Delta - Version 1.0 and Beyond

Sunday. April 08, 2018 - 4 mins

Naturally, 2 weeks after I wrote my last blog post promising updates every 2 weeks, I realized I was on Spring Break in Europe, and would be unable to write and publish one. “Not a big deal,” I thought, “I’ll just write one when I get home!” Then, of course, I find out there are a lot of assignments for school due in the couple weeks after Spring Break, so I ended up not having time to write a blog post then either….

Welp, I finally have a weekend free from my various projects, so here’s a blog post! 🎉

Since the last blog post emphasized being more transparent, in this post I’m going to continue with that theme and just detail why my life is so busy at the moment, and what that means for Delta now, in the immediate future, and beyond.

Why am I so busy?

The answer to this comes down to two primary reasons:

As it turns out, senior year of college is not the same as senior year of high school 🤷‍♂️ When I was a senior in high school, I was able to work on GBA4iOS 2.0 almost every day after school, allowing me to release the final version in February despite only starting it in July. As a senior at USC, my classes (unfortunately) have far more homework and assignments than my previous years of college, resulting in essentially an asymptotic situation; as time goes by, I continue to get closer to finishing Delta, but the progress is smaller and smaller 🙃
For the majority of my time not spent working on school assignments, I’m instead contracting for a small USC-based startup. I enjoy the work I’m doing—and most importantly it’s literally paying for my various student needs (s/o to student discounts though)—but it does mean I have even less free time I can devote to working on Delta 😔

What does the immediate future look like?

I’m just going to be honest. I have exactly 1 month and 3 days until I graduate, and unfortunately it will be filled with school assignments, final exam preparations, and misc. other things requiring my time, so it’s going to be very hectic for me. For that reason, I’m not anticipating making much progress on Delta (which I promise really bums me out too, because usually working on Delta is my reward for finishing my school assignments).

However, as an aside, one of the things keeping me busy is that next weekend my amazing sister is getting married! I could not be more excited for her or her fiancé, they make such an amazing couple! Hopefully you will all forgive her for having her wedding now and contributing to my continuously busy schedule :)

What about post-graduation?

Here’s where the good news begins: immediately after graduation, I have no obligations or plans whatsoever! Once I have my diploma in hand (and after a very short trip to Disney World), I’m planning on going home to Dallas and working on Delta non-stop.

In terms of remaining features, Delta really is almost finished. When I’m only able to work on it for a few hours every week or so, these features take a while to complete, but when I’m able to work on them for several hours every day, I can knock them out very quickly! For this reason, I am very confident that Delta will be released this summer. Trust me, I’m ready to get Delta out there and begin working on my next projects, so I’m going to do everything in my power to meet that release timeframe.

What happens post Delta 1.0?

The release of Delta 1.0 will finally be the end of this years-long endeavor, but that does not mean Delta itself be finished. Once 1.0 is released, I plan on maintaining and updating it just like I would with a normal App Store app, and I’m very excited about some of the updates I have in mind.

While this list is absolutely not definitive, here are some of the plans I have for Delta beyond 1.0 (in no particular order):

Nintendo DS support
Multiplayer support for SNES and N64 games
Native Apple TV support
3D Touch support in controller skins (so you can rest your fingers on the screen but buttons won’t activate unless you press harder)
Event Distributions (just like GBA4iOS)
Ability to search for popular cheat codes (rather than always having to find them online and type them in yourself)
Variable Fast Forward speeds
Custom filters to alter appearance of games

Thankfully, once Delta 1.0 is released, updates will take significantly less time to develop and release. I would love to even release a 1.1 update with some of these features by the end of this summer, but I’m certainly not going to commit to that given the history of Delta’s progress so far 🤷‍♂️

As always, thank you all for staying with me on this very long journey; knowing you all are excited for Delta helps me stay motivated throughout my incredibly busy final semester until graduation, after which I will be able to finally release Delta to the world 😃

Riley Testut

Independent iOS developer, USC student, and Apple fan.