Submitted to Apple App Store

Okay Apple, I've dotted all my i's and crossed all my t's... and boy were there a lot of them. The worst part was when I had to get a different screenshot resolution for every single Apple device. But it's done. Now, I just get to sit and wait and cross my fingers. I keep checking my email and expecting a "what are you doing? this is totally wrong in so many ways!" email, but so far it hasn't come.

The review process takes about 7 days on average, so I'll be holding my breath until then.

iOS is nearly ready to publish!

I've gotten Social Sessions working on iOS, including the iPad! I was stoaked the first time I saw it running on an iPad because it looked great! I just had to up-res one texture so it would look better. It mostly just worked! Yay!

Now I'm on to setting up my app submission... which is a bigger task than I'd anticipated. Last night I went to upload my screenshots... only to find out how particular Apple is about their screenshots. You have to have your screenshots in exactly the dimensions of whichever particular devices you are supporting. I can't just have a single set of screenshots... I have to have a set of iPad screenshots taken from an iPad, etc. It's a little frustrating because the same is true for the promo video, and the one I created won't work at all. Boo.

Well, I'm excited to be close to submitting. I did a Unity Cloud Build of my final iOS version, but then I found out that I can't just submit that. I have to build and submit from a Mac. So hopefully I'll be able to do that tonight.

Anxious to get it on the App Store so I can really start promoting the game. I'm excited to be able to stop hearing people say "Oh you released your app? Oh well, let me know when it's on the App Store".

My Facebook Post

Just thought I'd share what I posted on my Facebook, in case anyone is interested:

2 years ago, I had an idea for a game. In order to bring that idea to life, I learned programming and game development in Unity. Last month, I formed a company, Hester Games LLC, and today I launched my first mobile game on the Google Play Store.

But this isn't really a success story. Not yet. 20,000 apps are released every single month. Most of those are "zombie apps". No, it's not an app about zombies, it's an app that almost no one has ever played. If no one spreads the word, no one will find it or play it. I've spent at least a thousand hours, and hundreds of dollars from my own wallet to make it happen. I'm not trying to toot my own horn here, but sometimes knowing how much time someone put into something helps you realize how important it might be to them that you at least give it a try.

Last year, many of you tried my game in a web browser, and I'm grateful for your participation. It was a great learning experience. The game was rough at that time, and I've spent the last year bringing it up to a better, more polished experience, so I hope you'll give it another go.

I'd love it if you'd download it and give it a try, but more importantly, share it with anyone you think might like it. The game is free to download, and offers 28 out of the 120 levels for free before asking for an upgrade, but playing it and sharing the link is honestly the most important thing right now.

Right now, it's only available for Android (phone or tablet), but I'll be sure to update when I release my iOS version, hopefully before Christmas!

Some Background On Social Sessions

Social Sessions, going live on the Google Play Store next week, and on the Apple App Store soon after that, is a simple puzzle game with a "group therapy" theme of making everyone happy amidst interconnected relationships. Each level is a group of 3 to 8 people that you try to make happy by "encouraging" or "discouraging" them one at a time. The tricky part is that each person has relationships with others in the group, and so your encouragements extend to your target's friends, and get twisted into unhappiness to your target's "enemies". It's kind of like a twisted up version of the classic game, Lights Out. However, the game has gone through several iterations and designs before ending up with what you see here.

The original idea, about 2 years ago, had the game centering around some public space (a school playground, a college quad, etc.), where everyone had relationships with everyone else. The key would be that there were some popular kids, and you were trying to get "in" with them by being nice to their friends and being mean to their enemies. Ultimately, having more than a handful of people became a nightmare to try to keep track of all those relationships while solving the puzzles!

So I scaled back the idea and went with just a few entities. In this concept phase, the game wasn't set in any particular environment, and so it was just cubes and lines. The relationships weren't completely positive or negative; instead, they were a gradient from red to green (negative to positive), and when you did a positive action to someone, you moved their color a little from red to green, and affected their relationships only as much as they had strength.

I quickly found, however, that when people played, they almost always just went click-click-click really fast until they made the entity either completely green or red, and the same was true with their relationships. So I decided to drop the gradients and just go with a straight up "happy" or "sad" or "nothing" for the entities, and "positive", "negative", or "none" for the relationships. This really simplified the game down and stripped away unnecessary clicking and calculations about how much an action would affect someone. This is around the time when the gem within the idea started to shine. The game was now just about a simple sequence of actions that led to a success. And if the relationships fell in the right layout, you could really get some twisty and interesting sequences. Now it was a good puzzle game.

The therapy theme just kind of grew out of the way that I was thinking about these entities in my own head. I was making them happy and sad, and trying to get them all to get along and be happy. It just seemed natural that I slap faces onto the cubes, a diploma wall in the background, and skin it like the player is a therapist going throughout their day. And something about seeing those weird little faces get happy and sad is just so satisfying. ;)

You're probably wondering how it took me two years to make such a simple game. Well, first of all, this is a one man show for crying out loud. I've learned the hard way why people tend to make games in teams and not as lone wolves. But also, it's been on and off. When I first started toying with the idea, I didn't say "I'm gonna make a mobile game and publish it". I just toyed with it for several months, among other ideas. It probably wasn't till about a year ago when I decided to do something with it. I actually released an older version of this game on Kongregate last year. Looking back, that version was extremely rough. It looks basically the same, but the game progression was so bad, there were hardly any instructions or explanations. There's a pretty steep learning curve, and it's easy to lose players in the first few levels because they just don't get it. Holding players' hands a little at the beginning with tips and instructions has proven to be a huge necessity in getting people into the game, because it's a little hard to wrap your head around the puzzles at first. Kongregate saw an exciting first week (about a thousand players, about a 3.5 star rating, and front page attention for about an hour), but after that it faded into obscurity. In hindsight, I don't think that's really the right market for a puzzle game. This is the kind of game that you want to pull out occasionally when you're going to the bathroom, or sitting on a bus, not the kind of game that you want to play while sitting at a desktop computer on a browser for hours on end. And plus, it wasn't nearly as compelling with a mouse and keyboard.

It's also the first game I've made with Unity, and the first real game I've made, period. I couldn't write a line of code 3 years ago, and making this game, and playing with a few other ideas, has been what's taught me programming and game development. So, as you'd expect, the game saw several "rewrites", which were fairly major refactors of the entire game, as my programming skills matured. But if you need a confidence boost, I'm now a full fledged Game Designer and Game Scripter at a tech startup called MaxPlay (www.MaxPlay.io) that is doing exciting things in the gaming industry.

Okay, this post is probably long enough. Hope to see your name on the leaderboards soon! Enter your email on the side panel to subscribe to updates if you want to stay informed!

Monetization! Yay!

I just wanted to be up-front about the monetization in my first mobile game, Social Sessions, and explain why I went with the method that I did.

Social Sessions is a free-to-download game which allows players to play until they reach "Day 9" (out of 30 days) before they're asked to upgrade (for $1.99) to continue. The first 8 days will probably afford a player several days of occasional play.

I decided against using advertisements because, well, that's basically just going with the annoy-players-until-they-pay-you model. I don't want to annoy my players. I realize that for many developers this is the best option, and it's possible some very understanding players even appreciate this model and understand why it's necessary in many cases, but it wasn't right for my game.

I also didn't want to fill the game with micro-transactions. There are no extras or cheats or premium currencies in the game to purchase. You just pay to unlock the game once, and all 120 puzzles are yours!

The other decision was, okay, I'm going with the "Freemium" model (upgrade to play full game), but when exactly should I ask players to Upgrade? Some suggested that you do it early, as soon as the player is interested in the puzzles. But in my own experience, I always appreciated when Freemium games allowed you a bit more time to enjoy the game. It allows you to really get into it and play it over a few days so that when you get to the Upgrade point, you really feel like you've played a game already, and upgrading for more levels is just icing on the cake (granted, the icing on the cake is 5 times as many levels as the cake in this metaphor). But then, even if you don't upgrade, and you put the game down there, you feel like you were able to play and enjoy a full game, so you are more willing to go tell your friends to go download and try this game, because it's free, and you can actually enjoy the game for a little while totally for free! And who knows, maybe one of your friends will like it enough to want to upgrade? So everyone wins!

And to those who say that games should all just be offered to players for free, well... I'm not even gonna start...

;)

Game Play sneak peek!

Hester Games... The Beginning!

Horray! Hester Games, LLC, exists, and is a real and legally verifiable entity! :D

This is exciting to me, but maybe not to you. What should be exciting to you is that I'm going to be making games you will hopefully find creative, compelling, and awesome!

Social Sessions (Hester Games' first game that will be released in the coming weeks on the Google Play Store, and soon after that on Apple's App Store) started a few years ago when I started to teach myself Unity game development and C# programming. Suddenly, my imagination came alive with ideas of what I could make! Social Sessions took form slowly, and went through several iterations. At first it was just an idea that I found intriguing, and surprisingly, hadn't seen anything else quite like it.

The puzzles were challenging, for sure. That was what I liked, but that was the main hurdle: getting people to grok the puzzles right away. Playing that balancing game between challenging and fun. Lots of people threw up their hands and said "I just don't get it!" So, with that in mind, I worked hard to give useful tips to the player along the way, and chose a progression of levels that would slowly introduce players to the more difficult concepts. Eventually I began to see that spark of determination in people's eyes when they really got it and were self-motivated enough to buckle down and solve the puzzles (and even try to get a 3-star rating on all the puzzles!).

I've spent the last 2 years developing this mostly in solitude, but I hope to connect with the community of gamers who might be interested in this or my future games, from now on.

I'll post more about Social Sessions more specifically (video soon!), and also keep you updated during and after launch, but for now, here's a rough draft of the Play Store description:

Be the therapist you always knew you could be and try to make all your patients happy by manipulating their feelings and relationships!
Social Sessions is a group-therapy-themed game that will seriously challenge your puzzle-solving abilities. Make your way through the calendar as you right the wrongs in each group of dysfunctional relationships. Push yourself to perfection by figuring out how to solve each session in the most efficient way.
Then, just when you start finding your groove, you'll be challenged by four new special level types, introduced each new week in your therapist's calendar.

 Leave a comment if this sounds like something you'd like to play!