Show HN: Balls – Game I’ve made while I was learning Swift

I search for 'Balls' and got many hits, most irrelevant and uninteresting.

Then I searched for the exact title of your app and got about 13k hits. None of the first 100 which was your app. I downloaded it through iTunes eventually.

That makes me wonder: how do you promote (iOS) app discovery? There are plenty of analytics startups for this, but is anyone trying to improve this process?

edit: Searched around for curated app websites / stores. There are some, but lack in depth and quality. I'm starting my own.

However, designing something like this, seems like an innate ability of very creative people. I find myself far away, imagining something alike and putting it together.

Do you use only UIKit components (like UIView with UIKitDynamics) or are you using SpriteKit/Coco2D?

I'm impressed with the quality of your app/game, I'll be even more impressed if you don't use any game related libraries.

I imagine you'd get the rotational equivalent of Tetris Syndrome after playing this for too long!

The gravity mechanism is cool and the number of colors appears to be about right.

Tweaks:

- I reached a point where the circle was almost full and then I got a lucky cascade whereby most of the circle was cleared. Unfortunately this must have levelled-me-up as the difficulty (speed and frequency of ball entry) suddenly increased and it was game over pretty soon. Maybe you could implement a limit on the maximum rate of increase of difficulty, so that it eventually reaches the same level of hardness, but at a slower rate.

- I had no inkling of what the 'special' balls did, I imagine they cause something of a cascade. Could you implement a 'slow-mo' effect when they explode, whereby the action is paused and it can become clear what the hell is going on. This would also give welcome breathing room as the action can be quite unrelenting.

- add a cascading popping, bubble wrap effect (sound + appearance) to the balls for some additional addictiveness

My only issue is that there is no option to remove the sound and haptic feedback. I know a lot of people think the sound is an important part of a game, but I probably won't play again until there is an option to turn that off.

[0]http://www.neo-geo.com/reviews/neo-reviews/bust-a-move/bust-...

How hard was it to learn Swift without much programming experience? I've had more than a little trouble figuring it out, mainly due to the cryptic error codes, but also because I just want to write Objective-C or use NSString or type @{} when I should be using String and [:] and all that.

I also think, that it's getting too hard too fast. You should tweak the "difficulty curve" a little bit :)

BUT, it's _really_ hard to find. I had to search for your company to have a chance. (German App Store) Renaming it could be a wise decision.

Is it open source?

P.S. Nice game!

tinyurl.com/colorassign