The iPhone Game That Got Me Into Building

I’m a little late to this, but this last World Cup brought back a nice memory. Back in 2010, a couple of months before the World Cup, I started working on an iPhone game. Not long before that, I got into iOS development. Back then, there were promises out there about developers waking up rich after publishing a calculator or toy app. I learned Objective-C from the Apple docs, bought a pretty expensive Mac mini, and started experimenting. I tried a to-do app, but didn’t like it; tried a drums game, but neither made my own bar. All from the simulator, because I didn’t have an iPhone at the time.

Eventually an idea popped out. A few Google searches later, I realized no one had ever done that. When I was a kid, I had this board-ish soccer game: a field with fixed pins representing players. You would “kick” the metal ball with your finger toward the opponent’s goal. Easy. Simple. Fun.

I was never into game making. But I was excited about the learning opportunity. If I’m honest, I liked the idea of making some money, but I didn’t even do the math!

I spent my evenings and late nights making it. I learned what a game engine was when I found out it was hard to implement a game using the iOS frameworks — Cocos2D for the win. I understood the game loop, sprites, animations, memory management, and whatnot. Then I realized physics was not easy! Box2D was the solution, but not easy to understand. I learned about sounds, music, branding, domains, video-making.

A few weeks later, it worked! With animations, collisions, proper physics. But damn, it was ugly. I learned that making it look right required a very specific set of skills. I was lucky to find this amazing designer (miss you, Carlos), who took the crazy idea to the next level: a better visual identity, proper menus, reflections, rounded corners, everything that would make it shine. And shining it was!

I shipped it during the first week of the World Cup, on a Thursday. $1.99 on the App Store. I had no idea you could check the sales numbers, which was great, because I would have spent the weekend looking. On the following Monday, I was shocked to see 100 users had bought the game! I was getting rich!

Then I got an email from a blogger (remember them?) asking to review it in exchange for a bunch of promo codes — I didn’t even know what they were. I figured it out and sent them over. Then another blogger, then another. Those 100 users became 150, then 200, then 300. Then 300 per day.

Until Brazil was knocked out. Sales also dropped to less than 10 per day. We’re pretty into soccer, you know.

I didn’t get rich, but I was finally able to get my own iPhone, an iPad, and start trying something else. From there, Flip Studio was born, but that’s another story.