The official release of Sky Invaders for iOS occurred on 20th October 2012, followed in 2013 with versions for Android and Windows Phone (remember those). 

My expectations were low, and I told myself that I’d learn to code mobile platforms and see if I can get a game published. I didn’t aim that high, but what I learnt was much more than coding a game.

So with the 8th anniversary just around the corner, I thought it was time to reflect on the three biggest lessons I learnt.

1. Simple design
2. Test, test and test again
3. Focus

#1 Simple Design

Sky Invaders started as a simple alien invaders type of game, inspired, by countless arcade games from the late 1970s and early 1980s and the initial release followed the Nolan Bushnell design theory “a game should be simple to play, but hard to master”.

Gamers of a certain age seem to love the retro feel and repetitive gameplay (casual gaming), and we received plenty of lovely comments and feedback.

Then, somewhere around the release of v2, I thought I should make significant design changes, add levels, change the invaders. These changes, I thought, would make the game even more fun, but it turned out not to be so. 

The element of easy to play and hard to master had been lost, and the type of feedback we received indicated that the fun had gone. No longer was the game a simple pick and play and then leave kind of game but it had turned into something that required more focus, more time and this wasn’t what the users wanted.

The lesson I learnt here was to remember the original concept, the initial goal and think that you have to add, change and re-engineer a working product continually. 

Yes, enhance the game, improve the gameplay but don’t lose focus on the original goal.

#2 Test, test and test again,

Within days of the initial release, everything was going well. People were downloading the games, and I’d received some excellent feedback, but then an issue was reported.

It appears that in the higher levels of the game the invaders started behaving erratically. Not following the design patterns, but instead skipping all over the screen. 

It was a bug which turned out not to be that big of a problem to fix, but it meant that version 1.1 would need be to released ASAP. So a mere 15 days after the initial release the bug fix went live.

So what was the lesson? Insufficient playtesting. I didn’t get the game into the hands of enough games before release and this ultimately impacted reviews.

While at the time I hadn’t learnt the lesson, but given time and another couple of examples like the one with an advert sticking to the screen covering game controls, I got the message.

#3 Focus

After my first game was published, I immediately started on game two and three; I pushed those out into the app stores. All the while still working on bugs and enhancements with Sky Invaders. 

Trying flip between code bases, for iOS, Android and Windows Phone all within a short period meant that all three platforms and both games suffered from a lack of focus. 

It became all hard to manage the codebase. Features implemented in one platform and not others, and areas such as marketing and communication were all forgotten. 

I was on a roll, basically caught up in the excitement of publishing yet another game that I ended up doing an average job on the next couple of games I released. 

So the lesson learnt here was don’t spread yourself too thin. It’s better to do one thing really well than multple things averagely.