Rapid Tap was my first attempt at releasing my own Unity game onto various popular platforms and learning about that whole process. It was first released on January 22nd, 2018 on Steam.

The gameplay itself is very simplistic: a grid of nine squares light up and the player must press them before they go away. They rack up as many correct clicks as they can with three lives. It’s sort of like wack-a-mole, but with funny skins you can play it with. The point of the project was to focus more on learning the process behind how to release a Unity game onto Steam, Android, and iOS for free.

At the time of the project’s start, I had just finished my last exam for my computer science degree in college. Excited for the future and wanting to break into game development, I started a twelve-hour livestream on Twitch where I worked on a game project myself with audience suggestions here and there.

The result was Rapid Tap, whose initial conception was to be a much more simplified version of my Beat Grid project at the time. Since Beat Grid required a MIDI launchpad to play it, it would be difficult to receive feedback on how the gameplay would feel. An easier version that could also be played on their phone seemed ideal, so I worked on the project based off of that.

The only other difference between the two games is that Beat Grid is rhythm-based, while this game isn’t. I learned that having music play during this kind of flashing gameplay confused people into thinking it was a rhythm game though, and they naturally got frustrated. I believe it’s the combination of the gameplay with the music for the game that I choose was what gave off that impression, and I’ll definitely have to keep that in mind for future projects.

Rapid Tap also came at around the time when Steam Greenlight was shutting down and being replaced with Steam Direct. This meant that now you no longer needed to wait for community approval before publishing games onto Steam. To me, it was a great opportunity to learn about the Steamworks SDK and the whole Steam release process.

And of course I wanted to get experience releasing Android and iOS versions of the game as well. The Android version was easy enough to implement, since Google Play only requires a one-time fee and then you’re good to go. The iOS version, on the other hand, was a much more difficult problem. To release a game onto the App Store for iOS you need to pay an annual subscription, own a Mac and an iOS device, suffer through XCode headaches, and deal with Apple’s weird approval process. And apparently soon you can’t even log into your Apple Developer account without a Mac.

All of this was very painful to deal with for me since I didn’t have any Apple products and didn’t want to pay thousands of dollars just to publish a free app to learn. Nevertheless, I did everything I could and worked with my friend who owns Apple devices to get the game released on there for a year. Although now I just don’t want to deal with all the problems related with Apple, so on August 2019 the game will be removed from the App Store.

There were quite a few features with this game that I hadn’t had experience with going into this project that I tried out. In-game advertisements, leaderboards, cheat detection, multiplayer, and skins. Some were more trickier than others, of course.

In-game ads were actually much easier to integrate into the mobile versions of the game than I thought. I always knew the game would be free but I thought it wouldn’t hurt to experiment with ads in the mobile version for awhile. Unity makes it incredibly easy to put ads in, but I programmed in a gameplay timer so that it wouldn’t spam ads at them every time they died. Instead it would only show an ad after more than five minutes of active gameplay (after they died). Since most of the game’s playerbase was all on Steam instead, it never generated much for money. Not that I expected any, really. So I removed ads from them soon after.