Vacation Time for iOS has been in development for what feels like forever. Until now, it was a hobby project that never really got the attention it deserved. Partly because life/work gets in the way, but mostly because I didn’t know what I was doing and I made plenty of mistakes.

In this thread I’ll take you through its origins and show the different directions I took while working on the game that is now called Vacation Time.

The first commit dates back to October 2013. My biggest mistake (that I’ve repeated several times, for good measure) was changing the theme and architecture to follow whatever style I was temporarily enamored with at the time.

Not to mention the classic developer pitfall of losing interest in a current project because something shinier is winking at my brain.

I started out with a game called Puzzle Expo. It would feature many puzzle types with many levels across separate grades, interdependent on on each and unlocking as you go. This was my first real independent project and I couldn’t be more excited.

I remember it being like a grand adventure. I would write code or import an image and it would appear and move around on the magical sheet of glass. Particularly SKTUtils by @raywenderlich made animations bouncy and elastic, and I loved every frame of it.

But my placeholder drawings started to annoy me. And although I made steady progress, boredom snuck up on me. I hadn’t consciously experienced it as a software developer before, so I was unprepared to counter it and Puzzle Expo became dormant. It was a hobby project, after all.