The Waiting is the Hard Part
I had assumed that getting the game to run on the iPhone, or maybe debugging memory stomps would be the hardest part of releasing a game on the iPhone. Or perhaps the marketing that needed to be done, as that’s something I’m new to. But what I’m realising is that waiting may be the hard part.
I submitted to Apple on Friday afternoon (then pulled my app and resubmitted with a bug fix on Saturday morning). Basically, 4 days into the wait and I’m going crazy. I’m not sleeping well, and it’s pretty much all I think about. I’ve even started reloading the iTunes Connect page hoping for some glimpse into the process that’s going on in some secret underground testing facility in the middle of the Arizona desert, no doubt…even though I know it won’t actually tell me anything new.
I’m supposed to be working on marketing stuff and my 360|iDev presentation, but I’ve been too nervous. Ok, that’s not entirely true—I did write up a press release that’s ready to go out as soon as Dapple is released—but I haven’t been able to do much else, marketing-wise.
So yesterday I decided to give myself a task that would distract me, and I decided to install a forum system on the site. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for quite some time, but I just never had the time to figure out how to set it up. You’ll notice that the navigation bar at the top of the screen now has a link to the forums. I didn’t have the week or two I’d need to fully skin it to look like the rest of the site, but it’s good enough for now. I really wanted the forums in place by the time the game launched so that players would have some place to come and talk about their experiences with it.
I decided to use phpBB, as it seems like the most commonly used forum system out there and it had a sophisticated installation process. It was incredibly easy to set up (given the complexity of the system that was installed). It took me most of the day, but I managed to get it running with a rough re-skin in about 6 hours.
Today I am really going to work on my 360|iDev talk. I’m not too concerned about that, though, as I really enjoy public speaking and 3 weeks should be more than enough to prepare a good talk and rehearse it.
Oh, one final thing: my father sent me a link to a talk that Will Wright and Brian Eno did together on generative systems. It’s about an hour and 40 minutes long, and there’s 20-30 minutes in the middle where Will Wright demos Spore (it was done before Spore was released) that isn’t that interesting, but the rest is absolutely fascinating. If you’re at all interested in game design, and especially simulation game design, you have to listen to it. I found it inspirational. After listening to it I immediately wanted to write about 10 new games.
Note: this links directly to an MP3 file, as this was pulled from a podcast XML file:
Owen