Chain Mail

About two days ago I released my first (real) Android app, Chainsy. This will serve as the retrospective in developing and releasing the app!

The Light Bulb

The idea to create Chainsy came from a one-game-a-month challenge I was trying to do for myself. I listed around a years worth of projects, and Chainsy was only the second. The first project was called Nodle, which was a real time strategy game. It was actually fairly fun with a decent amount of promise, but it was just too similar to many other apps.

I really like word games, and recently at work we had Chain Reaction playing in the background. I realized there weren’t many word games based on this property of words, so I filled in the gap! Also, this was months ago, so the challenge should be considered… failed?

Development

Early on I knew the word associations would be a problem. I found an active GitHub repo with a wordlist compiled from both the show and the author’s own input. The quality was just a bit too low, though it is still even now larger than my wordlist.

I settled on making my own by creating a python script that allows me to choose a parent word and list all children I can think of. I also added utilities that list all of the orphans and leaves of the words. Presently, I have entered around 1000 words with heaven knows how many possible chains.

The game itself wasn’t ridiculously hard to make. It’s mostly text based. I used Godot, as I always do, to write it. The hard part was the polish. The game felt so static for a large portion of the development cycle.

I added a lot of in the form of sound effects, and this single handedly took the feel from a 2 to at least a 6. Vibration and smoother UI took it to a 7.

Release

Releasing the app went fine, but of course driving traffic is a challenge. I am currently running an ad campaign and have around 15 installs. I’ve made about a quarter’s worth of income (not including the $10 I’ve spent on ads) so far. Baby steps.

Chain Mail

I got an email today about Chainsy- someone playing my app let me know that there was an error on level 37, where the game stops working. This was an edge case I forgot to check, and a user was so kind as to let me know about it. This was truly humbling, and it made me so happy to realize someone was actually using my app.

Future Plans

More polish, more chains, more ads. Just kidding, I prefer not drown you in ads. For now.