I’ve been making games and apps for iOS since Apple released their SDK some time around 2008.
My first game was Cowabunga. Originally it was written in Obj-C. Back then there weren’t any game specific frameworks let alone SpriteKit. I rolled my own simple game engine utilizing UIKit and NSImageView’s for sprites. It felt a bit hackish but it worked very well for the type of games I was writing.
Soon after I discovered Cocos2D and jumped right on it. I quickly ported Cowabunga to C++/Obj-C mix with that framework. From that point on all my games were written with Cocos2D until SpriteKit was released. The transition to SpriteKit was pretty seamless since SpriteKit is basically mimicking Cocos2D.
The games started to gain traction almost right away. By October 2008 two games; Soccer Kickoff and Cowabunga were in the top 100 free. Aerolite, an Asteroids shooter, was in the top free Arcade games category.
Aerolite got a good review in Touch Arcade. That was cool! 😁
My biggest app was Fish Food Frenzy Free. In 2009-2010 it had around 10 Million downloads which at that time was pretty decent.
Below is a screenshot of my old developer dashboard. You might notice that all the games have been removed. I’m in the process of rebuilding/reimaging them. A lot has changed since the original seven versions of iOS.
