Anime Song Quiz

Short description

A quiz game where you have to listen to anime songs and guess the title of the anime

Technologies

Kotlin, Android Studio, Firebase

The story

My sister and I are massive anime fans. We spent a lot of our early teenage years watching anime, and we loved anime songs. There was one game on the App Store in the early iPhone era called "Anime Quizz" (yes, with two z's) that my sister and I really liked. It was a quiz game where you had to guess the anime starting from a song, a character, etc. Right before my graduation, we saw that the app was no longer available, and we thought it would have been nice to build a similar game ourselves. So, she did all the design, I wrote the code, and we both worked on the content (gathering songs, cutting them, and associating them with the anime of origin).

I didn't know React Native existed at the time, so I thought it would have been better to release it on Android first. So, I downloaded Android Studio and started learning how to develop an Android app.

I already knew Java at the time, but I saw that the Android dev community was starting to transition to Kotlin, a better version of Java. So, I immediately jumped into learning it (it wasn't hard).

To be honest, aside from learning the tools, it wasn't very challenging. The most annoying part was actually creating the content. For the rest, it was a really simple interface; once you understood how to work with XML and stuff, it's pretty easy.

At some point, we realized that the bundle was too big because we put all the MP3 files locally in the app. So, I decided to move everything to the cloud. I used Firebase storage. And while we were at it, I also implemented a "tracking" system that allowed me to see how many people had completed each level.

The app actually did okay, 2000+ downloads. So, I decided to develop an iOS version using Swift. Not so hard, just learn an entire new language and replicate everything. The thing is, the app never got into the App Store because it is much more strict than the Google Play Store about copyright. I ended up fighting with the review team because they kept replying with robot-like messages about the issue. Apparently, 30 seconds of anime songs on an innocent mobile game would do irreparable damage to the Japanese music industry.

It was so much fun. My first real project that got used by people all over the world (mainly US, FR, LATAM and south east Asia). It even made me about €70 of ad revenue!