When Munich publisher mixtvision Digital and the renowned german newspaper "Süddeutsche Zeitung" joined forces to bring one of their successful Pairs/Concentration games, "Das Gemischte Doppel", from the analogue to the mobile world I did not have to think twice which development environment to choose: LiveCode.

When the project was started around last Christmas, we - as the executive service provider - had gained sufficient experience with LiveCode over the last 2 years (in the sense that we did not have to consult the dictionary on every third line of code any more) to feel confident in our joint abilities. The demands for usability and animation seemed to be perfectly within the scope of LiveCode and although the project was targeted only for the iPad platform, we considered LiveCode to be a perfect choice to port to iPhone and Android with little effort later, if required by the customer.

The conceptional phase started around Christmas 2013 and the authoritative concept was approved at the 9th of January. We started art design and coding by January 13th, the first trial version was delivered to beta-testers just four weeks later. The voice recordings were done on Feb 20th at ToneWorx-studios in Hamburg and just 5 days later we uploaded the binary in iTunes Connect. The App passed its review on March 6th, 12 days before the intended publication date. The App was released by the client on March 18th and appeared in the top charts 24 hours later, making rank 2 in the children category and rank 24 in overall paid apps of the German App Store. We used LiveCode version 6.5.2 and XCode 5.1 and produced all graphics in full retina resolution.

This has been the fastest and smoothest development project for us in a while. The success of the App, of course, is mainly owed to the ingenious game idea, the fantastic design and some clever marketing efforts - but also to a tool, that allowed us to transform a product vision to a lean, working app at record speed.

You can try out the app for yourself in the German App Store, here, or visit the minisite here.