Post-mortem of the game “Smarten up”

The head of the company Alexander Biragov told us about the project.

 Alexander Biragov

Let me first tell you a little about the game itself, so that it is clear what, in fact, it is about.

Project Description

The essence of the game is simple. The player chooses a topic in which he wants to fight for the title of the best. Then the app picks up a random opponent, or the player chooses a friend from a social network. 7 questions for 10 seconds each – and the match is over. There are 4 possible answers to each question. The winner goes to the one who has the most correct answers. Battles take place in real time.

Start of development

According to our initial estimates, the development of an online vitorina should not have taken more than a month and a half.

Despite the fact that our project group has more than 30 children’s games and business applications, this format was new for us. Therefore, the planned development time stretched almost twice and took three months.

We worked as a team of three programmers (ios, android and backend), two graphic designers, a UI specialist, and a sound designer. Plus, a project manager, an art director, a technical director, a content manager and, of course, a project manager. This is the composition of the team we worked with for the first time on this project.

Pitfalls of development

Difficulties were waiting at every step. The first is at the stage of graphic design.

Our game has a large number of topics of questions. Because of this, we made the project with the expectation that its target audience would also be as wide as possible. But in terms of design, this created certain difficulties: we needed to make an application that would be comfortable for all our users.

Trying to please everyone, we made a critical mistake. At the A/B testing stage of the project, it turned out that the game was visually overloaded. I had to make it, let’s say, more concise.

The change of graphic design and UI entailed, respectively, an increase in terms, since the game had, in fact, to make up and code again.

Another of our shortcomings can be considered the fact that we started developing only by indicating the general direction. At the initial stage, there was no approved design document describing all the elements of the game. A large number of features were approved and introduced already during development. It is clear that each of them increased the development time.

For example, during the creation of the project, we came up with a very interesting feature from the point of view of content replenishment: players can come up with questions themselves, which, after passing moderation, replenish the database of questions. But only it took a week of work.

Another difficulty for us was that in the game, in addition to http requests, we had to use a socket connection to the Internet for real-time fights.

In a socket connection, the server can send the information itself, even without a request from the client. This is necessary in order to know, for example, how the opponent answered. That is, we cannot use standard http requests in an online game.

The difficulty was that socket connections are not trivial in themselves. Moreover, it is not easy to find libraries that seem to work on both platforms (we have a cross-platform game). As a result, the implementation of sockets on the server was carried out on socket.io + node.js .

The introduction of the Facebook, VK and Twitter development tools (SDK) was also a separate headache. We had to clean a number of defects in the solutions of these grids ourselves.

There were no problems with copyright as such, but at the first stage it turned out to be quite difficult to find people who were able and willing to participate in writing questions according to the criteria we needed (speed and quality).

Monetization

Based on the experience of colleagues, we decided not to reinvent the wheel, but to make a classic free-2-play with IAP. There was a temptation to make freemium, to distribute new themes for a fee, but for ethical reasons, this option was quickly abandoned.

There are two types of in-app purchases in “Smarten Up”: “experience accelerators”, which allow you to pump the rating faster, and “the right to make mistakes”, which make it possible to answer again in case of an incorrect answer.

Approval in the App Store

So, everything was ready. Nothing foreshadowed trouble, and we already seemed to be able to breathe a sigh of relief. But it wasn’t there! The classic of the genre is the problem with the approval of the application in the AppStore. Here it is necessary to note the specifics of iTunes.connect: the application itself is considered for several hours, not weeks, but you are waiting for your turn for 5-7 working days, or even more.

Attempt number one. In the status of Waiting For Review, the application hung for more than a week, and then we received a refusal to place, motivated by the fact that there is an error in the application related to in-app purchases. As it turned out later, the refusal was caused by an error of the inspectors, but, as a result, the application was not published this time either. I had to write an official letter to Apple, explain the essence of the problem in detail, tinker with finding arguments and explain the situation.

The App Store traditionally checks applications before the first error, because attempt number two led first to an even longer wait for a verdict, and then to another failure. This time due to incorrect authorization via social networks. Authorization was to be carried out not through the built–in browser (Safari), but through the applications installed by the user – Facebook, Twitter and VK (which at that time was removed from the App Store).

We bravely endured the blow: we fixed everything and again poured it for approval. It seemed that the third time the application was viewed for an eternity. In fact, it turned out to be a little more than a week. And finally, success – we are in the App Store!

Future plans

In the future, we plan to introduce several interesting features and add topics to compete in all possible fields of knowledge, also increase the number of interesting opportunities in the game store, create team competitions.

Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.partizangames.poumnichai

iOS: https://itunes.apple.com/ru/app/viktorina-poumnicaj!/id883121675?mt=8