Learnings and Envy from Trainyard

Trainyard is a visually minimalist color-mixing puzzle game about trains. It's simple looking, wonderfully subtle in its challenges, and all around well designed. It's #2 in the US app store at the moment I'm writing this, and on sale for 99 little Lincolns.

So I was pleased to discover this long and informative blog post from the developer, Matt Rix, that talks about Trainyard's development from pen and paper idea all the way to megabucks. Anyone who is interested in iPhone development, or is in the middle of a project, can probably find a nugget or two to take away from this.

I found several nuggets. While I haven't talked about it on this blog at all, I am less than a month away from releasing my first game on the iPhone. I'm very excited, and I enjoy reading about other people who have gone through the same challenges that I have. That being said, I'd be interested to know if a dev blog written during development would read the same as his retrospective. His first app has been an runaway success, even though it took a while before it "popped," and I wonder if he glosses over some of the less inspirational moments.

In my experience, doing an iPhone game in my spare time has been a constant battle between life, from my day job to my girlfriend, and my moonlighting. I'm working on a team with three other full-time employed people, which makes it even harder. A lot of our biggest challenges have been simply moving forward when it seems impossible to coordinate our different schedules and other priorities. Day by day, I often find myself thinking about the game or future ideas when I'm at work, where I have to push them from my mind until later, only to come home tired and uninterested, uninspired. When I wake up fresh the next day it can be frustrating to know the feeling may be long gone by the time I get to work on my game again.

And then there are moments of total elation. Our work has progressed very slowly, so when a new build with significant changes rolls in it's like seeing the game for the first time. It reignites the fire that started this project in the first place. Nothing is more satisfying than seeing ideas come to life.

I suspect our app will not hit #2 in the US app store, but I am still really looking forward to launching it, both to say "look, I made that" and also because I've long been thinking about future games. When we're ready to "go legit" there will be a lot more info about the game available, and I'll be talking more about my experiences right here.