9 July 2020 by A. O. Faruq

Beginning of Sheekore

Stage: Procrastination

Hi! Let me tell you a few things about Sheekore after procrastinating for over a year. I was studying Mechanical Engineering BSc in Italy, and there they introduced me to programming in my first year. I learned C programming then and even though it was daunting at first, the concepts that were taught were interesting to me. Then, after passing the computer science course, I didn’t study any further due to my other course loads. There was a nagging thought in the back of my head that I wanted to build a software application, be it whatever. Later that year, the Flappy Bird craze began. I didn’t use to play mobile games back then much, but after playing that simple game I did enjoy it and, out of curiosity, wanted to learn how to make mobile games. I researched some game engines, but back then, most were not free to use and the free ones looked a bit daunting to me. So, I shelved the idea of making a game.

Stage: Started learning

Later in 2016, I stumbled upon a free game SDK (Software Development Kit) called back then Corona SDK and currently it is called Solar2D which has become open source recently. The Lua language used in the SDK was very intuitive and the simplicity of the Solar2D API helped me to learn the framework within a few weeks.I sketched up a few ideas for a simple game called SymTap, where finding an emoji from a bunch of emojis was the goal. The idea was very crude at that time and played with many aspects, from incorporating physics to various grid designs. I registered the domain sheekore.com in June 2016. Sheekore is a Bengali word which means root. I published the game on Google Play Store and learned the overall process from developing to publishing and promoting process. I spent overall around €300 at that time and the majority cost went into promotion campaigns. Since the game was just a learning exercise, I unpublished the game after a couple of months. Even though the game was simple, it was very buggy.

Stage: Fully into the Sheekore Project

I started working on a new game called Emoji Crush (before it was called SentioTap Emoji) where the first goal was long-term support of the game. After publishing the first version, I kept learning new programming techniques and started untangling previous spaghetti codes that I wrote before while incorporating new features, mechanics, grid layouts. The game was very buggy initially, but after one year of persistence coding, the game started to look more polished while being presented as simple as possible. After around one year, I started another project called Uh Oh a simple arcade car game where the player drives against the traffic. Diving into this project while developing Emoji Crush drained all the energy because of which fully finishing both the game took more time than anticipated as various bugs crept up slowly. Later on, I have decided to unify the core codes to reduce the number of bugs.

That’s all for today, but see you next time.