Dot Hero Is Out!
Dot Hero is out!
“Hihan. This… is what we made, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Hahaha. I still can’t believe it. We actually pulled it off, bro.”
Daniel’s eyes were red as he fiddled with the phone and launched the game. The intro screen and music for **Dot Hero** played, and he pointed at the screen with wild excitement.
“This! This intro melody! I spent an entire week erasing, composing, erasing, composing, erasing, composing…!”
“Chill out. I’m sorry. If it doesn’t hit you that hard, what can I do?”
“I’m not blaming you, bro. Thanks to you, this incredible melody came out. I’ll give you that. I was just getting way too hyped.”
It was true. Daniel and I had basically lived together while developing the game. The more detail we put in, the more obsessive I became about every tiny thing.
“Hey, tone it down a bit, man.”
“Daniel, you’ve been grinding for five months. Want to go home?”
“S**t! Fine! Fucking. Whatever, do it. Fucking Korean. Fucking Korean army. What kind of words are these? Korean military service man? They’re all the same.”
“Sorry, Daniel. The U.S. military is exactly the same. If you want to get laid, you gotta get laid.”
“F**k.”
We’d been living together in the same house for less than a year, and I couldn’t count how many times we’d fought. We’d even thrown actual punches and made up right away.
“I won that one, though.”
“Hey, Hihan. What’s the next step?”
“We have to go through review.”
“Review from a public institution?”
“No, from a company.”
We had to get our game approved at Apple’s App Store and Google’s Android Market.
At the time, registering on Android Market cost just 25 dollars—about 28,000 won today. And once you registered, it was free forever.
“How does that work?”
“Android Market is simple. You just upload it. As long as you don’t break the terms, there’s basically no review.”
“Oh. So Apple’s is different?”
“Yeah. A lot more.”
Unlike the laid-back Android Market, Apple’s App Store felt like Big Brother was watching. They squeezed developers’ necks tight.
First, unlike Android Market, you had to pay to register on Apple. Annual fee: 99 dollars, about 110,000 won.
‘Compared to Android Market, it’s like a thug.’
Second, their standards were insane. You needed an Apple Mac computer to even upload an app to the App Store.
“Apple. I thought you guys were a cool company, but you’re total jerks. That’s why we made two versions of the game, huh?”
“Exactly. Otherwise we wouldn’t even get approved.”
Daniel had scored a used Mac for cheap from a college buddy. It was expensive even used, but it was all our blood money—my salary had been delayed, so we’d saved a lot.
“And we had to go through the certification process. This part pisses me off the most.”
“Why?”
Step one: get a developer certificate. You had to prove you were an officially registered developer with Apple.
Why was it so annoying? The security software on Apple’s developer site was garbage. If anything went wrong, it would eat three or four hours.
“I already set that up beforehand.”
“Oh. Good. Just talking about it makes me annoyed.”
Next came the app ID and provisioning profile. It was complicated, but Daniel got it.
“Second step: we get an authentication ID from Apple saying this app is ours.”
“Just like signing up, right?”
“Yeah. But it pisses people off too.”
Every Apple device had a unique UDID. If even one digit was wrong, we had to start over.
We also had to attach a framework or engine proving we made the app. A development log would’ve been perfect, but Apple would still complain.
‘At least make the certification process smoother.’
They understood the idea of only letting verified apps get registered, but they made it ridiculously complicated.
“Next, we have to get the distribution certificate.”
“F**k. Again?”
“Yeah. Again.”
We had to get both developer and distribution certificates. Without them, Apple’s review team wouldn’t even open our game.
“Sigh… done.”
“It’s over?”
“Not yet.”
“Motherfuc—”
Daniel was grinding his teeth. Even though we’d failed at something, our game was still far from being ready for the App Store.
“Actually, the first part was just preparation. Now we’re in the real review stage.”
If Apple could fill their headquarters with developers who cried blood over these strict reviews…
The review team would tear our app apart, test it, and enjoy every flaw.
“You missed the UI guide line? You didn’t know it was one pixel off? Fix it. Next.”
“If you keep pressing the home button, a bug will appear. Your phone will crash. You’re trying to put scratches on a perfect iPhone? Fix it. Next.”
“Hmm. No bugs visible… but don’t get comfortable. We’ll fill every second of the review period and find every flaw in your app.”
Even after finishing the app, some games had their release delayed by a whole year because of this review.
‘Those bastards are monsters.’
After we finished the review, I said seriously to Daniel, “Go to church and pray hard. Please make sure there are no bugs in our game. And make sure the Apple review team gets hit by lightning on the way home.”
“Ummm. Okay, I’ll pray. So it’s over now? We’re releasing on Android Market the same day it gets registered on Apple?”
“Not over. And the Android Market version is already up.”
“What?! Really?”
Daniel opened the Android Market and typed “Dot Hero” in broken Korean.
“Hey. A problem! No matter how I search, our game isn’t showing up.”
“You have two accounts? You registered with the Korean one?”
“What?”
It was unbelievable, but our game—made by Koreans—couldn’t be released in Korea.
‘No game category…’
The bane of every domestic game developer. The Game Industry Promotion Committee was the culprit.
Whenever something weird happened in the Korean game industry, just point at those guys and 90 percent of the time it was correct.
“Then why did you add Korean language support?”
“Mobile gamers bypass accounts anyway and download it themselves. You’ll see it if you use your American account.”
“What? It’s being blocked? Then why did you block it in the first place? I can’t understand.”
“Just feel it. The Game Industry Promotion Committee is like that from the start.”
Daniel flipped through the phone, then suddenly jumped up and shoved it at me.
“Oh! Hihan! Found it! Found it! Dot Hero! Here it is!”
“Yeah.”
Daniel was jumping around, tapping the phone, confirming it connected and ran smoothly, then silently expressed joy. But a moment later, with a gloomy voice, he called me over.
“Hey.”
“What?”
“Our game seems broken. Download numbers aren’t rising. Only one download.”
I looked at him and chuckled.
“Daniel, that’s normal. Did you really expect thousands of downloads the day you uploaded it? You don’t know games at all.”
“Is this normal? The apps I know get thousands of downloads in a day.”
“They must have promoted it. We didn’t.”
I knew how weird this was too. Next, a big corporation, had plenty of marketing budget. This was the first time we were releasing a game with zero marketing money.
“Then we have to wait for users to spread the word? So when do we succeed?”
“Who’s waiting? We have to work. You should stop playing and work too.”
“What?”
The only form of promotion possible with a zero budget was this one.
“From now on, we’re turning into human macros to spread the virus.”
We’d go to big websites around the world and promote our game.
“E, even like this? We’re developers. We can’t pretend we’re not and do reviews.”
“What’s the problem? If we have no money, we have to do something.”
And it didn’t feel too wrong on our conscience.
‘Compared to probability manipulation, this is just cute.’
I hadn’t done the probability stuff myself. My seniors had.
‘They couldn’t even go home for days while crushing user anger.’
Anyway, we needed to teach Daniel the basics of viral marketing: shamelessness.
*
CHAT [Hey friends, bored friends, try this game!]
Author: Dan841217
A new game just came out on the Android Market. It’s pretty fresh and fun. It feels like a bullet-hell shooter, but the bullets aren’t just bullets—they’re monsters!
Plus, the growth system is the best part. Catch monsters to level up. That’s normal, right? But the abilities are random. Random ability cards pop up. It’s completely addictive!
(Picture)
Look! Fucking my Prism ability card? Prism, diamond, platinum, gold, stone. Prism ones don’t come out easily. I played for two hours and only got one. Higher stages have rarer cards. This will make people go crazy.
If you’re interested, try it. Game name is **Dot Hero**.
“I played it for five hours after seeing your recommendation. It’s pretty good! It’s simple but time flies. lol. thx, bro.”
“└Which character did you play, bro? I tried Abyss Mage, but is this game actually that hard?”
“└HAHA. Friend, there’s a difficulty indicator next to the character choice. Mage is the hardest among the free characters. I chose the easiest Android and beat Stage 4 boss in five tries.”
“Hmmmm. The reviews look pretty good. ‘Joy and Dan’ is a brand-new company I’ve never heard of, so I didn’t expect much.”
“└Friend, it’s not the company. It’s the names of the developers. Who made this fresh game? Turns out it’s Joy the programmer and Dan the sound artist.”
“└What? Just the two of them? The quality isn’t that good.”
“└lol. They must have put in a lot of time. I bought characters to support their hard work. Each character has different concepts and abilities. It’s fun to try them one by one. A bit expensive, but lol.”
“Hihan. This is true…?”
“Good. You’re doing well.”
“F**k. Is this true? Really? The writer is me, and there are 21 comments, but I wrote 11 of them!”
“That’s the charm of internet viral marketing.”
Self-viral marketing was embarrassing but helpful.
Even more so back then, compared to 2026 when I lived here, we were even more vulnerable to virality.
‘If we get caught, it’ll be embarrassing, but as long as we don’t, it’s fine.’
For this, I even bought a paid VPN.
“Daniel, your hand is shaking. Stop messing around and write the posts. Don’t just copy-paste the same thing. You have to keep varying the references.”
“Is this really that much work?”
“If you don’t want to, don’t do it. If you don’t, the game will fail.”
“S**t. Who’s not doing it? I was thinking what reference to use this time.”
Daniel was only doing English sites, so he was relaxed.
‘I’m already doing Korean, Japanese, and Taiwan too.’
Korean was my mother tongue, Japanese was native-level, and I asked my Chinese girlfriend’s friend for help with the weak Chinese.
“Hihan, a comment is suspicious, thinking this is promotion. What do I do? Should I deny it?”
“No. Then it’ll be obvious.”
“Then what?”
“I’ll turn that comment writer into a gamer idiot.”
“What?”
“Watch.”
I took the link and checked the suspicious comment.
“Hey, isn’t this too obvious? This looks like a paid review disguised as a game review. Did you pay the developers? I tried it and it’s not as amazing as you said. You just have to rate it average.”
“└Hans19332: lol. What kind of garbage is that? Paid review disguised as a review? I don’t care. If you made this game, you should be proud, right? That said, your eyes for games are terrible. Average? I get it. lol.”
“└Hey friend. What’s this about? Average? Who are you to talk about my level? You’re replying to the writer!”
“└Hans19332: It’s because you’re only swayed by visible things. You’re a game-idiot who doesn’t see the perfectly designed system hidden in the simplicity. lol. What kind of thing is it? Never mind. Forget it. I’ll play another game ^^”
“└H. Wait. I deleted it after 30 minutes. If I’d focused, I would’ve noticed. I’ll tear apart that ‘design’ of yours and give a proper criticism.”
Daniel was shocked as he looked at my work.
“E, is it really okay to do this? That person seems really angry.”
“What do I care? I’ll just complain. Even if it makes people want to install the game just to see what happens.”
“Hah. A devilish kid.”
“What do you mean devil?”
As expected, mentions of **Dot Hero** on the internet kept growing. Two weeks later, the results came in.
“1, 100,000…! This is amazing, right? 100,000 is a huge number!”
“Of course! I told you I’d do it! And this is just the beginning! Now users will spread it to each other without us even trying!”
The cycle had begun.