12 orbits is made with Unity, and it is a one button game. So in theory, it should be easy to build for any major platform. But of course, no two platforms are ever exactly alike, even if it seems like that on the surface.
I did not want to launch the game on iOS/Android/PC etc. at the same time because there are always unforeseen problems, and I did not want to deal with all of them at once. iOS was chosen as the first platform since I was least used to it and therefore was afraid it could be the most problematic. And I very much hope that I was right on that, because this is what the game looked liked after 5 minutes of play:
This is what getting careless looks like.
The free version of iOS broke down whenever ads were shown. In short, if you are interested in Unity ads, iOS and using screen.orientation, better choose only two of those, or you will have a bad time. Worse yet if you lock down the game until the ad ends. Because it wont. The two days after launch were not a lot of fun.
This is something I really should have caught before the game went online. But since I did not touch the ad system, I did not think to test it again. Fixing the screen orientation should be absolutely unrelated, but isn't. So the takeaway here is simple: Everything can affect everything, so test everything.
On the plus side:
Approval times for iOS seem to really have gone down from what I was prepared to see. After completion, the patch was online in hours, not days.
So if you need a local multiplayer game for up to 12 players on iOS, 12 orbits is now all yours and will hopefully no longer stop midgame. You can get it on the app store for free or ad-free. Android will be next, possibly this weekend. And after that, I will start the long march that is Steam Greenlight.
Have fun!
