It was my first attempt at releasing a mobile game. I consider it a success. I set a goal of completing the game and having it available on the Apple app store in 4 months, in time for GDC and my birthday. I was overcome with joy when I received approval from Apple and my game went live on the app store.
The bubble maze itself was designed by Oskar van Deventer. He is a brilliant world-renowned puzzle designer and was gracious enough to let me build a mobile version of his puzzle. It is a unique maze that is filled with water and has an air bubble trapped inside. The air bubble is what you move throughout the maze to get to the goal. Since the air bubble travels up in the water, you have to orient the maze so that the path you want to take points upwards.
Within a week my spirits were dampened. I had received word from Oskar van Deventer. There was a problem with the game. This was a serious problem because the game was live, and there was no guarantee that every user that had downloaded the game would update it, so some users would forever be stuck with a buggy game. The problem was the way the bubble moved. I had used a physics engine, and the bubble moved as I thought it should through the maze. The problem was that it was supposed to be a maze and it wasn’t. It was a different kind of puzzle, a dexterity puzzle. That wasn’t the kind of puzzle he designed.
I fixed the game to make it so the bubble moves until it hits a wall. The fix only took one day to code and test on devices, but the fix had to be approved by Apple. A couple weeks later version 1.1 came out and it was truly a bubble maze.
The next big setback came at GDC. No one was impressed with my game. GDC is full of game developers, many of whom have been doing this for decades. Here I was with my first released game ever. It was okay though, Bubble Maze 1.1 was just the start. I was already working on version 2. It had more puzzle levels, and even a level editor so you could make your own levels and save them on your device. I had tons of other game ideas and prototypes in the works as well.
Then another let down. I found out about the review of my app. There is only one review for version 1.1. It is 2 stars and ends by saying “It’s just passable at best.” I don’t know why I cared so much about the review. It was my only review, so it represented what everyone else felt about the game. I went from feeling like a success to feeling like a failure. I couldn’t work up the motivation to work on version 2 any more. Who would even want to play it? I felt like I had let down Oskar van Deventer. If any experienced developer had made his puzzle, he would have gotten the 5 stars he deserves. I felt bad for trying to take it on as my first game.
I couldn’t work up the motivation to work on any games. I went back to teaching myself programming. I even signed up for one of those code bootcamps to turn you into a software engineer. It was a waste of time. They are all focused on web development. I wanted to be a mobile game developer, I had told them that in my application. I was told to first work as a web developer. Why? I thought the program was in software engineering? I then came to realize that I was already a software engineer because I had worked on mobile games that had shipped and were being sold on app stores! I had even shipped a game on my own, thus owning the entire development process of creating and distributing a mobile game. What further proof did I need that I was indeed a mobile game developer?
To get back my love of indie game development, I started signing up for game jams and hackathons again. I also started going to tech talks and meet ups. At a tech talk I met some people who encouraged me to volunteer as a TA to help underrepresented groups in tech.
Through mentoring those more novice than myself, I have come to appreciate the skills that I have, and more importantly, my passion for game development and programming that has driven me to acquire those skills. I have started to take on native iOS development again. I am learning the new Swift programming language and I plan to release another game for the app store.
While this was going on I met up with Oskar van Deventer and had a chance to talk about Bubble Maze. He wasn’t disappointed. It was passable. As long as he was okay with Bubble Maze, I was too. I am proud of it as my first mobile game, and my games are sure to improve over time. Bubble Maze is just the beginning.
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