How I made a nice game

Here is the little story about the app Travel Trivia:

Idea:

Actually, I wanted to test a new feature of a game engine (a software library) to conveniently download data from a server. So, I programmed a quiz that downloads the image of the next question in the background. As the app grew, I searched for a game idea that didn’t exist in the app store. My lovely wife had the idea of creating culture questions for each country!

Code:

I took half a year between two jobs to work on the programming. As a professional game programmer, this was a smooth and fun task. When adding platform services like in-app purchases, advertisements, achievements, leaderboards, and so on, Google released a new version of their code — but it contained errors. The old version was no longer supported, so I had extra work to fix it.

Graphics:

A more — let’s say, well-hidden — talent of mine is creating graphics. I bought UI and character textures and added the characters as sprite animations, which worked well. The characters reacted humorously depending on whether the answer was correct. That is, until I tested it for the first time without my fast Wi-Fi signal. Would you like to wait half a minute for each question? No. So, sadly, I dropped the animations, and now it loads lightning-fast.

Questions:

The most common question I get is where all these questions come from. Honestly, I should have asked myself this before starting the project because it takes me a full day to write the questions for each country. The quiz databases I found online were disorganized, filled with unsuitable questions — mostly dull and limited to geography. So, I assembled the questions myself by watching documentaries, browsing fun-fact websites, and researching culture, gestures, habits, official holidays, superstitions, and more. It was actually a lot of fun.

After that, I added an explanation text, a character, and two pictures (with proper copyright) for nearly every question, which also took a long time. In fact, most of this work happened during hundreds of train rides to and from work!

Once all that was done, I added text encryption to prevent theft.

Localization:

I wrote a ton of questions and encountered an unexpected problem: Google Sheets has a limit of 1,000,000 cells per document. Yes, a million! I had to reorganize the text imports. Luckily, I used automatic translation. Hiring human translators for 20 languages would have cost €100,000 — way too much for a hobby project. Here I am in a dilemma, because some users give a bad rating because “their” language is missing, others because “their” language is only machine translated. I spent some weeks translating German to English. 

Beta Test:

Besides family, it was surprisingly hard to find testers. Turns out, my friends weren’t interested in a quiz game at all. I noticed that the average question was answered correctly only 30% of the time, instead of my estimated 70%, so I had to add even more questions to match my intended gameplay experience. 

I also added a setting to exclude the hardest questions. 

Release:

The days when you could set up and upload an app to the Google Play Store in one day are over. It took me several days just to study all the new policies and settings. Now, you first release the app to friends and family, then to a limited audience, then to open beta, and finally, it becomes available to everyone.

The most difficult tasks in app development are: What is the app about? What is the name of the app? Is it ready and can it be published now? Before release, after marketing started, I had to rename the app several times because apps with the same name were published. In the first three months after my release, several apps were published with the same name, which I find quite inconsiderate. Renaming the app is about one week of work in total. If you're wondering about the long, strange app names in the stores, the point here is to include as many good keywords as possible.

Please play the app and rate and review it in the store! That encourages me a lot.

Have fun!

Chris

This text also is published on www.weltraumerei.com