Remember Talkie-Trivia? I just realized it has been four years since I first wrote about it.
I started working on it over two years ago, and it had been my main coding work daily since then. It is not an app that requires two years of work, but when you’re only spending 10-15 minutes a day on it without any urgency, it can add up.
But now, I have finally pushed through the finish line. I made an LLC and paid money to be a real company and am ready to release my project to the world.
I did basically everything I could to avoid actually releasing the product. I added tests, I re-architected things and stalled as long as possible. But, what is the point of making a game if no one is actually going to play it?
I turned to Firebase. I wrote my scripts in Go and have an attachment to Google for no real valid reason, but I also knew that I could get this app to production easily with Firebase.
I had to set up a billing account with my new company and then needed to move all the data to a database instead of a local JSON file.
I also needed to stop looking at production for my local testing. This introduced me to firebase emulators.
I created a local database and played around on my machine. I quickly realized I was storing too much data and needed to optimize my app size.
I felt more comfortable with the data I was working with and was able to switch to a server-side schedule of games. In my basic version, I just served up a random movie on start.
I was able to start testing out other things like user authentication and saving game history and streaks. I had to migrate to cloud hosted function to prevent data from being manipulated in the app itself. I don’t want users manipulating their stats and then uploading them.
I had to change my scripts to refetch movie data as there had been three years of movies that had occurred.
I then configured an Expo account so I could build android and iOS builds that I could release. I wanted nothing more than get to a place where I could actually have someone else be able to play my game. Whether that was via me emailing them a build or putting it up on the internet.
So I slapped it on the web: https://talkie-trivia-beta.web.app
There are five daily game modes in varying difficulty; from the exact movie description and four hints to a vague description with no hints and only three guesses.
Enjoy!
