Tyler May ‘21 released the game Line Bouncer! on October 29 after months of work and problem-solving. May describes the game as “really simple” and a great “time killer.” The game now has 75 ratings on the Apple Store which gives Line Bouncer! a perfect five star rating.
May released the game under the developer name T Dizzle Studios LLC, which he used to release a previous game called Bounce Bros over a year ago. May created Line Bouncer! with a different coding language that he describes as “harder to use, but less limiting.”
While May’s primary motivation in creating a new app was simply because it’s an activity he enjoys, he does recognize the accomplishment as helpful for college applications as well as something that can count towards his AP Computer Science class. May describes the process of creating the app as very challenging, requiring about four to five months of work, because “I went into it relatively blind. I knew a decent amount but, I would say, not nearly enough […] Most of the people doing this stuff have four years of college education in it.”
Although he went into the process with little information, May was able to problem-solve his way through and improve his skills as an app developer through the process. May says, “I’m not good at this stuff at all. I don’t really know what I’m doing […] You start with basically nothing at all… you break it up into super small steps, start with what you know, and then when you run into a problem—which you’ll run into a million problems—you just look up the answer and try a lot of different things until it works.”
After releasing the app on iOS app stores, May was met with “great feedback.” But he found that Apple took down 40 reviews of his app and has been unable to contact Apple and learn why, despite their promise to app developer’s to respond to emails in one to two business days. As for the future of T Dizzle Studios, May says “I’ve just had such poor interactions with Apple that I don’t plan on doing much going forward until I figure out what their problem is” and why reviews have disappeared from his app.
