
Apple Featured My Game, Here's Why I Changed It - qzervaas
http://zervaas.com.au/blog/hexiled-feature.html
======
JohnTHaller
A user being able to give a negative review for a game not supporting language
X when the game, like every single app in the app store, lists exactly what
languages it supports on the download page devalues legitimate reviews and is
the sign of a broken app review process.

~~~
qzervaas
Totally agree. Even the ability to respond as on we can on Google Play would
be a massive improvement (or even up/down vote like on HN)

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interpol_p
I think there is a down/up vote mechanism in iTunes ("Was this review helpful?
Yes/No"). But I'm not sure if that's visible on actual devices.

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qzervaas
Oh right. Very rarely do I view the App Store in iTunes. The only legitimately
useful reason I have for doing so is to quickly see rankings in a specific
country's store (but doing so removes all Genius & iTunes Match data, so is
pretty annoying also).

Before Google switched over to Wallet and allowed responses to reviews, you
could get a fair bit of info about each sale (for a paid app), including often
their email address.

I would often email people seeking clarification when they would review "XYZ
doesn't work for me" in a bid to fix it.

On one hand it might seem a bit creepy, but on the other hand, they were my
customer and I was provided with information about them. I never asked for a
better review, just for information to improve the product.

They rarely replied.

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interpol_p
I think giving customer emails to app developers is plain wrong. I'd be
creeped out if a developer emailed me after I reviewed his or her app.

Developers shouldn't be so concerned with reviews. Reviews are for other
customers, not for developers to read. I say this as a developer who has
received reviews that contain misinformation about my product (lying that it's
going to be pulled from the App Store, for example). I made a decision to stop
reading reviews and just focus on building something I'm proud of. This has
paid off for me.

I also make it easy for customers to email me directly in my apps. I get a lot
of good feedback this way — and I can send a response that is actually
solicited.

~~~
qzervaas
Agreed on the first point. I'm glad they removed it. But we had so few tools
at our disposal, and the reviews can mean so much.

I'm the same though, completely averse when it comes to looking at reviews,
good and bad. I hate it.

Your last point is really good, I've always thought there should be super easy
mechanisms like this (although I'm often guilty of not providing, aside from
email address or Twitter handles).

The Google Maps feedback mechanism works really well - includes a screenshot
and a bunch of diagnostics info. The only thing I don't like about it is you
need to shake to trigger it, meaning most people don't know about it.

------
prawn
I'm Quentin's co-creator on Hexiled. If you're interested, we had a woefully
unsuccessful Show HN the other day:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8088223](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8088223)

And note that at the end of Quentin's blog entry, there's a link to our blog
series about creating the game. We've been talking to friends about the
general aspects of the game so always keen to chat with other game developers
and entrepreneurs about specific challenges.

------
joshdance
Complaining about the review process is complaining about human nature. Is a
normal user going to find you site, find your contact form, and then send a
nice email to you asking for their language? No. There are things that Apple
could change, that may or may not help. Adding the ability to respond to
reviews might help the developer feel better.

What developers need to do is make it easier for a user to give feedback, than
it is for a user to leave a review. Give them a way to vent to you, and they
might not vent in a review.

Is this easy? No. Does it work? Yes.

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SoapSticky
From the title I inferred that you changed your game because apple featured
it, as a way of implying that you didn't like the exposure. The post revealed
something completely different of this.

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qzervaas
It's more so that the feature gave us such a huge amount of data early on in
our game's lifetime that we noticed some things we needed to quickly iterate
on.

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dwkns
Didn't you do any usability testing? It seems to me that most of the problems
you encountered would have been caught if you had.

~~~
codeka
Usability testing is a bit of a luxury for a two-man team...

~~~
prawn
Especially when we are running our existing businesses/clients concurrently.
In my case, my sole employee is overseas for four months so it was a pretty
intense period juggling things. Quentin handled the lion's share with the
programming side.

That said, we would pay a lot more attention to the on-boarding next game. I
was quite happy with our tutorial so it's frustrating we left holes and fell
short.

As Quentin said in another reply, one big mistake we made was that a lot of
testing was with a beta group that had played the game dozens of times before
the tutorial was fully fleshed out. Huge mistake! Another mistake was watching
someone play it for the first time where we were in a position to coach them.
We should've been silent and seen what they did. Easy to spot the issues in
hindsight!

~~~
dwkns
It's a big misconception that user testing is luxury, even for very small or
one person teams. Applying some of the most basic principals can save you a
ton of wasted effort. In nearly every case it will make you much more
productive / efficient. The earlier you catch the mistakes, the easier to fix
them.

Check out the 'discount usability' movement. Much of it is written for web /
mobile development but the principles are pretty much universal and can be
applied to both game design and/or interactive learning aids (in your case the
tutorial).

If nothing else read up on how to run a usability test. Without even being an
expert it will help you get much more out of your testing.

------
qzervaas
Author here, if you have any questions about the game or blog post, I'll be
here for a while.

~~~
aptwebapps
This is interesting, especially the bit about getting featured right off the
bat, because I'm just getting started with mobile game development and had for
long time an idea for a pretty similar game. Similar in the sense that it was
a hex-tiled spelling game where you need to string together words to get
somewhere.

However, my partner and I are looking at a different game right now.

Also, I know there are worse reviewers than this, but man ...

"The vocab in this game needs a serious update, I have no idea which words to
go for due to the fact that it does not have some retry basic words built in.
Not toention the selection process needs a tad bit rethink. Overall it is a
pretty great idea, it just needs to be fully realized. I would give it more
stars but I'm a pass or fail kinda guy, and this did not pass... Not yet
anyway :)"

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qzervaas
Yea, it can be confronting reading reviews.

There's over 250,000 words in our dictionary (that's not to say you can
necessarily make all of them in the game).

Most people just query "Zen" not being in there though ;)

~~~
aptwebapps
Are you using SOWPODS? I had thought to stick with TWL being somewhat of an
old school Scrabble player. Also, little technical question if I may: what
sort of data structure do you use for your dictionary?

~~~
qzervaas
We're using CSW12.

It's stored in a single-table Sqlite database with some techniques to make
word lookup really fast. I believe it could be faster still, but this is
likely beyond my technical expertise.

Next problem is to scale the game to multiple languages without bloating the
download size of the game too much. Haven't decided what's best yet for this:
either compressing the dictionaries for distribution (and decompressing on
first launch), or an in-game download (this seems like so much effort though
and just adds more friction)

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aptwebapps
I wasn't aware of CSW but from the size I guess it's similar to SOWPODS.

An Sqlite db sounds like the sweet spot of performance and easy of use.

Couldn't you automate the in-game download? I.e.: If the user selects another
language download it on the spot with a little popup telling the reason for
the delay?

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qzervaas
All options are being considered. I like that idea in theory but it just adds
to the complexity:

\- More technical debt \- More points of failure \- Need to host the data
somewhere (plus pay for it... the App Store is basically a free CDN)

Off the top of my head, it may be possible to do a Free IAP where Apple hosts
the content, but I may be totally wrong on that.

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abhimir
I am curious about the Apple process for a feature. Did you write to Apple
pitching your game?

~~~
qzervaas
I don't definitively know what caused it, but I did notify my local Apple dev
relations team while it was pending review.

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abhimir
any tips on how to get in touch with the Apple dev relations team? We
generally send emails to app_store_promotion@apple.com around launches, but
they don't seem to get any response.

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qzervaas
Go to WWDC if you can and there's a range of people you can meet. I'm not even
sure if my emails had any effect

~~~
abhimir
I do plan on going next year. I decided to skip this year as I was not sure
how valuable it will be, but now I feel I was wrong about that. Good luck with
continued success for this and future games.

~~~
qzervaas
Definitely go if you can. I went in 2013. I wish somebody told me ahead of
time how important / valuable the one-on-one sessions with Apple engineers are
though.

I realised though only during Day 3 and barely had any time with them. The
sessions are a small part of the week (I mean, you can watch those online at
any time).

