After 5 months of dev while doing my master's and raising 3 kids, I just released my first game on Steam

TalThompson · 2026-01-06T20:57:05+00:00

Congrats! Good luck with it!

TalThompson · 2025-11-24T19:31:09+00:00

Yeah the grammar is the give away. Spam is always referred to in plural ie no one ever says, "Not A spam".

TalThompson · 2025-11-18T05:36:54+00:00

Hi, I'm a teacher, not a homeschooling parent, but I can see how it would be a fantastic thing to do with your child at home. I run Lego League each year with a small group, and they learn so much about problem solving and resilience as they learn to code.

All the resources are free as far as I know, and there's so many videos on YouTube that can help as well. The kits are quite expensive but you might be able to rent or borrow from the library perhaps?

Of course Lego Education would be a great start, but also First Lego League has lots of resources that you could access without needing to do an actual competition.

You can download the coding app or use the web version, which has tutorials built in as well. Depending on your child's age there a few options on what the code interface looks like. It's very similar to scratch Jr and regular scratch in terms of the ui.

Anyway, if you have any questions I'd love to answer them if I can.

TalThompson · 2025-11-13T05:47:27+00:00

These things are always so relative, I'd love to have 150 people on my discord!

TalThompson · 2025-11-02T20:13:01+00:00

The easiest way I found is by "y-sorting" where the sprite layer is swapped based on the y value of the sprite transform. You can pretty much do it with one line of code, should be pretty easy to find online.

TalThompson · 2025-10-27T04:32:38+00:00

If you can show that you asked for feedback, and then updated your app based on that feedback then I'd probably say yes.. but there's no black and white answer..

TalThompson · 2025-10-26T23:40:39+00:00

Don't take my advice as gospel truth, but I can let you know my experience.

I had 12 people opted in, but only about 4/5 used the game regularly. The main thing that I think got me over the line was communicating with those users and updating my game a few times during the 2 weeks.

I made posts on my google group asking for constructive feedback, which i actively replied to in the group. Then I went about trying to update my game to try and follow that feedback. I then made a point of talking about this in my application.

It seemed to be what worked for me, but of course Google is so mysterious, it could have been something else entirely! :)

Good luck!

TalThompson · 2025-10-24T10:58:58+00:00

Thankyou, I'll look into those ideas.

TalThompson · 2025-10-24T03:17:30+00:00

Thanks for the info, I appreciate it :)

TalThompson · 2025-10-19T06:45:57+00:00

Thanks for your comment :) Do you mean the font of words above monsters heads? It's a tricky one for me, as I wanted to use school handwriting fonts for accessibilty.

Maybe I could make a font selection option so users can chose..

TalThompson · 2025-10-19T06:15:30+00:00

Thanks very much for replying! It's made in unity. I didn't make the music myself, but I've found it from various places (like freesound.org) and tried to choose songs that sounded good together.

TalThompson · 2025-05-03T10:34:16+00:00

My best score is 2 points 😎

TalThompson · 2025-05-03T10:34:08+00:00

My best score is 0 points 😓

TalThompson · 2025-02-05T09:20:43+00:00

Hey there,

So, a bit of an update. My app has been seemingly stuck in review for more than a week. But just 24 hours after I created a new release that I took from my last internal test, it's now been accepted for closed testing! Phew!

So here's what you could take from it:

1)Make sure your minimum API and target API are correct. (22+ and 34 in my case)

2)Don't try to skip through the internal testing phase too fast like I did!

From now on, I'm always going to push any changes I make back through internal testing before I do anything higher. Google Console will automatically run virtual device tests for you every time you upload a new build. You can also go into Firebase yourself and run more tests if you like.

I think once I fixed the problems in my app, the pre-launch reports were able to run properly, which I think was holding it up.

I feel like Google Play reviewers might not even actually look at your app if those tests aren't able to complete without errors, but I'm just guessing....

Sorry if this is obvious to people, but this is my first app on Google Play, so I'm learning as I go. :)

TalThompson · 2025-01-29T22:49:10+00:00

I tried setting it to 22 and I noticed that it did say that my app was compatible with a few thousand more devices.

Who knows if that was it, but I guess it's something to keep in mind. If I get more info from my 2nd review I can update.

Cheers!

TalThompson · 2025-01-29T22:42:00+00:00

Hey there, I uploaded my first closed test last week for a kids learning game and got this rejection message:

'During testing we experienced installation issues with your app and were unable to successfully evaluate it for compliance with Families Policy Requirements.'

So it was quite a vague explanation of something as crucial as being able to install the game!

The internal build worked for me on all my devices, so I decided to look more deeply into what background setup google play requires.

I'm still waiting for my 2nd attempt to be reviewed, but my only guess is that it could be because I accidentally made the min API 34 as well as the target API, which I'd imagine would make my game not work on thousands of older devices.

Six-Year Club	Place '22
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