I finally released my first game

When Word Wars finally went live on the App Store, my first thought was:

“Wait… that’s actually my game.”

I had waited so long for that moment.

For months, I had been building this thing, testing it, fixing it, changing things I didn't like, and then changing them again. But there was something different about seeing it sitting on the App Store as an actual game that anyone could download.

It felt real.

Apple made me feel official

Honestly, the process of releasing on iOS was pretty straightforward.

Apple has a lot of rules and guidelines, and there is definitely some tedious stuff to get through. But I actually found myself enjoying a lot of it.

Creating my privacy policy. Setting up my developer site. Making sure my screenshots, description, age rating, and all the other metadata were correct.

None of that is the fun part of making a game, but for me it represented something bigger.

Every little checkbox made me feel like I was taking another step toward something I had wanted to do for a long time.

Then came App Review

After I submitted Word Wars for review, my nerves were ridiculous.

It felt like the anxiety was sitting in the bottom of my feet.

I kept checking the review status over and over, convinced that I had somehow missed something and Apple was going to reject it.

And because it was my first app, the wait felt even longer.

When the approval finally came through, the relief was something I don't think I'll ever forget.

My game was going to be on the App Store.

I had actually done it.

I thought people would just show up

I knew I had to spread the word about the game, but I'll be honest: part of me thought a few posts and a few texts would be enough.

I'd tell some people about it. Post a few videos. Maybe some people would download it, share it with their friends, and suddenly Word Wars would start spreading.

Boy was I wrong.

Getting people to discover the game is way harder than making the game.

That's probably been my biggest surprise since releasing it.

I used to release music, so I already knew I had a tendency to get sucked into analytics. Apparently that didn't go away just because I started making games.

Now I'm checking downloads, impressions, players, and everything else I can get my hands on.

And somehow, no matter how much testing you do, the second you hit Release, new bugs decide to introduce themselves.

Of course they do.

Then I saw the leaderboard

Word Wars still has a relatively small number of players, but one day I opened the Daily Challenge leaderboard and looked at the global scores.

I recognized some names. Friends and family were there.

But then I saw several names I didn't recognize at all.

People I had no idea who they were.

Twenty individual people had played my game.

That might not sound like a huge number, especially compared to the millions of downloads you see other games getting.

But I got emotional looking at that leaderboard.

These were actual people who had found something I made and decided to spend some of their time playing it.

That was a completely different feeling from seeing a download number in App Store Connect.

For the first time, it really hit me:

Other people are playing my game.

I also made the game too hard

One thing I definitely didn't expect was how difficult Word Wars would be for other people.

I've played this game so much that typing words and dealing with the blocks became second nature to me. I had spent so long with the mechanics that I forgot what it felt like to be new.

What felt obvious to me wasn't necessarily obvious to someone playing for the first time.

I think that's another lesson that only really becomes clear when you release something.

You can spend months inside your own game and still have no idea what it's like to experience it for the first time.

Making the game is only half the job

I thought finishing the game would be the hard part.

And it was hard.

But releasing it taught me that making the game is only half the job.

You also have to get people to find it. You have to watch what happens when real people play it. You have to fix the bugs that somehow survived every test. You have to learn what players understand immediately and what leaves them completely confused.

I'm still figuring all of that out.

But that's what makes this whole thing exciting.

Word Wars isn't just the game I made anymore.

It's the first game I actually shipped.

And now I get to figure out what happens next.