Tag Archives: app

Introduction to Hexa

I’m excited to announce that I just published Hexa, a game developed for iOS using objective-c. Much like the games I developed for Windows Phone it falls into the category of simple pattern matching within a short amount of time. The game is made of two core components: a pattern and an ever changing board of hexagons. As the board changes one must select hexagons that match the pattern and freeze them in place. As you match patterns you earn points and move onto new patterns. The difficulty increases as you progress and you’ll have to match bigger patterns with less time.

Each solution earns you points and resets the clock for the next pattern. Users have a shot of earning scores on both the all-time and weekly leaderboards.

This is the first iOS app I’ve published under my personal account, although I’ve been an iOS developer since college. This project was intended to be a fun way to brush up on the iOS SDK and publish an app to the app store, where there is a significant user base.

Introduction to Radii

Last week I published Radii, my latest game published on Windows Phone 8 & 8.1. It’s a memory recall and pattern-matching game. You are given sixty seconds and a board of circles. A collection of circles briefly expand and it’s up to you to swipe them before the next problem presents itself. You must be quick because the board regularly changes. The board grows, shrinks and rotates. As you find solutions you earn points and time is added to the clock. If you’re fast the points you earn are multiplied and you have a better chance to earn a spot on the global leaderboard.

I thought of the game while developing Squared. Squared’s difficulty was bimodal – it was too easy or too difficult and the moment the game becomes difficult many users were quick to give up. Radii’s game engine is much more dynamic than Squared because it continuously measures the users performance. The better a user performs the harder the game becomes. The worse the user performs the easier the game becomes. The goal of the dynamism is to keep the user engaged and challenged without feeling frustrated. My success criteria for Radii is to see that users play more games and play longer games than Squared users.

Also, I’ve had a lasting desire to build a service that powers an end-user experience so I decided to build Radii’s leaderboard service. It’s a service that’s been built time and time again but all of them seem to have their own nuances. Squared uses a friend’s leaderboard service – which doesn’t provide all of the functionality I desired. Although I may have been able to extend my friend’s service I took this opportunity to build an Azure web service from scratch and now I manage a live site service that’s completely in my hands.

Introduction to Squared

I recently created Squared, a game that was submitted to the Windows Phone 8 store. It’s a pattern-matching game. You’re given 60 seconds to match the corners of a small square with the corners of a larger square, which resides in a grid of many squares. As you find solutions you earn points and time is added to the clock. If you’re fast the points you earn are multiplied and you have a better chance to earn a spot on the global leaderboard.

There are a handful of reasons I created this app:

  1. Since college, I’ve always wanted to create a novel game.
  2. Last summer I read Eric Ries’ book, “The Lean Startup” which discusses how to build a minimum viable product (MVP) that needs to be instrumented to understand how many and if users like a product. I’ve been meaning to build a product instrumented to measure user interest.
  3. I became one of the resident ‘big data’ analyzers in my professional job. I work on a service that logs every interaction between clients and the service. This allows the feature team and business to glean important business intelligence and service intelligence. Since I’ve been writing scripts to process swaths of data, I’ve been motivated to collect event-oriented data in the software I create in my spare time. I’ll discuss this more in another article.
  4. I was interested in learning more about the Windows Phone 8 SDK. I was an iOS developer for about 2 years and I spent 8 months working on Android.

Squared Business Model

I originally planned to give Squared away for free. It wouldn’t include ads and nor would it include in-app purchases. These are the reasons why:

  1. I only download free apps on my smartphone and I believe this is true for the majority of smartphone users. I’d like to get a high download count.
  2. I don’t like ads inside of apps. They’re useful for putting food on the table as an app developer but I think they look tacky. I’m fond of Squared so I’ll put ads in a different app.
  3. I’ve never used in-app purchases before. I’ve never purchased items within an app and I’ve never set up in-app purchases in my own apps.

In the middle of development decided to add in-app purchases to Squared for a couple of reasons:

  1. I believe I can provide a premium experience without users requiring users to pay me anything and I can enhance the experience for those that choose to buy in-app purchases.
  2. I spent a fair amount of time developing the app and as an experiment I’d like to see what sort of monetary ROI I can get. 🙂