phuzzle-launch
Here we go, after long time without writing. I have been thinking a lot recently, from changing apartment to move to a totally different area, from Polish and JS to Phuzzle and objective-c, from WWDC to AjaxWorld... and yes, from quitting my job to leave US for good. Well, some of those happened, some are in progress, and others might never happen and be soon close in a drawer that will never be re-opened again.
Sunday at 2 PM I received an email from Apple, saying your app is ready for sale. Yeeey, cool. What's that? After months having this small game on my phone, I decided to submit it in the App Store. Long story.. I built this game in JavaScript last Christmas, then I realized that the loading of the JS was incredibly slow on the iPhone, next step I found out I cannot submit a paid application due to Visa and IRS manner, and so I almost forgot about it. Till the last Sunday of May, where I spent the night converting the JS in Cocoa Core Graphics and I submitted the game. And that's it, after one week Apple approved my app (yeah I know, I have good contacts with the inside and I'm not hiding them). The app is called Phuzzle and it's a nice game. I'm not gonna tell you more, you gotta download it. Anyway it's free, and run on any IPhone OS and IPod Touch. Just a note on the name: the original name of the projects was IPhuzzle (which clearly reveals that I have also a version for Android called APhuzzle ready for submission, but this will deserve a different post), but bad news is that such name is already taken by another app.
The cool part: I wasn't expecting anything particular from this app. At the end, without considering the initial prototype in JS, I spent between 6 and 8 hours for the coding and the graphics (I could almost say that it took me more time for the graphics). Phuzzle had almost 2K downloads in the first 4 days. It's floating around position 90 and 95 in the top free game ranking (definetely the most difficult category), with a best result of 88th. After 4 days, it sent over than 20K request to the Ads server, and doing some math that means around 10K minutes of application running overall, equal to almost 7 days of running time (the math considers that Phuzzle refresh the banner each 30 secs, without considering that there is a request every time someone starts the app). At the end, I call this a WIN!
The end: there is no end. I don't know if this good experience will push me back to do mobile development or will incourage me to move forward and do something else. I can't say right now. The only thing for sure is that I'll keep updating everybody with the status of Phuzzle. And feel free to suggest possible enhancements. That's what I have in the pipeline so far:
- hint, showing the cell in the right place and showing the whole original picture.
- support for saving the status of a game when closing or on interruption.
- multiplayer mode (maybe only for OS 3.0).
UPDATE: by the way, I'm not good at this game, but can someone who is really playing tell me how long does it take on average to complete the puzzle? My girlfriend finished the 4 x 4 phuzzle in about 50 secs and I don't know if it's too easy or if I have to be scared.