I developed my first game, Rocket Renegade [1], for iOS. Although I think that it was well-received (based on the reviews and emails I've received), it's made under $100 US since launching in January 2015. But, I did finish, and I taught myself Swift in the process, so I'm proud of that.
I'm a classic example of a technical person that's learning the marketing side, so I have a lot to learn in that area. I think the game is a solid offering for its genre (80s/90s inspired shmup).
For stories of much greater success than myself:
1. There was a user here (kreci) that used to post financial reports regarding his Android development efforts, but it doesn't appear that he has been active on HN for quite some time. However, you may still find his reports a useful/interesting resource [2].
2. Nathan Barry (nathanbarry) has written about his experience developing his "OneVoice" app and the financials surrounding it [3].
3. The greatest financial success story that I am aware of in terms of sales in the mobile space is Allen Wong. He really hit it big with "5-0 Radio Police Scanner". He did an AMA [4], which you may find interesting.
Looks cool, nice work! Before you get discouraged, remember that Angry Birds was Rovio's 52nd game [1] -- consumer products and pop art are a hit-based crapshoot. As much as you want to learn about marketing stuff, make sure to keep producing new work.
The fact that you managed to learn Swift while developing a new game just by yourself it's a great accomplishment already.
Hope you'll manage to increase the revenue on your game - it looks like a really nice game.
You know, looking back, I sometimes think I was a bit insane to go with Swift, mostly because it was so new. I'd almost dread when a new Xcode beta would be released, because Swift was in such a state of flux; working code would end up breaking and I'd have to get everything working again, but in the end, it was exciting to go with a new language.
I wrote about my development experience here [1]. Warning, though: it's a long post!
At the time, I didn't have any game-specific tutorials for Swift when I started. That's largely because I started with the first Xcode beta (Xcode 6 Beta 1) that was released with Swift support in 2014. It was so new, that there just wasn't much out there.
That said, I used the Swift documentation that Apple released as a guide to the language. I also used the Objective-C (There wasn't a Swift version at the time) SpriteKit Guide [1] as a way to get a handle on SpriteKit. If you aren't familiar with it, it's essentially an Apple framework for working with sprites, physics, collision detection, etc. It's similar in spirit to Cocos2d, if you are familiar with that.
Then, I just brute-forced my way through a Swift equivalent of the syntax. It was a slow process. My first version of the game was just displaying the player's ship on the screen, and then I iteratively built the game up from there.
On a related note, I'm really proud of the way the enemy drones fly in the 3rd level. If you go to this link [2], it's the 4th screen-shot from the left. I implemented a Catmull-Rom spline generator that creates flight patterns for the enemy drones.
Fast-forward.... now, I think more game-specific Swift tutorials are available. I would definitely check out http://www.raywenderlich.com , for example.
I developed my first game, Rocket Renegade [1], for iOS. Although I think that it was well-received (based on the reviews and emails I've received), it's made under $100 US since launching in January 2015. But, I did finish, and I taught myself Swift in the process, so I'm proud of that.
I'm a classic example of a technical person that's learning the marketing side, so I have a lot to learn in that area. I think the game is a solid offering for its genre (80s/90s inspired shmup).
For stories of much greater success than myself:
1. There was a user here (kreci) that used to post financial reports regarding his Android development efforts, but it doesn't appear that he has been active on HN for quite some time. However, you may still find his reports a useful/interesting resource [2].
2. Nathan Barry (nathanbarry) has written about his experience developing his "OneVoice" app and the financials surrounding it [3].
3. The greatest financial success story that I am aware of in terms of sales in the mobile space is Allen Wong. He really hit it big with "5-0 Radio Police Scanner". He did an AMA [4], which you may find interesting.
[1] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/rocket-renegade/id955229059?...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=author:kreci%20%22Income%20Rep...
[3] http://nathanbarry.com/how-i-made-19000-on-the-app-store-whi...
[4] https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/17lwcs/iama_a_person_...