The Bin Chicken Has Landed

There is now a video game on the App Store and Google Play, with my company Sugarolly Mountain's name on it, and it is about an Australian white ibis that dive-bombs rats onto wheelie bins to pop the lids and steal the treats before the seagulls get there first.

I want to sit with that for a second, because a part of me still can't quite believe it. Not the ibis part, that felt inevitable the moment the idea landed. The 'it's shipped' part. For years these weekend builds of mine have lived and died on my own laptop, or at best got flung up onto the website for three people to try. This one I decided to actually put through the front door of the two biggest software stores on the planet. And to my surprise, the front door has a great many locks.

So this is the story of that. Not a victory lap, more a field report. Because the building of the thing turned out to be the easy, joyful bit, and the shipping of it turned out to be a month-long education in everything nobody warns you about.

First, the bird

The game is called Bin Chicken, which if you're not Australian requires a small cultural footnote. The bin chicken is the ibis: an Australian icon, a scruffy, bin-raiding, deeply unhygienic bird that has given up on wetlands and thrown its lot in with suburbia and our rubbish. It is a menace and a legend in equal measure, and it was crying out to be a game.

The loop is simple enough to explain in a sentence. You fly the ibis, you drop a rat onto a wheelie bin to pop it open, and you swoop down to grab the loot that flies out before a seagull nicks it or a garbage truck arrives and ends your run. One thumb, sixty seconds, one more go. From there it grew the way these things do: seagulls that steal, magpies that swoop you, dust devils, a possum you can grab off the power line for a bonus, suburban scenes that change as you climb, an outdoor-cinema level showing films with names like 'Lord of the Bins'.

All of that came together fast, and I'd be lying if I pretended I did it alone. I build these with my AI twin beside me the whole way, and the prototyping loop these days is genuinely a delight. Have an idea, watch it exist a minute later, feel whether it's fun, keep it or bin it. The build was the twenty percent. It was the fun twenty percent.

Then I got ambitious and decided to ship.

The eighty percent rarely blogged about

Here is the thing about a working game on your laptop: it is a lie of completeness. It feels done. It plays, it's fun, the art's cute, your partner or kids want another go. And then you try to give it to an app store and discover that "done" and "shipped" are, it turns out, entirely different postcodes, and the distance between them is measured almost entirely in bureaucracy.

"Done" and "shipped" turned out to be different postcodes, and the distance between them is measured in tax forms.

To sell a ninety-nine-cent purchase inside a free game, I needed a verified company, a DUN & Bradstreet number, a Google payments profile, an Apple developer org, bank accounts registered on both sides, and — my favourite — a United States tax form. Me, in Perth, filling in a W-8BEN-E "Certificate of Foreign Status of Beneficial Owner" so that America doesn't withhold tax on the handful of USA Players who might buy three extra lives for their bin chicken. There's a question on it about whether your company satisfies the treaty's "limitation on benefits provisions" under the "ownership and base erosion test." I am not making that phrase up. I had to ring my accountant about a bird game.

None of this is hard, exactly. It's just slow, and gated, and every gate has its own queue, and several of the queues don't tell you how long they are. You wait on a DUNS number. You wait on identity verification. You wait, once everything's finally active, for the payment systems to quietly propagate so the store even acknowledges your product exists. My beautiful two-week build sat in the departure lounge for the better part of a month.

The comedy of errors, an incomplete list

And then there were the genuinely daft ones, the ones you could not invent.

Early on, some test builds I'd run had quietly registered my app's identity under Apple's free "Personal Team" — which, it turns out, reserves that identifier globally and permanently, invisibly, where you can't get it back. So my perfectly sensible app ID was gone, burnt, unusable by my actual company account. Then the backup name I chose got burnt the same way. I ended up shipping under a third choice with an awkward suffix, having learned the hard way that on Apple's side, everything must go through the company account and nothing, ever, through your personal one.

Oh, and the name "Bin Chicken" was already taken on the App Store — reserved, as it happens, by my own personal Apple ID from a month earlier, so I was blocked by nobody but past me (I hate that guy :-). The game is called Bin Chicken Swoop on Apple as a result. Google, mercifully, let me keep the plain name.

The one that nearly broke me

But the real education was a bug. A small, stupid, cosmetic bug that took days.

On my phone, the purchase button showed the price as $0.99. But when you actually tapped through, Apple charged the correct Australian price of $1.99. Wrong on the button, right at the till. Maddening, and exactly the sort of thing a reviewer would bounce.

I chased it hard, and here's the humbling part: I was confidently wrong three times. First I decided the price fetch was firing before the store was ready, and added a retry. Didn't fix it. Then I decided the store was handing back an empty price string, and built the price from the raw numbers instead. Didn't fix it. Each time I had a tidy, plausible theory, and each time I'd built it on precisely no evidence, due to the store being a blackbox.

What actually broke the deadlock wasn't a cleverer theory. It was giving up on theories entirely and making the app tell me what it was seeing — a tiny diagnostic line, printed on screen, showing the raw data the store returned. And there it was: on newer iPhones the game uses Apple's newer purchasing system, and in the test environment that system was quietly resolving a United States storefront for the display price while charging the real Australian account. A test-environment ghost that would never touch a real customer. Three days, several wrong turns, and a genuinely embarrassing side-quest where the fix was right but an old cached build kept hiding it from me.

I'd built three convincing theories on no evidence. The fix only came when I stopped guessing and made the app tell me what it actually saw.

That's not a mobile-games lesson. That's the whole of debugging, and the whole of a lot of consulting, compressed into a bird. When something's misbehaving, the instinct is to reason your way to the answer. Reasoning is cheap and it feels like progress. But a plausible story built on no data is just a nicer-sounding guess, and I'd assembled three of them before I did the one thing that actually mattered, which was to stop talking and go get the signal.

Where the AI actually helped, and where it couldn't

People who read this blog will expect the AI angle, so here it is, honestly. My AI twin was in the trenches for all of it — not just the code, but reading the cryptic store errors with me, drafting my answers to the app reviewers, even helping me reason through the tax-form questions and the StoreKit ghost. It made the whole grind faster and, frankly, less scary.

But it's worth being clear about what it couldn't do, because that's the interesting bit. It could not make Apple's review queue move faster. It could not make my DUNS number arrive sooner, or the payment systems propagate quicker, or the tax form optional. All the cleverness in the world sat behind gates that open on someone else's schedule.

Which taught me something about where the bottleneck has actually gone. For years the hard part of a project like this was the building — could I even make the thing. That part has genuinely collapsed; a working, polished little game is now a weekend. The hard part has migrated downstream, to the shipping: the verification, the compliance, the review, the patient bureaucratic plumbing that connects a clever idea to a paying stranger. AI shrank the fun part and left the tedious part exactly where it was. The ratio has never looked more lopsided.

Was it worth it?

Yes. Obviously, embarrassingly, yes.

Because somewhere out there, right now, a person I have never met can search a store, find a game about a scruffy Australian bird raiding bins, and play the thing I made on a Sunday. That's a small and slightly ridiculous kind of magic, and it was worth every tax form to get to it.

And I've come out the other side with a whole pipeline I understand now, every gate mapped, every gotcha written down — which means the next one won't take a month. There are already two more games, a stunt-riding reboot of an old BBC Micro classic, and a card matching game, both sitting on the runway. This time I know where the locks are.

The bird has landed. Go on, have a swoop.

Bin Chicken is free on the App Store and Google Play, or play it right in your browser over on the Apps & Games page. More weekend experiments over there too, or head back to the blog.