Drill Planet: How I developed and released a game to the App store in 69 hours

Yesterday I uploaded Drill Planet to the iOS app store. If the review gods are on my side, Drill Planet should be available before the end of July. This is how I got it out on time and with minimal monetary investment. 

Note: You can download Drill Planet on the Apple App Store or get the HTML-5 version of it.

Who are you and what is this about?

I am a part-time indie game developer with a full-time job outside the industry. From 2011- 2014 I release 3 games. I slogged through development with a few downloads and very little bit of press recognition.

For 2015 I am done making big games that take a long time and have set the goal to release a game every month in 2015. I want to experiment, learn, and get my name out there with a dozen tiny, exciting experiments.

Goals for Drill Planet
 

Instead of doing an tick-tock description of May, I made this fancy chart.

Each colored bar represents one hour. I was very strict about those hours and used a pomodoro-style timer app and only recorded time in which I was productive for the full hour.

The labels are the top are the weeks I spent on the game.

“WAIT A MINUTE I thought you were doing this game in a month? That thing goes to 10 weeks!”

That is true! But! I got a base playable version of the game done in 3 weeks and posted it on itchio the last day in May. In order to get this game ready for the app store I had to return to it in July.

How I Saved Development Time

I wanted to focus on getting a minimal viable product released that looked good. These are some time savers:
 

Playtesting

I didn’t do enough of it. For future games I want to submit an itchio build every Friday and post on Reddit’s “feedback friday”

I also plan to continue live playtesting with friends and at the monthly IGDA meetings.

Building up My Base

I was really proud of how much base reusable code I got into this game. All of these features will be need in my future games and I am glad I got them working now:
 

Everything in orange is code that can be reused in my next game:

To Be Improved

I still think this game too long to develop. If I am going to keep up a game-a-month pace I need to cut some things. Here is what took too long:
 

The Future of Drill Planet

I want to keep up with this, depending on initial reception possibly add more monster types, different world scenarios such as harder surfaces, different terrains, bigger circles.