Building an iPhone App in (the entirely opposite of) a Nick-of-Time

A total of 14-months is what it took me to develop my first iPhone App. I went from having no idea where to start to an officially published iPhone app. I know, it's 2018 and building iPhone Apps is nothing new, but believe me when I say that it was a life-long dream of mine. I'm an Electrical Engineer so I know how to code, but I never got around to learning Objective-C while in College. It wasn't until I learned how to stretch my days longer (by facing the "daily whirlwind") that I found a way to learn how to build iPhone apps. I learned at home, after work, watching online tutorials, reading documents online, and spending part of my non-existing free time troubleshooting my test codes. I spent the first three months getting familiar with Swift (Objective-C's successor), then as I kept practicing with Swift, I started developing app-ideas with paper and pencil. By the fifth month I had an unrealistic idea of what I could code and what I wanted to build - I wanted to build a game about stacking cups (not like Tetris). Here's a picture of the original sketch of the game.

I adjusted my expectations, by removing features that did not bring any added value to the game-experience, and finally arrived to a solid idea of what I wanted to do: a color plastic-cup stacking game in which a cup that grows (the cool cup) destroys your stack of cups while keeping a smile - the goal is to collect the floating golden medals by reaching them with the top cup on your stack. I learned a lot: where to get royalty free sounds, images, and most importantly how to code the game. I also featured original art from a professional artist, under his agreement of course. It was a great experience to see how a professional artist gave the game-like feel to my bundle of code.

Here's the app's Title Screen as it was originally published. The game's title was the last thing that came-up. During one of the many conversations my professional artist colleague and I had about the game, the game's title just slipped into the conversation. It was month #8 and we had the original art, royalty free items, most of the features implemented, but it took me about 5 more months to clean-up the code, and about a month to find time to go through the release process. It was hard work and I'm glad I did it. It was an amazing feeling to receive that email from the App Store saying that the game was accepted for publication. The app was first published on 1/13/2018. You can download it using this link to the App Store, and you can see its demo video below.

In short, the most valuable aspect of this is that a fully functional, officially published iPhone App gives you a branch of code that can be leveraged for future apps (analogous to the Mandelbrot set shown above and found here). Once you get your first app, getting the second should not take as long. Of course, it depends on your know-how skills and an strategic approach, but I think with time and enough experience we all can get there. Let me know if you want to know more details about it. -Thanks for reading,