies all sprites ?

And one more thing is , are you blitting a scene graph ? I am having a hard time thinking about this data structure. Would love to hear you explanation.

Thank you!

The art is amazing. I can say this because I'm just the programmer. Eka did most of the art. The end of the 30 weeks image shows who worked on it and for how long.

The simple 2d sidescroller you see is surprisingly complex. The characters and obstacles are full 3d models. The animations are authored in 3dsmax and have something like 20 bones. The course environment is flat polygons with clever UV mappings to get the most out of texture sheets. The background is a flat 2d image. It's all rendered orthographically with careful depth values to make sure it layers properly.

I remember reading your story here and writing my thoughts about it: http://blog.nerdvana.gr/index.php/2013/03/humble-beginnings/

Maybe I should do a rewrite..

Agreed. Its realistic, and something that can be achieved in that time frame. People who claim to build applications in 3 days, I'm wary of them. Sure you can hack your way to an application in a couple of days, but I think it will be bug prone and not fully optimized.

Congrats to the developer and his friend. I'm inspired to create my own applications one day.

I built my first game (and native iOS app) in 6 weeks - its Sim City for tech startups and its called Hipster CEO :)

That actually sounds interesting, so I looked it up. I'm guessing this is it, yea?

http://www.hipsterceo.com/

Yup, thats the one.

I'm busy building the sequel right now - hope to have it ready for December this year.

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