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Introducing Party Doodles, and the Lessons It Has to Share

Last Wednesday we released our newest game, Party Doodles. A unique picture guessing game that uses AirPlay mirroring to create a party game experience unseen before now on the App Store. It has been in the works since AirPlay mirroring was announced (yes, almost a year from concept to release).

I believe, and app reviewers (here, here, and here) seem to agree, that Party Doodles is the first of it's kind on the App Store. The tag line for the game is 'Made for iPad, designed for Apple TV' because while you can play without Apple TV, the game is really meant to be played on the Apple TV.

The easiest way to describe the game, is to compare it to Pictionary. A group of friends break into two teams, each person takes a turn drawing clues (on the iPad) while their teammates try and guess what it is (watching on the big screen TV) before time is up. If time runs out, the other team can steal the points. I added some strategy to the game by having 3 difficulty levels baked into each turn, the person doodling can pick an easy topic to win 1 point, a medium topic for 2 points, or a hard topic for 3 points. If you're behind the other team it gives you a chance to catch up, or if you're winning, a chance to get even further ahead!

The game really is a lot of fun, and I'm not just saying that cause I made it. I had people actually come over to my house and ask to play it. And it's not uncommon for players to break out into uncontrollable laughter.

Anyway, enough plugging the game, please download it and give it a try. Did I mention it's free?

On to what lessons the game has for us, as developers....

First, it's important to know that progress on the game was sometimes slow as I was working full time at a normal job when I first started working on the game. Even when I went full time indie, client projects usually take precedence and consume the majority of my time. I recently looked back at my source commits and noticed several months where I hadn't committed a single line.

A lot of things happened over the course of the development of the game. One of which was that Draw Something came out and became a massive hit. There was a definite 'Oh shit' moment at that point. But it didn't take long to come to terms with the fact that the games are significantly different. I never intended Party Doodles to have mass market appeal anyway. It's definitely for a niche market since the requirements to play properly are high; you need:

  1. an iPad
  2. an Apple TV
  3. actual friends in the same room1

The goals for Party Doodles were to create a unique experience doing something that no other app on the store was doing yet (I expect more will come along shortly), to try the freemium model out, to create a fun game that people can really enjoy playing together, and to get a little attention for the game itself since it is the first of it's kind on the App Store, not an easy feat nowadays.

I've definitely learned a lot while developing this game and plan to share a bunch of tips/tools and code over the next few blog posts. Today's tip is a short one though (since I used up so much space detailing the game in the first place).

When releasing an app with In-App purchases, make sure you test the purchase functionality with the live app from the App Store as soon as it's available. (Use a promo code to download the app after it's approved and before it's released if need be). There are some slight differences between the Production IAP system and the sandbox we can get to test with before submission. In my case, I added receipt verification as suggested by Apple (using PHP on the server, with code I'll likely share in a later post) and the verification process would fail on production requests only due to a minor difference in data sent back from Apple. That caused the first few purchases to be rejected. Not a good user experience at all! Even Apple's reviewers test the app in the sandbox and thus missed my production only bug.

Fortunately I was able to fix it fast since it was just server side code and not in-app code that needed to be changed.

Ok, lots more to come in future articles so stay tuned. In the meantime, please download the game, and like us on Facebook.

1As a french review (Google Translation) of the game pointed out, you also need a TV which they said makes my free game very expensive. I hadn't considered that someone would add the TV to the cost of my game.