Released my first game today! Here's my experience
I've been working on my first full development project solo for about 3.5 months now, it started off as a simple math battle concept and quickly grew into something else.
The core mechanic is that math is the gameplay, I felt that turning mistakes into an opportunity to reinforce problem areas could be a fun twist on a tired genre. I spent months designing levels, animations, sounds, and music tracks to accent the level designs. Every additional item sparked more curiosity and exploration on my part, this is where I learned that scope should have been a top priority. What I estimated to take 2 months easily turned into 3.
I mixed in 6 mini-games to break the monotony and keep it casual, most casual games are played in short intervals so I wanted the game to feel like something you could come back to without feeling frustrated or bored. I genuinely had my hand on the design the entire way.
I don't think I would have been able to do all of it so quickly without the help of Anthropic's Claude Code CLI, I had some very light understanding of Xcode from previous attempts to learn Swift. I knew the terminology and the concepts but AI assistance genuinely made things more approachable and fun for me. Having that confidant to guide me through questions and blockages was honestly what kept me going.
It's true what they say about Kids Category games being very difficult to break into, but it ultimately boiled down to being in compliance with some common sense guidelines and designing with parents and younger audiences in mind. AI excels at this, if you really lean into its ability to research current guidelines it can save you hours of frustration trying to decipher documentation.
The part I hadn't planned for was the extra slow review process, my game was rejected 3 times in a row, but here's the thing: it was never my code that was the issue or my lack of compliance, it was literally App Store Connect reviewers not being bothered to read notes. That back and forth alone took almost 2 weeks to get past because each review took 3-4 days.
My advice, just be explicit and offer up annotated screenshots of the user flow and any area you think the reviewer might get stuck on. I wanted to shout "Come on, It's obvious!" but the friction points were understandable and easy to communicate with the help of AI. I think a lot of people panic and think they need to change something, most of the time communication just needs to be clearer.
To be clear, AI isn't a magical problem solver, it confidently walked into plenty of dead ends with me and I had to verify everything myself. It's like a very fast junior partner, it acted as a sort of assistant that orchestrated mundane tasks and tests to help streamline my production.
TestFlight was one of the nicest surprises, I was so worried about IAP not working, getting sandbox accounts running and receiving actual human feedback to test my changes was one of the most important things to do to find quirks and imperfections that affected flow. I can't wait to work on my next project and apply everything I learned from this one.
App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/gizmos-math-arcade/id6791430789