Over the next two months, we met every weekend at Starbucks in Emory Emory Village and worked on our app, which we decided to call Popr. My official role was as the graphics designer, as I had never coded prior to this. But when I wasn't busy working on the visual design of the app, I learned from the lead coder, Devin Mashman, and soon had a rudimentary, but effective, skill for coding in Objective C.
One of the tasks that took up quite a bit of our creative thought was the company name. My friend was put in charge of coming up with a name for our company, but was soon removed from that position as he came up with names such as "Awesomness Inc." and "Swaggilicious and Company". I was given that position, and came up with Haptic LLC. Haptic, according to Merriam-Webster, means relating or based on the sense of touch. This seemed appropriate, so we adopted the name. I then created our logo, which is shown below.
Gameplay Description:
Perhaps you and your friends have done this: twist a plastic bottle, building up pressure in the top, which allows the cap to fly off when unscrewed properly. That’s the idea behind this game!
After you press play, you will be presented with a bottle along with a cap attached to the bottle. At the bottom right of the screen, you’ll see a timer and your swipe counter. To swipe the bottle, simply move your finger back and forth across the bottle’s midsection. The swipes determine the amount of pressure that is building up in the bottle, therefore controlling the height that your cap can fly. The goal of this section of the game is to get as many swipes as you can and tap the cap to send it flying, all before the timer runs out!
As soon as you hit the cap, the cap flies off into the clouds! The goal of this section is to get as many points as you can before you reach your predetermined height. Hitting a cloud will give you a fair amount of points, hitting a rainbow will boost your score significantly, and hitting a storm cloud will obliterate your score. Below are examples of the objects, the cap itself, prototype caps to be added later, and gameplay:
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi99bHMYt1X_0g9GVfLVHX0zmIP1kZ6ZruP2_fMDcg_ZSr6BiZ7yLTRouv6T4ifu4l3rlu-vq1D1dbWNh8kLNKQZ1C1y_HjJ-TetPOZNHgezKn5LaNFWe8rriekYWeZqeAaiCJ19Hu4Kkc/s320/295851_243408549030652_788616_n.jpg)
Release:
We finished the first version of the app just before school began, September 2012, and released it worldwide. At this time, Popr was free, and we planned on making revenue through in-app purchases, which we would add in an update later that year. After the first month, we ranked top in free apps in Hong Kong, Australia, and Romania. Our app was also featured on popular app blogs.
Retirement:
Unfortunately, school began and work on this project stalled. Our planned updates were never completed, and the app sat in limbo for the rest of the school year. The app also represented a drain on our finances, as it was expensive to keep the app in the App Store without any revenue. Therefore, we were forced to retire the app. Before the end of its life, the app scored more than 2500 downloads, no small feat for three high school sophmores!
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