My first app: Bug Bomber

My wife and I like to play two player Dr Mario on our Raspberry Pi/RetroPie. I thought it’d be fun to clone this and port over to a mobile app so we can play wherever we are.

There were already plenty of Dr Mario clones out there but I didn’t like the game play, and I wanted to add the ability to play head to head. This is accomplished by using PubNub to send real time events to both devices to trigger score updates, penalty piece drops, and win/lose indications.

Aside from the basic 1 and 2 player game there is also a progress screen where you can see which levels (21) and speeds (3) you’ve beaten.

I was surprised by how quickly it came together. The final touches, design (what little there is) and App Store submission process took more time than I thought, but it was worth it to get my first game out there. I was rejected once by Apple for using “hidden features”. The only other Expo user I was able to find that had this issue fixed it by turning off OTA updates. :frowning: So I turned those off and my next submission was ok. I’m going to see if I can turn these back on at some point because it’s so nice to be able to push bug fixes quickly.

Thanks to the Expo crew for creating such an awesome platform for creating native apps! I’m open to any feedback you can provide.

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This is awesome, @jcsanford! Thanks for sharing your creation with the community. It’s always super exciting for the Expo team to see what fellow exponauts are creating! Please let us know if you still have issues with Apple rejections after you enabled OTA updates again.

Also, since it seems like you have a passion for games, I think you may want to take a look at Castle (https://www.playcastle.io/) - a project that some of the Expo team has been working on that really captures the spirit of the gaming community.

Cheers,

Adam

Thanks @adamjnav! I looked around the forums and my issue was identical to this one: Apple rejected Binaries due to “Guideline 2.3.1 - Performance" and "Guideline 3.1.1 - Business - Payments - In-App Purchase"

So I may try building again and submitting to get my OTA updates back.

Ah! Yeah, really sorry about that. We messed up and hate to see it negatively affect our developers in such a way. The silver lining is you should have no issues getting those OTAs back so you can squash some bugs that come up in a timely manner!

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Some quick feedback: The options button could use a little more spacing on top so it’s not quite so close to the Status Bar. Also, I think it would be great if the button used the same color scheme as the rest of the app as it seems a little out of place. Perhaps some combination of #1C1623 and #FF7700. Just food for thought!

Yep, that could use some adjustment for sure. You can probably tell which device I did most of my testing on. Thanks!

Very cool. @jcsanford Would you be willing to share your source on github? I’m curious how you put together some of the graphical aspects.