Hacker Monthly Special Issue: Startup Stories by Netizens Media

Author:Netizens Media
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Netizens Media
Published: 2011-05-20T23:01:29.346254+00:00

Trainyard: How to Make a Popular iPhone App

By MATT RIX

Trainyard started out as a couple of scribbles on a notepad in May of 2009. At the time, I was prototyping ideas for Flash games because I’d been doing professional Flash development for four years and so it was the only game-making technology I knew really well. I had plans to make a game and maybe make some money by putting it on Kongregate or selling it on FlashGameLicense.

One day, while sitting on the train during my daily commute, the concept for a game involving trains filled with paint came into my head. I did a bunch of paper planning and eventually coded up a quick Flash prototype nicknamed “PaintTrain.” It was awesome. I set to work making puzzles every day during my commute for the next few months, still thinking I was making a Flash game.

The Familiar

As an avid iPhone user since it first came out, I wanted to learn to develop for it, but I thought it would be way too complicated. Talk began at my work about doing some iPhone projects instead of doing all Flash work. We were given a solid week to look into iPhone development and see what we could do. I didn’t make anything substantial, but I did learn a lot and I discovered the excellent Cocos2D for iPhone framework [cocos2d-iphone.org].

After fiddling around with Cocos2D and seeing what it could do and how similar it was to Flash, I realized that I could definitely make iPhone games. I decided that PaintTrain would be my first iPhone game and I also decided, thankfully, to name it Trainyard.

Preparation

One of the key things I’ve learned is that the first project you make with any new technology will be awful, or at least full of issues and problems. I didn’t want Trainyard to be awful, so I decided to make a simpler, smaller game first.

I spent a couple weeks creating a game with an interesting tic-tac-toe-ish mechanic called “Quaddy”. It actually wasn’t that bad, but I didn’t feel comfortable releasing it as my first game. Through the process of making it, I learned a whole lot more about Cocos2D, Objective-C, and iPhone development in general. I was ready to make Trainyard.

Winter

At this point, it was October 2009. I figured I could finish the game in 3 months, using Christmas break as a final polishing time. Oh how wrong I was. It wasn’t that development was particularly slow, but that I kept adding little features and tweaking other ones. By January 1st, the core game was playable, but the menus were sketchy, the graphics needed work, and the end was still a long way off.

At Indusblue we were building our first major iPhone app, the official Olympics app for the official Canadian broadcaster of the Vancouver Olympics, CTV. It was a huge project for us, so I spent most of my time on that and really didn’t have time to dedicate towards Trainyard. The CTVOlympics app was a massive success, both for CTV and for our company, but I lost a couple months of Trainyard development time.

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