My Journey to the App Store

Hi

I have been a member here for just about a half a year, this forum has been a great motivational factor to me. I have made some small pocket change using some of the fantastic methods posted here, but haven't utilized their full potential because of lack of interest. Making money also has to be fun, otherwise you will hit a brick wall eventually, and I did, not because I didn't want to put in the work required, but simply because you have to enjoy what you do!

But enough of that stuff, back to the journey.
Recently I posted a new thread here asking for an estimated price of a simple game. The response was very good, and I even posted a job on Elance to get a better understanding of what price I would be looking at. The prices ranged widely from about $400 to $10k. But was averaging at about $800. I could put in the money for the development required, but then I though to my self, what the heck I can do that my self!.
I have been a hobby programmer for the last 10 years, and has mainly been programming in PHP, JavaScript and Python, so programming does not come as a new thing for me. Both PHP and JavaScript have a similar syntax to C, which Objective-C was build upon. So I think I have an advantage there.

I probably wont be updating this journey everyday, but I will be updating it as frequent as I can and feel it makes sense. Also I would like to answer any questions, if I can

The tools I have available:
- An idea for a game
- A premium subscription to Lynda.com
- 10+ years of Google-search experience

I hope you will follow me on this journey to publishing an app to the App Store!

Subscribed. Good luck mate.

Do you plan on just sticking to the Apple App Store? Picking up other languages should be easy with your already prepared brain.

For now, yes I plan on only sticking to the App Store. If some of the apps I develop will become popular, I have to create an android version as well, but if will get that developed by outsourcing or creating it my self, we will have to see. So for now the plan is to become familiar with objective-c and start creating my game

good luck m8. Any good Objective C books?

Probably. I haven't been looking into books yet. I stumbled across a nice website though http://www.raywenderlich.com they have a lot of awesome tutorials on just about anything in regards to app programming. I will have a closer look at them
over the next few days

So a little update from me.
I have during the day today been looking at the basic syntax of Objective-C, declaring variables functions and working with a few of the classes in the Foundation framework.
Because I am pretty much starting from scratch and are back to basics, I find that it is relatively easy to lose my overview, so I decided to create a roadmap for myself, so I always know where to go next whilst I am in this learning phase.
Below I have listed the steps I think I need to take in the order I will take them in.

1: Lynda.com - "Objective-C Essential Training"
If you know just a little bit about Lynda.com, you know that they have an "essential training" course on just about any topic, everything from time management, customer service and even SEO is covered, and luckily Objective-C is also covered. This will give me a basic understanding of Objective-C and the syntax of it, as a programming language. The course does not cover anything it regards to app development it self, but introduces the mechanics behind the scenes.

2: Raywenderlich.com - "Beginning Objective-C"
This is a tutorial series on the website i mentioned in the above post. The series is divided in to 6 written tutorials. The series covers some of the same things as the Lynda.com course, but this series also gives some hands on examples that can be used to debug, test and play around with Objective-C. During the series, the making of my very first app will even be covered, yay!

3: Lynda.com - "iOS App Development Essential Training"
Again a Lynda.com course this won't cover Objective-C so much as a language, but merely focus on using it as developing an app. I think I will learn some very important things in there, and browsing over the topics, I will pretty much take me from creating an app, to put it on the App Store.

4: Lynda.com - "iOS Game Development with Sprite Kit"
I am still on Lynda.com but now we are getting down to business. With iOS 7, Sprite Kit also came along. This is the game engine I will be using for my game. It has some awesome features such as "real-life" physics, collision detection and a bunch of other things. After this course I will probably begin to looking in to designing the first parts of my game and also coding some of the features.

5: Raywenderlich.com - "Sprite Kit Tutorials"
This is another written series on Raywenderlich.com. It contains a total of 24 tutorials, but I probably won't be reading all of them, but only some. The series covers a lot of ground, and takes me through a few examples of apps that they have created for the purpose of these tutorials.

After reading and watching these steps I feel fairly confident that I will be able to create the game I want. Of cause I won't just eat them up over a weekend, and expect to be an Objective-C guru by monday, so in between all steps I need to test out the things that I have learned, and puzzle around with everything before taking the next step. But with this roadmap outlined, I have a better understanding of what I need to do, and when I need to do it.

I hope that my posts so far has been useful to you. And I have maybe inspired others to plunge into creating apps!

man my head hurts!!!

Good luck bro I'm gonna follow along

seems really interesting good luck man with your journey.

So again a little update from me.

I have finished the first course on Lynda.com, and have almost finished the part on Raywenderlich.com about beginning Objevtive-C. I feel like I am starting to get the hang of things. As oppose to PHP, Objective-C is much more strict in it's syntax. The creation of objects are divided in to two files, a header file, and an implementation file. I actually really like this way of coding, because it forces you to keep your code clean and organized.
I have made some small command line based games, where the objective is to guess something, like a number or a letter. Really basic stuff, but nevertheless it is the code that matters at this point.

I really have to admit that I really love the Raywenderlich site (Just to be clear, I am in no way affiliated with the site). It has some awesome tutorials, and they really know how to explain things so even a dog could follow along.
Someone asked about a good book on Objective-C, whilst I haven't been looking in to any books, I have signed up for the newsletter at their website, and guess what? You get a free 140 eBook for signing up. I know that this is common practice in email marketing, but really I don't give much. I have downloaded the book, and started reading it yesterday. Today I am about 50 pages in, and I can definitely recommend it so far. So for everyone that wants to give this a shot, head over to their site and start reading. All their written tutorials are free.

I want to add one more thing to my to-do list, and it goes in between number two and number three.
After I have read the eBook. I will outline my game in details. The outline will go something like this.

- The game must have 3 screens, the game, highscore, options.
- When the user presses X they will be sent to Y
- When the user dies Z will happen
- Etc.

Doing so will help me get a much better understanding of how the game will hang together overall, and breaking it all down in minor pieces also helps me not to forget things.
Unfortunately I won't share these details with you, as I would then give away my whole idea, so sorry for not sharing that part

I know that this journey is a bit different than the ones people normally post here. But I still think it fits the forum here, despite it not having any thing to do with SEO yet

Until next time,
mojdk

you want to make a simple game, you know JavaScript, why don't you use Unity engine? it support Js language. In addtion, you can port your game to iOS, Android.

Thanks for the feedback.
I probably could. But I like to challenge my self. Also I am one of those people that are a strong believer in using "native" tools, and not third party workarounds like Unity. If/when I want to deploy an Android version of the game, I guess I have to learn Java.
I might sound stupid to some, but having skills like this can really help me in my future.

Any updates on your journey?