The Artist Fills Out a Standard Form

When I work on Doorak, I feel like an artist with complete freedom. I chose the project myself. Every decision is mine.

Doorak is not just another cookie-cutter card game. I designed a custom deck and created AI characters, each with a personality and lines of their own. The cards, the game table, and everything around them follow the same concept. So yes, artist and creator, more or less without quotation marks.

Then you open the publishing page in Google Play or the App Store, and the artist is handed a standard form.

Next come signing keys, platform rules, and a long list of questions. None of the tasks looks impossible. There are simply a lot of small details, and making a mistake in an unfamiliar process is unsettling. The brain soon suggests putting the whole thing off until later.

On Google Play, the game has entered its mandatory two-week testing period.

I also submitted the iOS version for review. It was rejected with a request for a video showing the app in action. While recording it, I found a network bug. I spent three days fixing it and submitted the build again.

The irony is that a formal procedure exposed a real flaw. Publishing is part of development after all. It just does a very convincing impression of somebody else’s job.

At a mid-sized or large company, this administrative layer is almost invisible because other people handle it. At a small company, you see more of it. For a solo developer, the entire company fits inside one person. This includes the department that moves unpleasant tasks to Monday.

Large language models and agents help a great deal here. They study platform rules, explain unfamiliar procedures, and point me in the right direction. Without them, I suspect the whole process could easily take months.

I do not have a proper system yet. I have a checklist, the weight of the work already done, and one recurring thought: “Everything is finished. There is only a little left. Oh. A little more.”

I have already travelled to Kazakhstan to set up banking infrastructure for my projects. Giving up over one more form would feel slightly undignified after that.

I am now training myself to treat publishing as part of development. After a few releases, it may become a normal stage of the job. For now, the artist fills out a standard form. Then another one.