July 2023: From Learning SwiftUI to Publishing First App

I published a simple Math Game (not Mathle)

Aug 04, 2023

Hello Dear Reader,

This month, I went from learning SwiftUI to publishing a game to the App Store. More about that at the end of the issue. Let’s start with a few updates on other projects.

Reversle v2 improvements

Last month, I spent most of my time improving Reversle with additional features and bug fixes. The main change was the ability to play archived games. I limited them to the last 30 puzzles, with the option to buy the PRO option to remove them.

Until now, nobody paid for the PRO option. Ads seems the only way to keep the website online. My initial plan was to add the archive mode to MathleGame as well. But looking at the usage statistics of the new feature, I don’t think the development cost was worth it in terms of effective usage. Around 1% of the users used the archived puzzle feature. For now, I will put the plans on hold to improve MathleGame.

I don’t expect to make money with Reversle in the long run, therefore for the time being I use it as a billboard to promote some projects (some mine and some from Ed).

Learning SwiftUI

My background is backend and frontend development. Most of my projects are either done with React, Elixir, Java or Python (it doesn’t really matter which of them I use most). I would mostly not recommend doing Apps, but Ed hooked me on iOS Apps. After checking out SwiftUI, I decided to give it a try.

I got an iPhone, starting going through the SwiftUI Tutorial and porting WhatDinner to an App, it’s almost done.

At some point, I got bored with the tutorial, decided to work on a math game. This was the result:

You are given an equation and have to select the correct solution by given the first digit and then the second one. I gave it to some people to test, and the result was meh, but I got some great tips on how to improve and adapt. One of them was (by Ed) “what if you see some numbers and have to touch the correct one”. That got me thinking, and I prototyped the actual game I published on the App Store.

Math Multiplication Flash Game

I spent a total of~35 hours from creating the project to submitting to App Store. The submission process went surprisingly smooth, but creating proper screenshots and description to testing with different devices and figuring out what made sense (in terms of game logic, e.g. when to change the level, how to calculate the score) took the bulk of the 35 hours.

Here is the gameplay (sadly you don’t see me touching the solution)

The “game” is very simple: You are given an equation and a bunch of numbers. Your goal is to click the solution. More numbers appear if you are correct. In case you are wrong, a row disappears. After the second row, you have a time limit, if you don’t find the solution within the time, a row disappears as well. Once you hit a certain number of rows, you “restart” with a shorter timer.

I experimented with the number of rows and timer to find a sweet spot which worked for me. Just to keep me engaged enough and keep it challenging as well. The final app is not perfect, but I think it is a good basis to improve on. Click on the following link to download the app:

Let me know if you have any feedback on how to improve.

A few notes

Thank you

Thank you very much for reading this issue of the newsletter. As usual, don’t hesitate to contact me if you have any questions or suggestions.

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