Looks good. Can you give more details to us? Like what was biggest issue for you, did you do it full time or part time. How many hours average a week you would spend on it and how many downloads did you got thanks to HN?
I thinks those details would be very good to have!
Sure. The app actually went through several iterations. The first thing I developed was the main board of the game and it was definitely the hardest part (at least at the development side) since it needs to detect valid words. If you play around with it, you'll notice that you can form combinations of words that are linked together, so you basically have paths of words that might be connected to one of the fixed words through this path, and are thus valid combinations (hard to explain, but I think it makes more sense when you see the gameplay). Getting this logic right involved a couple of weeks of trial and error. On the bright side, it increase my vocabulary skills :).
Most of the gameplay was developed locally, without any backend. By the game I was sure I could get the gameplay right, I asked my friend to join me and work on the backend. So for the past 3 months more or less, we've been working on getting all of the endpoints right, and testing, testing, testing and more testing to make sure we could catch as many bugs as possible.
In terms of hours, we probably put in about 2 hours per day on weekdays and about an average of 5-10 hours during the weekends. In hindsight it looks like a LOT of time, but if you've ever done Android development, you probably know that the amount of time and effort that goes into testing the app on several devices, probably surpasses the actual development time.
I thinks those details would be very good to have!
Good luck with your success!