Interview at The Mobile Orchard Podcast

The latest podcast from Mobile Orchard covers my interview describing my experience as an indie iPhone developer and how Flower Garden was developed. I was particularly pleased when Dan Grigsby invited me to do the interview because the Mobile Orchard podcast is one of the two podcasts I listen regularly (the other one being TED Talks).

The interview topics range from high-level topics like business aspects of iPhone development, down to the nitty-gritty of how the procedural flowers were created, or how I had to use assembly language to take advantage of the vector floating point processor on the iPhone to do all the heavy lifting for matrix transforms.

Flower Garden Released!

Flower Garden was finally approved and it’s available right now! This is what I’ve been pouring my heart and soul for the last six months. You can buy it directly from the App Store.

If you like it and would like to help out, here are some of the things you can do to promote it:

Go back to iTunes and write a fair review
Grow flowers and send bouquets to your friends
Join the Flower Garden group on Facebook
Tell all your friends how great it is 🙂

Thanks everybody for all the encouragement and support along the way. I hope you enjoy playing it as much as I enjoyed creating it.

And don’t worry, this is just the beginning. I have lots of updates planned, so keep an eye out for lots of fun new features!

Flower Garden: In Review

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With all the excitement last week with GDC and the last push for Flower Garden, I completely forgot to announce that I submitted Flower Garden to Apple last Friday. It’s currently listed “In Review” and hopefully, if all goes well, will be available on the App Store either this weekend or early next week. Keeping my fingers crossed!

GDC 2009: iPhone Development: Exploring The New Frontier

Things have been so busy ever since I got back from GDC that I never got a chance to upload the slides for my GDC presentation. So here they are. You can download the Keynote file directly from here, or view it online.

The presentation went very well. The room was *completely* packed, with every seat taken and people standing along the walls. In retrospect I shouldn’t be surprised because it was the only iPhone presentation in the main GDC conference. Clearly there is a huge amount of interest in the platform. I’m already pushing to have a lot more iPhone content for next year, so you can all look forward to that.

Because it was the only iPhone presentation in the main GDC, I had to keep it very high-level and focused on the question of “what can you expect if you switch to develop games on the iPhone”? Not like I can really answer that, but at least I can share what my experience was. Hopefully next year I can really dive into some juicy tech topics.

In the meanwhile, if you’re dying for some more technical content, go check out my latest column in Game Developer Magazine dealing with multi-touch input devices with the lessons I learned from Flower Garden.

Update: Ari Braginsky recorded the audio of the session (part 1 and part 2), so if you want, you can follow along with the slides. Thanks Ari! I believe that the synced audio and slides will be available through the GDC web site for registered attendees too.

The Importance Of First Impressions

A few weeks ago, I set as my drop-dead, better-be-done-or-I-kill-myself date for Flower Garden to be March 20th. The date getting closer allowed me to focus and put a huge, hard effort. Since I got back from 360iDev, I’ve been working between 18 and 20 hours per day. Yes, that’s pretty crazy, but it actually didn’t feel like a strain because a) I love doing this and b) I can do it from the comfort of my own home. But that’s the topic for another post.

The point is that as March 20th approached, I was slaying bugs left and right. Flower Garden went through two rounds of beta testing and it had some great feedback. All the crash bugs and top priority tasks were done and taken care of a few days before the deadline. Things were looking good for a submission to Apple on the expected date! Yay!

Then, with just a day to go, I decided to step back a second. Something had been nagging at me for a bit and I had to be honest with myself. Yes, all the crashing bugs and major features were taken care of. But how come my issue tracking system still had 50 entries in it marked as “Final release”? It wasn’t a big deal. Those were all marked as “low priority” or “trivial”. And that’s the great thing about the iPhone, I can submit the application and then start pushing out updates as I get to the little stuff. Right? Right?

This wasn’t a case of taking Old Yeller behind the shed. The app was looking good. Really good. And it wasn’t just a puppy, but a fully grown, beautiful app. It’s just that it was a bit… slow and rough around the edges.

This is were things got really tough for me. On one hand, I was ready to ship this baby. I have been working on it for almost six months (where did time go??) and a lot of people were loving it. But when I allowed myself to give it one hard look, I realized that the experience I was hoping for wasn’t there. Yes, the functionality was there, but not the experience. With a tool that gets a job done, maybe that’s not a huge deal. But Flower Garden is all about the experience.

I tried to rationalize it by thinking how I could get all those little, low priority things done in an update right away: Improving the performance of the rendering, making the transitions more responsive, adding those subtle animations and sounds, making load times shorter… In short, it was missing the key ingredient to a successful experience: polish. I could always add that polish later, but what about all the people who bought it right away? What kind of impression were they going to get? In a saturated market like the iPhone App Store, and especially with a title aimed at a casual audience, first impressions are everything. If people don’t fall in love with your product right away, you might not get a second chance.

So it was with a very heavy heart that I decided to slip my target date. I really needed one more week to get to the point that Flower Garden could be the experience I had envisioned. And of course, to make it twice as hard, this coming week it’s GDC, so that means that the release date is pushed out two weeks.

Coming from the console world, where updating your game is a rare opportunity and you better get everything right for the big release,I was really counting on releasing frequent updates. Does it mean that updates are useless in the App Store? That we shouldn’t take advantage of them? Not at all. I realized that I was looking at them the wrong way. Updates are supposed to provide bug fixes and new functionality. They are not a crutch for sloppy development and an excuse to release products before they’re ready.

Now I have regrouped. Reassessed where I’m at, and prepared the final plan of attack. If all goes well, I will be submitting Flower Garden to the App Store the last week of Mark/beginning of April. When exactly? When it’s ready. Lesson learned.