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  • (2/3) My Wife and Kid Were the First Users — The Road to Trains Out’s First Penny (Dev Log Part 2)

    This is Part 2 of the series. Part 1 covered building a game in five hours and getting rejected by the App Store. Part 2 picks up from that rejection — introducing QA for the first time, passing the second review, and earning the first penny. And the strange question that penny raised.

    One Rejection Email Made Me Stop

    Version 1.0 was rejected for two reasons. First, an ATT handling bug. The second was more embarrassing — level 11 out of the 50 I’d built was unsolvable. The reviewer had tried it themselves on an iPad and couldn’t clear it. They included a polite explanation. They also asked me to record a video of ATT working on a real device for the re-review. As rejections go, it was a warm one.

    Working on 1.1, I thought about “QA” for the first time. With 1.0, I’d honestly thought — what’s the point of QA at this scale? I remember exactly where that arrogance cracked. Once I started carefully checking the two rejection reasons, other issues started appearing one after another. About three more hours went into it.

    QA Is Where I Started Seeing the Game

    The first thing I noticed was humbling. The game was too easy. “Why would anyone play this?” — I asked myself that out loud. I seriously considered scrapping the whole thing.

    Then I calmed down and looked again. With a clear head, small things became visible. The movement of a single finger, the hook of the first 30 seconds, that vague thing people call game feel. It felt like a senior game PD’s instincts waking up after a decade. If you ask me today whether this game is actually fun, I’d need more than a sentence to answer honestly. But in that short time, a lot changed — including one major pivot in direction.

    I resubmitted 1.1. The review took two days. The code took five hours, but human review time was 9.6 times that. I thought that ratio perfectly captured the asymmetry of the AI era.

    The approval email arrived.

    After Launch: “I Made This Too Carelessly”

    The joy of approval was short-lived. The day 1.1 went live on the App Store, I opened the game on my own phone and my immediate thought was — even for an experiment, this is too sloppy.

    I spent two days polishing. I’d added a system where watching an ad gives you two extra lives, but some of those ads were surprisingly inappropriate. When I opened the AdMob console, a completely different interface from a decade ago was waiting for me. Lots of settings, complex policies — more time gone.

    After all the fixes, the ads became kid-friendly enough for ages 4 to 9. That one sentence is the summary of the 1.2 update.

    The First $0.01

    At some point after 1.2 went live, the number on the AdMob dashboard changed from 0 to 0.01.

    The person who once built LINE Bubble to #1 on the App Store in eight countries — their first revenue over a decade later was one penny.

    Here’s what that penny really was. The first users were my wife and kid. Right after launch, the two of them opened the game on their phones, and their ad views became that one penny. As of this writing, about four days after launch, the total is just over $10. There are barely any users. That’s the honest number.

    A Déjà Vu from a Decade Ago

    When I was working as a VP, CTO, CISO, CPO — I was making big decisions and setting direction for hundreds of people. Now it’s different. I work alone, thinking only about myself. The weight is lighter. For the first time, I can think on my own terms, and that means I can do what I actually want to do.

    I only realized that was the real motivation behind this side project when I saw that first penny.

    And strangely, a scene from the LINE Bubble days came back to me. Back then, there was this unofficial challenge among us — “who can clone a hit American game the fastest.” When Don’t Touch the Spikes was trending in the US, I cloned it in 2–3 hours without any AI help.

    Over a decade later, I did the same kind of thing in five hours with AI beside me. Same kind of work, but not the same. Back then, the 2–3 hours were because my hands were fast. This time, the five hours were because the tool was fast — and pulling that tool all the way to the finish line still required the instincts from when my hands were the fast part.

    So What Changed

    Part 2’s conclusion is short. AI can code in this era, but commercialization is a different story. Policies, game feel, ad appropriateness, self-critique — none of these could be handled by AI alone. But when the human in the loop is a 25-year veteran, AI works at a terrifying speed.

    Part 3 continues with what came after launch — marketing, HOL4B.com, and the next experiments that have already begun.

    What You Can Do Right Now

    Always run at least one cycle of human QA on your AI-built first version. Even if it took five hours to build, spend one hour manually tapping through every screen. Seniors are especially prone to skipping this step. And don’t bolt on AdMob at the end — review the ad policies from the start. They’ve changed completely from a decade ago. If your target audience includes children, you need to manually restrict ad ratings.

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