Waiting for Review

I finally finished my second game "Bubble Bob" after months of part-time development. The game is currently waiting for review in the App Store submit process. It should take about a week to get it to the store.

I started the development of the game soon after I released my first iPhone game "Marble Manager". The first game was not a success if measured in numbers of downloads. However, I learned a lot about Objectice-C and iPhone as a platform during that project. I also got my company established and got some experience in publishing stuff in App Store. The development process of Bubble Bob was a bit slowish. There was a period of time in the end of the last year when I didn't really feel like making my game. I also bought my copy of Minecraft just before it was released as beta and that took some time. Around Jan-Feb I started pushing my game a bit faster and got to the point when I could say that it will be released in the beginning of May. I would say I made it since I submitted it to the store 1.5.

I read several blogs and forum threads about publishing iPhone apps and how disappointing the numbers of downloads have been. The numbers were quite same as with my first game but I still got a bit concerned whether the second game will perform any better. I know that I've fixed several issues I had with the first one. I also have much more unique idea in the game and hopefully that will help. My graphical skills haven't really improved since the first title and unfortunately, I could not get an artist to draw the stuff for me. I managed to make some kind of animations for my character - Bob - who is supposed to act according to the player's activities. I also got four different worlds with different backgrounds and there are several other images I rendered.

The total amount of work required for this project was quite big. I needed to implement a level editor to get the levels done. I also had to create all 100 levels and test them several times. I should have been a bit more systematic with my work since I forgot how some of the levels should be played and I needed to change them a bit to get them tested. I've written down the instructions for the most complex levels now.

All in all, I'm really excited right now. I'm just waiting to get my game to the store and see how it succeeds/fails. I still need to update this page and make a Youtube video for demo purposes. I really hope this one does better than the first one!