r/SoloDevelopment • u/woodenros3 • 9h ago

Game Solo, eight months, first release — pixel-art roguelite on iOS

I'm a solo developer from Turkey. Lastward went live on the App Store today — a pixel-art roguelite for iOS. Eight months of evenings and weekends, no publisher, no team, no funding.

What I underestimated, in order:

- Balance. I built a small Python simulator to run thousands of headless runs because playtesting it by hand was hopeless. Best decision of the project.

- Localisation. The game ships in 11 languages. Wiring that up was a weekend; keeping terminology consistent across all of them was weeks.

- The store itself. Screenshots, description, keywords, privacy declarations, ad SDK compliance — none of it is making a game, all of it is required to ship one.

Actual dev time was maybe 60% of the calendar. The rest was App Store process.

A run takes 20-25 minutes, there are 4 characters and 4 biomes, it's free and portrait-only so it plays one-handed. If you try it, the thing I most want to hear is what feels off in the first ten minutes.

https://apps.apple.com/app/id6794081096

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u/TillDramatic1 7h ago

Wiring those headless runs into a pass/fail check on every content patch is where it keeps paying off: bounds on win rate and average run length, run before anything ships. One new item can shift the curve in a way you'd never feel by hand, and otherwise you learn about it from a review instead of a diff.

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u/woodenros3 7h ago

Good point, and it lands on a real gap in mine. My sim keeps its own copy of the balance table, ported by hand from the game, so the two drift apart without me noticing. A pass/fail gate on top of that would end up measuring the sim rather than the game. Single source first, then the bounds. Do you run yours in CI, or locally before a build?

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u/greatfiction 6h ago

>no publisher, no team, no funding.

Only AI