Should I Even Bother Making Games for Apple Anymore?

This is something I've been fighting with in my head for the past few years. Even after I have decided, yes, fucking love it, I have massive doubts again.

@Cabel, of Panic, posted this on Mastodon the other day.

A short story. We once submitted Untitled Goose Game to the Mac App Store. It was rejected by the reviewer because they thought you couldn’t skip the credits. (?!?) We explained that you could skip the credits by holding space. It was then rejected for something else and at that point we just gave up and never bothered to resubmit. Fin

Just like most developers, I too have had my share of complete WTF rejections. I've dealt with most of them and moved on. In one case I gave up just like Panic. It just wasn't worth it. That game sits in an archive never to be looked at again. Just thinking about that review process boils my blood.

If a company like Panic has to go through this and moves on because it's just not worth it, I, like others, don't have a chance. There is a problem at Apple and by the looks of it they still don't care. And why should they?

This brings me full circle to having zero confidence in the Apple review process. Zero. And once again...

I Don't Know What To Do

I've been working to get my original games to re-imagine and re-release them back into the Apple app store. I've been having fun doing it. Swift is easy and fun.

Because of all this new doubt I'm not sure it's a good idea. I still haven't spent the $99 dev fee to publish and I am, at this moment in time, I'm kinda glad I haven't. (probably will change later ;)

This photo puzzle game I've been creating has been bringing me great joy. So much so I haven't felt this happy about creating something in a long time.

But, it's different.

If a reviewer "doesn't get it" then it's dead. If they can't figure out how to play, it's dead. If they think it's too simple, it's dead.

Sure I could port it to Windows and maybe even the Switch but I simply don't want to. It's so nice to see it on Apple TV, Mac and iOS.

There's still a lot more work to be done but I'm hesitant. Things have changed for me with some sudden unexpected life changes.

I don't want to spend my energy fighting bullshit.

Journal Entry 2023-02-17

Photo Game

Added game controller support and smoothed out the micro controller movement (Apple TV Remote) for the photo game.

Air Pod Pros have a gyroscope!? I might want to include that later on. Imagine tilting your head to control the game?

Navigation code for the game is complete. Individual "Item" and "scene" discovery is finished along with a save states. Save states will be important since it could be a long game.

One item I'm struggling with is the randomness of item placement. Not a code struggle but a game design struggle. I'd want it so that every new game is a different hunt. Otherwise once a player finds all the items and it's not randomized the game would become repetitive and easy.

Swift Games

My first reimagining of one of my old games is almost done. I'm currently debugging, play testing and updating the art.

KaiOS

As I'm updating Google analytics to V4 for the KaiOS games I'm curating the stats for the past couple years to have as a record.

KaiOS 3.0 is gaining ground in U.S. relative to 2.5.x versions but still lags behind globally (not counting India) where 2.5.x is still the dominant version.

I'll post the stats in the near future. I have no stats for India as my games are not on the Jio store.

Some KaiOS stats since Jan 1st 2023 are included here until I finish a more detailed post some time later.

Jan 1st - Feb 17th 2023

37,340 Users 37% Return – 63% new 19:31 average game play session

Top 10 Countries

  1. United States
  2. Pakistan
  3. Tanzania
  4. Uganda
  5. Mexico
  6. Ethiopia
  7. Chine
  8. Madagascar
  9. Mozambique
  10. Nigeria

Web

Migration of andradearts.com blog's domain is done and should be working correctly now.

I'm continuing to tweak the blog themes and eleventy code. I'd love to have 11ty run a php script to get data I need and then build the static page. I'm not sure if it can be done. If it can, no matter how much I google, I can't find how do it. :/

KaiOS Template Rebuilding

Had to rewrite the KaiOS template. Couple of Reasons. The GameMaker build is disappointingly larger than the Phaser builds and the latest GameMaker (2023.1.0.76) HTML5 build is broken. Although I'm not sure what version broke it since I haven't used it for months. It just won't work load in older versions of Firefox. So instead of waiting for a fix I just rebuilt it in Phaser.

I 'm so happy I did.

It took better part of the day but it's done. It was a quick turn around since I already had the framework. I just had to update the menu system with the new art and flow. Also took out a bunch of unused code that was there for KaiOS touch screen devices that never happened and optimized the rest. It's 35% smaller. I'm very happy with it.

Now I have to get updates out.

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