My First Mobile App: Creating and Deploying an App in Just 3 Weeks!
This year, I quit my job and completed a 3-month coding boot camp in Tokyo, Japan. The culmination of this course was a final group project that tested all of the skills we had gained. My group decided to make ✨ Mystic Tear ✨, a fantasy mobile game for Android with an emphasis on AR. The game featured collecting characters and using them to fight and ultimately defeat the evil unicorn overlord. Oh yeah, we leaned hard into the fantasy elements! I’m going to recap our development process for you here.
🤔 Decisions, decisions….
No one in our four-person team had ever worked in mobile development. We quickly made the decision to stick with Android development for purely financial purposes (why is the Apple store fee so much higher than the Google Play Store???). After narrowing our focus, we then needed to decide on our tech stack.
At this point, we were all strongly comfortable with JavaScript/HTML/CSS and Node.js. We had front end and back end skills but our particular knowledge base was not well-suited for mobile development.
And after lots of hemming and hawing and trying to fit our square tech stack into a circular hole we realized the inevitable: it was time to learn C# and Unity. In the end, this was the best choice. Kind of funny how learning an entirely new programming language and software is easier than trying to use JavaScript for mobile-development. 🤣
🧟♂️ The Frankenstein Method: Or, How to Create a Working App in 3 Weeks
My first recommendation when developing a mobile-app is to make sure you have a talented artist on your team that can write the code and create all of the artwork! Thank you, Julia!!!! My second recommendation is that you have deep wells of patience because you’re going to need it. Mobile-app development is a beast but it is possible. For our app, we used Google Firebase features which were easily integrated with Google games login and achievements.
Due to the size of our project, using github was a bit fiddly. Instead, we opted for Unity’s built-in cloud collaboration which made the development process smoother. Our team worked remotely for this project and updating our files via cloud services was so helpful.
The actual coding was done with the help of an uncountable number of youtube tutorials. I don’t know what happened in the Unity/C# community in 2017 but it was a golden age. Every single one of the videos we used to learn about creating a new feature came from the year 2017. However, this did prove challenging in a few cases when we realized the tutorial and our app were running on two different versions of Unity. This is a huge thing to watch out for: make sure your team and any information you’re using are running the same version of Unity!
Coming to C# from JavaScript was a big change at first but an easy one. I enjoyed the strict nature of writing C# as it really helped future-proof my code from pesky errors.
👏 Credits
🔧 Wanna see what’s under the hood? Mystic Tear Github page is here!
👀 Wanna check out the app? Download here!
👩💻 Developers on this project: Julia, Kohki, Roger, and Halee (that’s me!).
🙏 Special thanks to our instructors at Code Chrysalis!
Thanks for reading! My name is Halee Pagel (rhymes with Cali Bagel) and I’m a software engineer in Tokyo, Japan. You can find me on twitter which I mostly use for liking tech memes and MLB updates. ✌️
