Planning with a programmer

If you own a smartphone or have your own personal computer, chances are you’ve played a video game, otherwise known to phone users as game apps. These days there are a variety of video games to play and seemingly one for every person. But, have you ever wondered how that favourite app of yours came to be? Have you ever wondered about the type of person who took the time to make it? 

I  talked with an app programmer, Sulhan Samee, to further understand about app development within the indie context. I asked him questions to get a basic understanding on the process of development.

Sulhan has been programming for many years now, mostly self taught, and a university student where he has been able to further hone his skills. He and his friends from overseas have established their own indie (self organized and not really corporate) development group. Under this group are a few small apps as well as a mobile app in development which will act as a stepping stone towards making their first PC video game. 

When it comes to app development, to simplify it, there are three main stages to it; Planning, Production, and Publishing.

“ For planning, we make a simple flowchart of basic mechanics at first and try to implement them. A Trello board is also made that follows the Agile software development life cycle. Later on, it’s expanded to fit more mechanics and a timeline is made for each module and who’s doing what is decided.”

“Compared to everything else, this stage is relatively short.”

Sulhan and his friends plan and organize this very well, which is something that’s essential to any team project. 

“Production depends on the project itself. There isn’t a specific time and it’s hard to say when we’ll be done. We try to stick to our timeline and meet deadlines for small parts of the project and slowly build it up”

This is true for even the big Triple A companies (for example, Bethesda). Breaking the project into smaller parts and building up from there is also a technique used by many successful development groups. 

“We’ve published only mobile games so far but we have one big PC game* being planned that’s expected to release in 2 – 3 years. The games are built and tested on Android first as it’s just easier and quicker to test for bugs and see how it performs on an actual mobile device. So our games release to the Android play-store first once they’re ready. We only publish to iOS if the game is polished.”

The team has published two mobile games; Haashiavani, a children’s app to learn the Dhivi alphabet (the native language to the Maldives); and Cube Dash, a hyper casual game where you make it past incoming walls by aligning yourself to the holes of the walls. 

I next asked Sulhan about how development affects his time as well as the skills required to become a successful app developer. I was interested about these two questions. 

“ I spend roughly five hours a day working on my modules or fixing bugs as I have other things to do such as university assignments. My colleagues in Male’ though work eight or more hours a day.”

That is indeed a lot of time spent per day on a single project, undoubtedly it would cause an increase in stress. Of course, Sulhan also has some advice about this. 

“But, to get started on developing something, you don’t need anything other than motivation. There’s so much information online that can help you achieve your goals. Experience matters a lot and the only way to gain that is by doing and experimenting.”

“Perseverance is key and eventually it can be figured out.”

Sulhan means self preservation. 

Unless you’re a coding wizard, if you’ve ever looked at a script of code, chances are that despite it being in English it all looks foreign to you. I’ve personally done a little programming in the past, trust me when I say that it can certainly become hectic. 

Lastly, I asked Sulhan if his team was currently working on any big project. His answer;

“The current project being worked on is Thakuru Wars. A multiplayer mobile battle arena that’s themed around Maldives.”

“This game is supposed to be a stepping stone for our bigger project, the PC game mentioned earlier called Islander. It’s a singleplayer adventure game that explores Maldivian folklore with a unique and magical twist.”

From this we can gather that game developers spend a lot of time and care with their projects, even in group work it’s time consuming (this is also true for big companies). Not only that, but the motivation to do it and having perseverance are important. Undoubtedly, the developer who brought you that beloved game app on your phone would have gone through the same process. 

Perhaps in the future we will get to see both projects from these hardworking individuals. Personally, I wish them all the best.