We didn't like the standard Game Center pop-in notifications, so we designed our own - these use normal UIViews, and we use the built-in Twitter/Facebook sharing view controllers.
The loading spinners, alerts / dialogs are all in SpriteKit. I'm not sure if this is optimal (I believe other developers lean on UIKit a bit more), but it all fits together nicely this way.
Correct, iOS only. I have no idea what their motivation was for posting the video. I simply used that as an example since it taught me a few things we hadn't encountered yet in our 2+ months of testing.
I am wondering what most of those game developers use for writing apps. Your app looks pretty minimalistic, and I do think it could use at least some additional decoration.
But writing my own game apps, I do realize why you're not doing that when implementing games directly in things like SpriteKit.
There are a ton of cross-platform frameworks, both proprietary and OS. Here are a few of the bigger ones: Marmalade, Cocos2d-x, LibGDX, Xamarin, and Unity (you can 2d with Unity now, I believe).
I think Unity is pretty common. There's tools for converting cocos2d code to Android, so that one too.
Being the first game I've ever made I wanted something I could jump into really quickly just to play around. Got a bit of momentum on it and kept going.
I do wonder about the future of SpriteKit because of this, since having to code it two or more times is a huge effort. Apple seem to be all-in on it though, especially with SceneKit coming soon.
I am a web developer/designer and certainly not a game designer or illustrator so I guess in tackling a word game, we avoided 3D models or other things we couldn't do ourselves. We abandoned our initial game concept because it was going to require more challenging artwork.
The music was something we used a freelancer for, however.
Hopefully if Hexiled continues to prove successful, we're in a position to get help on the visual side!
In comparison to Unity, Monogame is a good option if you would really like to write a complete game in a high-level cross-platform language (C#/F#) rather than scripting pre-made chunks: http://monogame.net
