About 6 years ago, I posted an article I wrote about my experience on the app store[1] and somebody (now a good friend of mine) reached out and asked why I wasn't living in silicon valley. Long story short[2] I ended up moving to San Francisco less than a month later and I've been here ever since. That was unexpected.
I was playing around with writing an app for the new Apple TV, and it was fun enough that I ended up putting a bit of polish on it and releasing it to the app store. It's a free game called Slingshot Superhero.
It wasn't until the app got approved that I started to realize just how terrible app discovery is on the platform. There's no "new apps" list at all. There are no Top 100 lists in the individual categories. I can't even link you guys to the app. The only way anybody can find my app is if I personally tell them to go to the app store, find the search feature, and use the hilariously bad text input feature to search for "Slingshot Superhero".
I probably won't be making any more Apple TV apps.
Yeah, absolutely there is a great tech scene in the TC area. I tried to paint MN and my former employer in as good of a light as I could while concurrently throwing them under the bus and using them as the bad guy in the story.
Hmmm, I don't think so. I did a pretty good job of avoiding... everyone during that period of my life. It's only in recent years that I've realized that there are better ways to operate than being a complete hermit-weirdo.
You're definitely not coming across as an asshole. I know a lot of assholes and I hardly ever see them mock-up screenshots for strangers. Very much appreciated. The screenshot is definitely food for thought.
Btw, I feel like I should have a good answer for why the bullseyes are spherical and not flat... but I don't. More to think about there...
Yeah, I definitely plan on follow-up posts with any changes that occur.
As for engines, I used cocos2d for all of the 2d (imagine that) stuff like menus and the HUD. The 3d objects I made using blender, modified some code I found online[1] to load them into the project, then pretty much just cobbled together a physics and rendering engine by hand. Good times.
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2705440 [2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4424592