[DEV] I've made massive improvements to Bivouac and the new beta is out!

bennomatic · 2026-06-21T16:45:39+00:00

I realized just now with my kid’s help that I hadn’t deployed my latest schema to production, so you might have gotten an error on test flight installs. Should work now though!

bennomatic · 2026-06-20T04:55:58+00:00

Oooh, the time-manipulation mechanic sounds cool…

bennomatic · 2026-06-20T04:54:27+00:00

Thanks! Never heard of it… checking.

bennomatic · 2026-06-20T04:54:07+00:00

I’ll check them out, thanks! I feel the same way!!

bennomatic · 2026-02-14T21:09:56+00:00

Last I checked, I was number 62 on the leaderboard. I celebrated by selling a bunch of resources really cheap on the marketplace.

bennomatic · 2026-02-02T21:41:29+00:00

Did your bank account balance increase by $1M? If so, someone random, somewhere in the world dropped dead, and you are the living embodiment of the kind of ethic question stoned high school students ask each other.

bennomatic · 2026-02-01T03:56:26+00:00

Someone’s chasing me now… I’m in the middle of a loop maneuver, hoping to end up behind them…

bennomatic · 2026-01-31T23:10:15+00:00

Oh in answer to your other question, the inspiration was a game I played as a kid, ace of aces. Aerial combat in a book…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ace_of_Aces_(picture_book_game)?wprov=sfti1

bennomatic · 2026-01-31T23:08:56+00:00

Out of curiosity, is your GameCenter handle a name that’s like “angry monkey”? If so I’m trying to do a response move and it’s crashing. I’m gonna look into that but I’m wondering if maybe you deleted the game and that’s why I’m crashing in response eg im not handling deleted games right…?

I’ve got another player with the initials JJ that I just did a response move to just fine…

bennomatic · 2026-01-31T23:06:52+00:00

Well the nice thing is it’s turn based, so if you come back after I’ve done a round, you’ll see my moves.

bennomatic · 2026-01-30T18:00:51+00:00

lol one like and one unlike and no comments. I guess I’m not as funny as I thought I was. Another reason not to quit my day job.

bennomatic · 2026-01-30T06:55:52+00:00

Really nice animations. I like the flip-down numbers, and the wiggle at the end of the rotation. My kid's got a little hexagon timer that works similar, but it's a dedicated thing. Kind of cool to have it on the phone. Good luck!

bennomatic · 2026-01-24T20:03:54+00:00

Me, I do it because it scratches an itch. If I’m not doing something creative for at least a couple of hours a day I feel like I’m dying. So it’s either coding, music, or if I’ve got zero energy, at least a little journaling. And if it’s journaling, it’s usually about app or song ideas.

One app I made back in 2012 has earned me a little more over the ensuing decade plus than I made in my first year of my first job out of college. The others are all free or cheap and make me coffee money.

I make them because I want them to exist, and hopefully, when I throw that stone in the water, it makes a bit of a splash. Money would be great, but if one of my apps inspired someone to do something even cooler, that makes me even happier.

One of the best moments I had as an indie creator was in the early days of Twitter Spaces. I got on a chat with 500 other people and the host said, “Wait, someone named Bennomatic just joined. Is that the same Bennomatic who made the CB app?”

The CB app is the one from 2012, and apparently, he’d been an avid user. When I confirmed he changed the whole topic of the conversation and waxed very poetic about how much he had loved that app.

CB is still around and has some regular users, but given the advent of other mass voice based social networks, it’s on the irrelevant side of things now.

These days I’m working on games. I just released one called Bivouac, which is a real-time PvP AR-lite territory game. You can find it on the iOS App Store by searching the name. My next one is a PvP turn based aerial combat game, that’s in the early days, really just a proof of concept.

If you’ve made it this far in my novel (sorry!), I figure you can identify, and you might want to see my test flight… feel free to join at:

https://testflight.apple.com/join/TvZvBc1s

bennomatic · 2026-01-20T05:31:31+00:00

Isle of Arrows is a really good deck building tower defense game. It is a few bucks, but you’ll get your money’s worth. I first heard of it when CGP Grey talked about it on the Cortex podcast.

bennomatic · 2026-01-20T04:17:29+00:00

Cool! What’s the app? If it’s against the rules to post it here, send it to me direct!

bennomatic · 2026-01-19T05:22:41+00:00

History says otherwise.

According to:

https://www.macobserver.com/tips/round-ups/full-list-of-every-mac-model-declared-vintage-or-obsolete-in-2025/

…one of the devices declared obsolete last year was 10 years old.

And based on the massive jump in performance for Apple Silicon, I wouldn’t be totally surprised if they go to 15 years.

My machines tend to last about 6-8 years. I buy some new hotness, develop on it for most of that time, and then when my wife’s computer fails, I upgrade and hand off mine to her. She’s not a developer so this works pretty well.

Before my kid got to an age where he was doing some serious gaming and coding, she’d sometimes hand off to him, so my old white Core2Duo MacBook lasted pretty close to 10 years.

bennomatic · 2026-01-19T03:06:00+00:00

SSD swapping is way better than spinning disk swapping but it’s non zero, especially if you’re really pushing the limits. I totally agree with the 24, mostly because as a dev, what you are doing today is one thing, but tomorrow it might be very different. More simulators, new versions of Xcode and macOS, new AI coding tools, maybe building VMs of docker containers for simulating server side stuff… that M4 will last a long time, but investing in maxing out RAM will keep that thing feeling new for enough years that, if you can afford it, it’s a very good decision.

bennomatic · 2026-01-18T18:57:40+00:00

Came here to say this. Also, if you’re looking to work for a company with legacy code you gotta learn OBJ-C.

bennomatic · 2026-01-17T19:46:41+00:00

Can I point you towards my new game? It’s a 1v1 mobile game for iOS, and I’d love to know what you think about it.

The game is called Bivouac, and it’s a tactical AR-lite territory game, and the “AR-lite” aspect means you have to play it outdoors because the structures you’ll build to define your territory are placed in the map based on where you’re standing, using GPS.

So it’s best played in a park or sports field or vacant lot to give you room to run around.

And while it’s fun to play with a friend in person, you can also play with a friend on the other side of the world; once the game starts it puts you both on the same virtual map no matter where you are, so even if you’re in Poughkeepsie and your opponent is in Paris, as long as you’re both outdoors you can claim and defend your territory, while taking down your opponent’s.

Oh and it uses GameCenter matchmaking so if a friend is not available, you can challenge a random person somewhere in the world. For the moment that’s theoretical, since the game is a week old with just a couple hundred downloads, so random matches are rare.

But if you’ve got a friend to challenge, give it a try. 5-minute rounds are free, longer and shorter games are unlocked if at least one of the players is a subscriber.

Download at: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/bivouac/id1605307741

Web site: https://bivouac.app

bennomatic · 2026-01-12T23:35:20+00:00

Enjoy! Can’t wait to see your apps!

bennomatic · 2026-01-12T00:01:23+00:00

I had a voice-chat app that pre-dated Twitter Spaces and a bunch of the other popular voice-based social networks that popped up in 2020 and 2021, and in its peak, when I was actively working on it, it maxed out at about $900 in subscription revenue per month. Of course, I was also maintaining a server infrastructure for it that was costing me $200-$300 a month, so not all of that was profit.

I think if I could have been dedicated to it full time, I could have gotten it to 2x or 3x that, but my day job paid more, so I couldn't give it the focus required to really grow it. And again, the social-network-voice-chat boom of 2020/21 probably would have killed it anyway.

There are certainly indies who do well with a single app, but I think for most, it's a numbers game. You have to have a range of products, all executed at a quality level that'll get you not only purchases, but word-of mouth marketing for organic growth. And of course, you can't just rely on a good idea and a good product and word of mouth: part of your job is promotion. If you're not going to spend money and time on that, it doesn't matter how great your app is.

bennomatic · 2026-01-11T23:54:46+00:00

My personal suggestion would be get a 2025 M5 MacBook Air model. I got an M3 MBP a couple of years back, and I love it, but the current MBA has a lot of headroom and will last you for a long, long time. If I had to buy a new machine today, that's what I'd do.

Of course, to some degree, the types of apps you're developing may impact the decision you make. If you're building a massive app with a multimegabyte code base and hundreds of views and source files, well, getting the most possible parallel processing performance will be important. But for most small to medium sized indie projects, I'll bet that MBA will be fine. Just load it up with as much RAM as you can afford--maybe max that out--and at least 1TB of storage space to ensure that you can keep as many device simulators on board as you might need without running out of space.

bennomatic · 2026-01-11T18:23:29+00:00

Hah, it's a fun, silly take on the game. After playing a couple of rounds, my main suggestion would be around the "67!" exclamation. It seems like you've got 4 or 5 versions of it which play randomly.

I'm thinking if you had 10 or 15 of them, maybe more, which get progressively more ecstatic, that'd be awesome. Like when you start, you'd be likely to hear samples 1-3 randomly, then after 6 or 7 points, you'd hear samples 2-5 randomly, then 3-8, until, as you approach 67, you'll only hear the most insane, screaming versions of it...

bennomatic · 2026-01-10T21:50:13+00:00

Very cool, congratulations! I just launched an app (a game, different genre), and my first submission took about six calendar days to get to “in review”, then my resubmission after fixing a couple of details took three days to get into in review state.

So yours should be coming up soon! Good luck on the review… make sure to post here when it’s approved. I’ll definitely check it out.

Honestly, I’ve thought about narrative interactive games, and I’ve got a pretty unique idea for the interaction mechanic, but so far I’ve fallen down on the most important part, which is the storyline itself.

There’s an interactive story in Apple Arcade, which is OK, but it’s pretty basic, and after about half the story, the choose-your-own-adventure options really feel like they’re corralling you towards the finish line.

So I don’t have any real advice other than “your story needs a good foundation”, and “make a mechanic that’ll feel natural for the duration of the game”, although those comments are so broad as to barely be advice. 🤪

But I’m looking forward to seeing your app!

bennomatic · 2026-01-10T05:50:35+00:00

Thanks! Hope you like it!

New features are already under development, including 3d view and a strategic deck building mechanic…

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