Back in November, I redeemed a freebie deal, offered here on Toucharcade, to learn how to make an iOS game. With no prior programming experience whatsoever, I spent 2 months learning from the basics with the Python language, to Objective-C development, to cloning games like Flappy Bird. Then in January I continued learning through the practice of making my own game. Working on it whenever I could, I'm now ready to release it! The price will be free, with ads that don't appear during gameplay, and a $1 IAP to remove them if you feel you've gotten your money's worth of enjoyment out of it. It's of the highscore-chasing genre, as I had to keep the gameplay simple to align with what I was capable of making for my first game. You play as a bee, which moves up and down automatically as the gameplay scrolls horizontally past you. Tap and hold the screen to pause the bee's movement as you navigate through obstacles, while collecting honeycombs to increase your score. The scoring system concept is what sets it apart, you can check it out in this new release trailer I made: Subscribe to the TouchArcade YouTube channel Thanks to everyone in this thread who helped test it! Here's a look at the title screen. In keeping with the bee theme, I thought it would be cool to make almost everything out of hexagons. It also made things a bit easier for my first time making graphics!
Congratulations, good for you man! I want to do this one day, but I can't afford a computer yet. You are a motivation for those with no programming experience, to sit down and start from scratch. Good luck!
PM'd my email info. I'd love to test it out! That's quite a remarkable feat you described! Slightly less so considering how crazy good you are at games, but still so cool. =P I'm honored you've extended the invitation.
I've spent a fair amount of time with Risky Bee, so I feel like I can leave some feedback. Matt, I'm truly amazed that you learned the coding on your own. This is better than some games from well known devs. I'm playing on iPhone 6 & iPad mini 2 with iOS 9 in case that helps. iCloud works perfectly, Game Center loads right up, and I've had no crashes on either device. I was able to lower the in-game music and play Apple Music with just the effects left on. Restore Purchase also worked. Perfect. The ads were not too intrusive, IMO, as they are only pop-ups that you can exit right out of. There is also a banner at the top when you're in between games, which I think is totally fair, especially since there's a $0.99 IAP to remove all ads. Now for the game itself... Matt explained the premise well, but you kinda have to try it for yourself to see that there is indeed some depth to this. At first it seems like a spinoff of the 'Flappy Bird' genre of high-score chasers, but there is an element of risk here. It's quite brilliant, really. Each section (or level) is 9 or 10 barriers long. The goal is to stop the automatically-moving bee from its up and down movement by touching and holding, without hitting the barriers. And that's just to survive. In order to score, you collect shiny honeycombs(?) that are between each barrier. Sometimes you have to pass one by in order to stay alive. The scoring is so cool. Each short section ends with a little finish line, and, upon passing through, you are given 2 choices: "Submit Score & Quit" and "Risk It & Keep Going". "Submit and quit" guarantees the score gets posted to the GC leaderboard. "Risking it" allows you to continue, with the bees movement speed increasing a little each time. I love it. Quitting after a successful section also saves your score, allowing you to pick up where you left off later on. I've had more than one instance where I tripled or quadrupled my score only to die on the next section because I got greedy =) Then there are the little things like the glimmer of the honeycombs, the nice soundtrack and effects, super-smooth frame rate, and even the transition screens have a nice design, the way the screen washes over from right to left and so on. The only thing I'm wondering about is replay value. We all know that high-score chasers have limitless replayability, but I think adding achievements might keep people hooked for longer. I can't think of anything else at the moment, but I hope this was a little helpful. @Matt33: Please let me know if you have any questions or want me to test anything else in particular. I'm gonna keep playing anyway to see if I can break 100
I have played it it's fun specialy for a first time game, congrats Matt for taking the plunge and good luck with your game. Matt himself is a gaming pro, I saw him on many games on Leaderboard above me ha ha.
Thanks so much for sharing all your thoughts and positive feedback, noticing the little details I put into it makes it all worth it I'm very relieved that the scoring system is being received well, I thought it was pretty cool but I wasn't sure others would feel the same. I've also been nervously checking the front page every day for 5 months hoping someone else didn't come up with it! Sounds like all the features are working as they should, awesome! Glad you guys think the ads are fair. My hesitation with adding achievements stems from experiencing frequent frustration with games not syncing them correctly, and I didn't want my game to be one of them. I will definitely look into seeing if I can do them justice though. Since the gameplay is fairly straightforward, I can only come up with 2 kinds of achievements I could implement. Let me know if you can think of anything else, or if these would satisfy (benchmarks very much open to suggestion): Get a best score of 25 Get a best score of 50 Get a best score of 75 Get a best score of 100 Finish 1 level with a score of 0 Finish 2 consecutive levels with a score of 0 Finish 3 consecutive levels with a score of 0 Finish 5 consecutive levels with a score of 0
Pretty cool for something built after a teach-yourself-coding course. I think the scoring scheme is nice and makes it feel different. The other obvious achievement for me would be to collect x consecutive hexagons, e.g. Collect 20 in a row without missing any. Like you though, I'm not convinced they're needed. The ads seem fine to me, but I'm not able to remove them. When I tap the ad removal button, I just get the Touch ID/password prompt over and over again. iOS9.3.2, iPhone 6S+. My only other piece of (hopefully constructive) criticism would be that the art style seems a bit mismatched at the moment. I love the commitment to the hexagon theme, but the two different 3D styles (of the background and at the bottom of the screen) seem odd compared to the flatness of the other assets.
I'm glad you brought that up as a suggestion. I've actually intentionally made it so that some (I've taken to calling them honeycombs) aren't possible to collect and make it to the next opening. This is so that the gameplay doesn't just revolve around reflex timing to let go as soon as you pass an obstacle. You also have to assess whether or not you can grab the honeycomb and survive, something which gets tougher as the speed increases and further solidifies the risk/reward theme. Yikes! After searching online though, I found this response to the problem which makes me feel better. Although just hoping it'll work on release is disconcerting. "It looks like TestFlight somehow does not support Touch ID purchases. I had several of my apps experiencing the same issues while being tested. However, upon release, Touch ID works fine." That's fair for sure. I did the background effect just because I thought it looked cool , and I wanted to give some illusion of depth to the ground so it resembled honey inside honeycombs. I kept the gameplay elements 2D so that their hitboxes would be explicitly clear, but I also just wasn't successful making them look good otherwise. Maybe a positive would be that they stand out from the other stuff? Hopefully it grows on people like it did for me
Yeah, I noticed that sometimes you can't get all the hexagons, but I've definitely had streaks where I've got all of them in one or two levels, so the acheivement could add more risk/reward. Hopefully the IAP thing is what you say, although it goes wrong even if I choose to enter password. Might try restarting my phone in a bit and going straight to it, seeing if it works before Touch ID is enabled. I like the 2-D foreground objects and sprites. The background thing is just an observation!
your game looks amazing ! I really want to see more screenshots and if possible a trailer for this game.
Just got a new score of 39, I really like the scoring system, it will have many devs covering it. For Achievements I would say 10 points is 10 Achievement points and 20 points is 20 Achievement points and so on it will keep players coming back.
I managed to borrow a device with touch id from a friend. I had it set to use touch id for app store purchases. When I went through the IAP process in my game, I was only prompted for the password, not using a fingerprint. And it worked successfully. This was when I was running the game on the device connected to my mac with my Xcode project, not TestFlight. So hopefully it should work like that on release. Having never used a touch id device before, is that how it normally works with IAP's? Does it just bypass touch id completely and only ask for your password?
Hey Matt, Impressive! Very complete, screen fades, you've implemented the ads / game center / store rating / restore purchases. The UI looks nice, reads well, is animated. You've got a tutorial, its all there! Nice animation on bee character, no sorting / graphical issues. Countdown when resuming paused game and also direction indicator is nice. All these small things take time and few are trivial, people don't appreciate how challenging even the smallest features can be. Its all in the details, which you have addressed! Right on! Ship this thing and then on to the next game!
