An excerpt from a day-by-day dev diary as a Korean indie studio attempts to launch its first game.
애증(愛憎): Love and Hate.
愛憎. Pronounced as “ae jeung” in Korean, this word encapsulates ‘love’ and ‘hate’ in one convenient package. And it describes perfectly my relation with the server attached to my game. Love and hate. As I described in a previous post, the Deadlock issues with our server have yet to be taken care of. Piece by piece I feel like I’m uncovering the reason for these issues, but there’s still a long way to go. Even though there are a ton of important things to do, the server comes first, because without the server the core premise of this game fails. (The game is about playing minesweeper with friends). In other words, I love/hate the server. Haha…
Still, as I go down my tasklist, each time I’m able to cross something off I feel a bit more positive. Step by step, we will release Spirit Sweeper to the world. Of course, one important part of releasing a game is to register it on the major app stores. Right now I’m in the process of registering on Google Play and iTunes. It’s actually my first time doing it on my own, and I was surprised to see that the two processes are a bit different. (I had thought all I needed was to prepare a description.) I’ve listed the differences below:
iTunes requires keywords, descriptions, and game screenshots for all the different iOS devices, in their respective dimensions. And of course, the iTunes process of accepting apps takes a lot longer, usually about two weeks, so you have to prepare for that when setting up your launch schedule.
On the other hand, Google Play does not require a separate keyword section. Instead, the keywords should be included into the description, making it much like standard search engine processes. This meant that we had to re-write the description to include the keywords. Also, Google Play requires a short, 80 character description that’s not required by Apple. Finally, Google Play games can be launched directly. This can be both good and bad, since Google Play won’t check for bugs on their side. But we’ve run some beta tests, so hopefully this won’t be an issue.
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