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6 episodes with amir rajan
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Ready to unlock the secrets of game development using Ruby? Join us as we chat with the ingenious Amir Rajan, the mastermind behind the DragonRuby Game Toolkit. Amir takes us on a captivating journey from his corporate days in app development to becoming a trailblazing indie game developer. You'll be amazed at how Amir leveraged Ruby's expressive power to create innovative games and how his monumental success with the iOS port of "A Dark Room" reshaped his career. Prepare to gain an insider's perspective on the unique challenges and rewarding experiences of adapting Ruby for the gaming world.Ever wondered what it takes to test a real-time game with precision? Amir sheds light on the stark contrasts in testing between app development and game creation. Listen as he breaks down the complexities of managing long-running states, debugging frame-perfect bugs, and implementing replay systems for maintaining consistent gameplay experiences. Using a racing game as an example, Amir explains the intricacies of regression testing in game development, offering a fascinating glimpse into the meticulous world of game testing.Curious about what it takes to create a successful hyper-niche game? Discover Amir's strategic approach to captivating players within the first 20 seconds and crafting a minimum viable product (MVP) that stands out. Drawing inspiration from literature and focusing on underserved communities, Amir shares the potential of niche game concepts—without competing with big-name studios. He also tackles common misconceptions about Ruby's speed, demonstrating with DragonRuby how a well-implemented runtime can rival even the fastest engines. This episode is packed with invaluable insights for both aspiring and seasoned developers, bridging the gap between app and game development in innovative ways.Send us some love.Support the Show.Ready to start your own podcast?This show is hosted on Buzzsprout and it's awesome, not to mention a Ruby on Rails application. Let Buzzsprout know we sent you and you'll get a $20 Amazon gift card if you sign up for a paid plan, and it helps support our show.
Have you ever been frustrated with your job? Maybe not burnt out, but getting close to there? You used to love what you did, and it felt so creative and empowering, but then it starts to feel a bit more cookie cutter. Have you ever been frustrated with your whole life? The daily grind has taken what you love and it just doesn't feel the same anymore. Some of the magic just has slowly faded away. You don't know when it started, but it did. Today's guest is Amir Rajan. He's hard to describe. Is he a developer? Yes. An artist who sold everything that he owned for indie game development. Yes. The subject of a New Yorker profile? Yes, all of that. And also, somebody who got frustrated with his life and left everything behind. Episode Page Support The Show Subscribe To The Podcast Join The Newsletter
On this episode of Remote Ruby, Jason, Chris, and Andrew welcome guest, Amir Rajan, an indie game developer and owner/CEO of DragonRuby LLP. Today, our conversations revolve around game development using RubyMotion and DragonRuby. We'll hear how Amir built a successful iOS game called, A Dark Room, using RubyMotion, and his experience with RubyMotion and its expansion to target other platforms, leading to the creation of DragonRuby Game Toolkit. There's a discussion on the challenges of targeting different platforms and the benefits of DragonRuby's data-oriented API, scalability, and continuity of design. Amir touches on the benefits of game development, the possibility of making a living from it, and he shares some advice for indie game developers. The importance of sustainability in open source development is emphasized, and Amir tells us about some upcoming features in DragonRuby, and he explains his reasoning for charging for DragonRuby. Hit download to learn more! [00:01:28] Amir talks about his experience using RubyMotion to build a successful iOS game called, A Dark Room, and about acquiring RubyMotion and expanding its runtime to target other platforms, which led to the creation of DragonRuby Game Toolkit. [00:06:21] When it comes to RubyMotion, Amir explains that you still need to learn some of the iOS frameworks to implement it in Ruby.[00:09:10] We hear Amir's thought process behind acquiring RubyMotion and how taking over a runtime has been for him. He emphasizes the importance of understanding foreign function interfaces and building C extensions in Ruby to take advantage of battle-hardened C libraries. Also, there's a great book he read that really helped him understand the machinery and language called, Ruby Under a Microscope. [00:11:52] Amir discusses the challenges of targeting different platforms with RubyMotion and the difficulties of integrating new language enhancements into the runtime. [00:14:02] We learn how DragonRuby utilizes MRuby to create a multi-level runtime that handles constructs that don't exist on different platforms and 90komprovides a cross-platform experience for game development without any assumptions about the platform.[00:19:15] Amir dives into the problem DragonRuby solves and why someone would want to use it, besides it being awesome and that you get to build video games in Ruby.[00:21:59] Jason loves how simple DragonRuby is to get started so Amir explains the simplicity behind it versus Unity. The continuity of design is emphasized which allows developers to start with simple solutions and expand as necessary. [00:27:30] The conversation touches on the benefits of game development and the possibility of making a living from it.
Welcome to Remote Ruby and thanks for joining us! It's Jason and Andrew today and do they have so much to talk about. RailsConf 2023 is coming up, Andrew booked his flight and lodging early, Jason announces he's doing a podcast with Brittany while they're there, and the guys discuss how their ADHD is so different from each other. Then they discuss npx, the benefits of using it, and how it can be useful in Ruby. Jason and Andrew talk about building user interfaces in Ruby, creating games with DragonRuby, learning Rust and Python for hardware projects, and using OpenAI API for Ai projects. We'll also hear about their programming backgrounds, not liking math, regrets about not taking a statistics class seriously, and experiences with other college classes. Press download now to hear more! [00:04:19] The guys are excited to go to RailsConf but Jason's feeling socially anxious since he had surgery. [00:06:03] Andrew explains what Hashnode is since Jason has no idea what it is.[00:06:28] In the wonderful world of Ruby, Andrew's been scripting lately since he wanted to have fun, and if you don't know what npx is, he explains what it is. Jason and Andrew also discuss using npx with Tailwind and esbuild, [00:11:09] Jason brings up using standards VS Code extension and mentions how surprisingly fast it is.[00:13:35] Jason mentions Nick Schwaderer taking on building a new Shoes project, which was a GUI graphic user interface library for Ruby, built by, why the lucky stiff. It looks like their using WebView, and if anyone can explain it, please Tweet Andrew on Twitter or message him on discord. [00:15:17] The guys talk about building user interfaces in Ruby, creating games with DragonRuby, and a Tweet by Amir Rajan about DragonRuby.[00:20:35] Jason tells us about trying to learn Rust and Python for hardware projects, and Andrew tells us about a widget he built using Rubyist.[00:22:28] There's a discussion on using OpenAI API, Andrew has an interest in creating a profitable business with web3 technology and AI, Jason mentions “Ask Rails,” an Open AI powered chat to help you with all things Ruby on Rails.[00:25:42] The conversation shifts to Jason and Andrew's programming backgrounds and their interest in using Ruby for hardware projects. [00:29:34] Have you heard of PicoRuby? Also, if you know mRuby, please reach out to Jason or Andrew because they need to talk to you.[00:31:50] Andrew was asked to be a Guide at RailsConf, saw the email too late, and he's not doing it because of his commitment issues.[00:34:37] Jason and Andrew discuss their rabbit holes. One is about a speech professor, the other is being back on Khan Academy filling gaps in math knowledge, and regrets about not taking statistics class seriously and other classes. Panelists:Jason CharnesAndrew MasonSponsor:HoneybadgerLinks:Jason Charnes TwitterChris Oliver TwitterAndrew Mason TwitterRailsConf 2023HashnodeAmir Rajan TwitterDragonRubyAsk Railsnpx-GitHubSearls After Dark #1-ChatJPN (YouTube)ShoesRubyistOpenAI APIPicoRuby-GitHubRuby Radar TwitterRuby for All Podcast
Game Developer and CEO of DragonRuby, Amir Rajan returns to the show. He joins the rogues to talk about DragonRuby. DragonRuby is a zero dependency, cross-platform, Ruby runtime built on top of mRuby, libSDL, and LLVM. Additionally, Amir talks about how it allows you to use the Ruby language to build video games. He also shares his experiences when it comes to working with mruby.About this Episode All about DragonRuby Building VR games using Ruby Runtime and how it works Sponsors AppSignal Developer Book Club starting with Clean Architecture by Robert C. Martin Become a Top 1% Dev with a Top End Devs Membership Links 272 RR Game Development and RubyMotion with Amir Rajan RR 333: RubyMotion and the Aesthetic of Ruby with Amir Rajan RUBYMOTION DragonRuby Flappy Dragon by DragonRuby mruby Simple DirectMedia Layer Ryan C. Gordon's Homepage fiddle.dragonruby.org Chipmunk2D Physics Toby Fox GitHub: DragonRuby/dragonruby-game-toolkit-contrib Intro to DragonRuby Game Toolkit Pico-8 Fancine Duelists amirrajan.net Twitter: @amirrajan Picks Amir - Project Hail Mary Amir - We Are Legion (We Are Bob) Amir - The Broken Earth Trilogy Charles - King of Tokyo Charles - Command your coding career Charles - Rails Remote Conference 2023 Luke - UTM Luke - Modules! Magnets! MiRage Mk3: The Mechanical Keyboard You're Meant to Modify! Luke - Real Hardware Hacking (with a hacksaw): My New Wearable Computer Valentino - Apple Watch Ultra
Game Developer and CEO of DragonRuby, Amir Rajan returns to the show. He joins the rogues to talk about DragonRuby. DragonRuby is a zero dependency, cross-platform, Ruby runtime built on top of mRuby, libSDL, and LLVM. Additionally, Amir talks about how it allows you to use the Ruby language to build video games. He also shares his experiences when it comes to working with mruby.About this Episode All about DragonRuby Building VR games using Ruby Runtime and how it works Sponsors AppSignal Developer Book Club starting with Clean Architecture by Robert C. Martin Become a Top 1% Dev with a Top End Devs Membership Links 272 RR Game Development and RubyMotion with Amir Rajan RR 333: RubyMotion and the Aesthetic of Ruby with Amir Rajan RUBYMOTION DragonRuby Flappy Dragon by DragonRuby mruby Simple DirectMedia Layer Ryan C. Gordon's Homepage fiddle.dragonruby.org Chipmunk2D Physics Toby Fox GitHub: DragonRuby/dragonruby-game-toolkit-contrib Intro to DragonRuby Game Toolkit Pico-8 Fancine Duelists amirrajan.net Twitter: @amirrajan Picks Amir - Project Hail Mary Amir - We Are Legion (We Are Bob) Amir - The Broken Earth Trilogy Charles - King of Tokyo Charles - Command your coding career Charles - Rails Remote Conference 2023 Luke - UTM Luke - Modules! Magnets! MiRage Mk3: The Mechanical Keyboard You're Meant to Modify! Luke - Real Hardware Hacking (with a hacksaw): My New Wearable Computer Valentino - Apple Watch Ultra
[00:04:42] We find out if the guys done any stuff with Rails 7 yet and Chris tells us what's been going on with it. [00:09:44] Chris asks the guys if they are using an encryption library, and Jason talks about using Lockbox and Symmetric Encryption. [00:14:08] Chris tells us more about progressive encryption in Rails 7. [00:15:11] The guys chat about Ruby 3.1 and the new project from Shopify getting merged into Ruby called YJIT, which is an open source JIT compiler for CRuby.[00:18:43] The conversation turns to TenderJIT and Jason brings up a Tweet from tenderlove about it. There is a livestream Aaron Patterson did with hexdevs that he did about it this stuff.[00:22:23] Jason talks about using a tenderlove gem called “dnssd.” [00:26:40] Andrew tells us about an app called Rubyist 1.0, where you can write your own Scripts, system commands, and write your own widgets and stuff with Ruby to automatically trigger lights. [00:31:18] Andrew announces they are giving out free RubyConf tickets on Ruby Radar. [00:34:54] Chris shares some nostalgia when he was in high school learning to code and how the calculator keyboard was the worst. [00:37:08] The guys chat about DragonRuby, Amir Rajan who works on DragonRuby, and Matthew McKinney who made a Tetris game with DragonRuby.Panelists:Jason CharnesChris OliverAndrew MasonSponsor:HoneybadgerLinks:Ruby Radar NewsletterRuby Radar TwitterYJIT- Building a new JIT Compiler inside CRuby with Maxime Chevalier-Boisvert (YouTube)hexdevs-TenderJIT: A JIT compiler for Ruby with Aaron Patterson (tenderlove)TenderJIT-GitHubdnssd gem-GitHubRubyist 1.0 AppAmir Rajan Twitter (DragonRuby)Matthew McKinney Twitter (DragonRuby)
Amir tells Jonathan and Nick about Dragon Ruby, his experiences with making games, playing them, and wondrous digressions. http://amirrajan.net/7-lessons-from-7-years-of-indie-game-dev/ http://dragonruby.org/ Dragon Ruby Game Toolkit Performance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UuY7CWdvyWM https://yzcroshaw.itch.io/the-life-of-erich-zann Perception game documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29kCOc6LjnY https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryan_C._Gordon
Relicans host, Rachael Wright-Munn talks to full-time indie game developer and creator of A Dark Room iOS, Amir Rajan. This RPG conquered the world and took over the Number 1 spot in the App Store, and placed in the Top 10 paid apps across 70 countries. Amir is also the CEO of DragonRuby LLP, creators of DragonRuby Game Toolkit and RubyMotion.Should you find a burning need to share your thoughts or rants about the show, please spray them at devrel@newrelic.com. While you're going to all the trouble of shipping us some bytes, please consider taking a moment to let us know what you'd like to hear on the show in the future. Despite the all-caps flaming you will receive in response, please know that we are sincerely interested in your feedback; we aim to appease. Follow us on the Twitters: @PolyglotShow.
Amir speaks with Jonathan and Nick about A Dark Room on the Nintendo Switch, the saga of the secret programmability within, and whether Nintendo can take a joke. This is part 2 of our Amir Rajan double-feature.
Jonathan and Nick discuss Nier Automata with Amir Rajan, games, philosophy, and everything. We ended up recording for two hours, of which this is the first. We get really deep into this, and you won't regret listening.
02:27 - Amir’s Superpower: Sensitivity to Development Pain A Picture of Amir’s Keyboard and Battlestation (https://twitter.com/amirrajan/status/1172565179806224384) Eye Tracker (https://www.tobii.com/) 06:59 - Developer Productivity and Breaking Constraints Magic Leap (https://www.magicleap.com/) 16:58 - Idea Flow 21:00 - Building an Environment That Enables You File Watching Automating Leverage 28:18 - Optimizing Local Maxima Bret Victor: The Future of Programming (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pTEmbeENF4) Delta Time 41:01 - Questioning Fundamental Assumptions Continuity of Design™️ Gradual Stiffening 46:55 - Game Development Unity (https://unity.com/) 56:05 - Extremeness and Pushing Boundaries: Being a Weirdo/Being an Outlier/Thinking Differently Off Meta, Super Smash Brothers Melee Gods (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJrEhy4ya74) Meta and Off Meta DragonRuby Game Toolkit Sandbox (http://fiddle.dragonruby.org) Reflections: Jess: “A pin on my upkeeps.” Avdi: Meta and off meta. John: Continuity of design. Rein: Continuity and discreteness. Janelle: Process-oriented thinking. Amir: Being consistent with philosophies. This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps, LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode) To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Amazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks! Special Guest: Amir Rajan.
Sponsors Sentry use the code “devchat” for 2 months free on Sentry small plan Triplebyte offers a $1000 signing bonus Cachefly Panel Nate Hopkins Dave Kimura Andrew Mason Charles Max Wood Joined by Special Guest: Lori Olson Summary Lori Olson introduces herself, her school and ruby motion. Lori invites all to come to her webinar introducing her “six steps from idea to app store”. The panel discusses their rubymotion experiences and issues; which Lori advises on gems that will help. Lori shares her introduction to ruby and the story of writing her book.The evolution of rubymotion is shared leading the panel to discuss dragon ruby, the rebranding of rubymotion, which will be open sourced. Lori discusses her views of open sourcing and talks about her experiences in the rubymotion community; Amir Rajan, the owner of rubymotion, and his role and success in rubymotion are discussed. The panel considers flows potential and discusses the best way to develop for IOS and android. Links https://wndxschool.easywebinar.live/registration http://www.rubymotion.com/news/2019/03/01/the-sleeping-dragon-has-awoken.html https://github.com/infinitered/redpotion http://rubymotionquery.com https://wndx.school/p/rubymotion-jumpstart https://github.com/rubymotion/BubbleWrap https://rubymotionweekly.com https://www.reddit.com/r/ruby/comments/aovm41/a_renaissance_for_ruby_rubymotion_will_be/ http://macruby.org/ https://github.com/amirrajan/rubymotion-templates https://github.com/infinitered/bluepotion https://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/wimby/id1147353955?mt=8 https://wimby.ca https://wndx.school/p/6-pack-apps https://coredatainmotion.com/ https://motioneers.herokuapp.com https://devchat.tv/iphreaks/161-ips-successful-indie-ios-game-development-with-amir-rajan/ https://devchat.tv/ruby-rogues/272-rr-game-development-and-rubymotion-with-amir-rajan/ https://www.twitch.tv/amirrajan https://kotlinlang.org/ https://devchat.tv/iphreaks/172-ips-kotlin-vs-swift-with-andrew-rahn/ Picks Nate Hopkins https://www.focusatwill.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psych Dave Kimura https://nucleoapp.com/ https://calendly.com Andrew Mason https://www.codewithjason.com/rails-testing-book/ https://twitter.com/josh_cheek Charles Max Wood www.vrbo.com www.audible.com Lori Olson https://alteregoeffect.com https://www.jetbrains.com/ruby/
Sponsors Sentry use the code “devchat” for 2 months free on Sentry small plan Triplebyte offers a $1000 signing bonus Cachefly Panel Nate Hopkins Dave Kimura Andrew Mason Charles Max Wood Joined by Special Guest: Lori Olson Summary Lori Olson introduces herself, her school and ruby motion. Lori invites all to come to her webinar introducing her “six steps from idea to app store”. The panel discusses their rubymotion experiences and issues; which Lori advises on gems that will help. Lori shares her introduction to ruby and the story of writing her book.The evolution of rubymotion is shared leading the panel to discuss dragon ruby, the rebranding of rubymotion, which will be open sourced. Lori discusses her views of open sourcing and talks about her experiences in the rubymotion community; Amir Rajan, the owner of rubymotion, and his role and success in rubymotion are discussed. The panel considers flows potential and discusses the best way to develop for IOS and android. Links https://wndxschool.easywebinar.live/registration http://www.rubymotion.com/news/2019/03/01/the-sleeping-dragon-has-awoken.html https://github.com/infinitered/redpotion http://rubymotionquery.com https://wndx.school/p/rubymotion-jumpstart https://github.com/rubymotion/BubbleWrap https://rubymotionweekly.com https://www.reddit.com/r/ruby/comments/aovm41/a_renaissance_for_ruby_rubymotion_will_be/ http://macruby.org/ https://github.com/amirrajan/rubymotion-templates https://github.com/infinitered/bluepotion https://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/wimby/id1147353955?mt=8 https://wimby.ca https://wndx.school/p/6-pack-apps https://coredatainmotion.com/ https://motioneers.herokuapp.com https://devchat.tv/iphreaks/161-ips-successful-indie-ios-game-development-with-amir-rajan/ https://devchat.tv/ruby-rogues/272-rr-game-development-and-rubymotion-with-amir-rajan/ https://www.twitch.tv/amirrajan https://kotlinlang.org/ https://devchat.tv/iphreaks/172-ips-kotlin-vs-swift-with-andrew-rahn/ Picks Nate Hopkins https://www.focusatwill.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psych Dave Kimura https://nucleoapp.com/ https://calendly.com Andrew Mason https://www.codewithjason.com/rails-testing-book/ https://twitter.com/josh_cheek Charles Max Wood www.vrbo.com www.audible.com Lori Olson https://alteregoeffect.com https://www.jetbrains.com/ruby/
Sponsors Sentry use the code “devchat” for 2 months free on Sentry small plan Triplebyte offers a $1000 signing bonus Cachefly Panel Nate Hopkins Dave Kimura Andrew Mason Charles Max Wood Joined by Special Guest: Lori Olson Summary Lori Olson introduces herself, her school and ruby motion. Lori invites all to come to her webinar introducing her “six steps from idea to app store”. The panel discusses their rubymotion experiences and issues; which Lori advises on gems that will help. Lori shares her introduction to ruby and the story of writing her book.The evolution of rubymotion is shared leading the panel to discuss dragon ruby, the rebranding of rubymotion, which will be open sourced. Lori discusses her views of open sourcing and talks about her experiences in the rubymotion community; Amir Rajan, the owner of rubymotion, and his role and success in rubymotion are discussed. The panel considers flows potential and discusses the best way to develop for IOS and android. Links https://wndxschool.easywebinar.live/registration http://www.rubymotion.com/news/2019/03/01/the-sleeping-dragon-has-awoken.html https://github.com/infinitered/redpotion http://rubymotionquery.com https://wndx.school/p/rubymotion-jumpstart https://github.com/rubymotion/BubbleWrap https://rubymotionweekly.com https://www.reddit.com/r/ruby/comments/aovm41/a_renaissance_for_ruby_rubymotion_will_be/ http://macruby.org/ https://github.com/amirrajan/rubymotion-templates https://github.com/infinitered/bluepotion https://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/wimby/id1147353955?mt=8 https://wimby.ca https://wndx.school/p/6-pack-apps https://coredatainmotion.com/ https://motioneers.herokuapp.com https://devchat.tv/iphreaks/161-ips-successful-indie-ios-game-development-with-amir-rajan/ https://devchat.tv/ruby-rogues/272-rr-game-development-and-rubymotion-with-amir-rajan/ https://www.twitch.tv/amirrajan https://kotlinlang.org/ https://devchat.tv/iphreaks/172-ips-kotlin-vs-swift-with-andrew-rahn/ Picks Nate Hopkins https://www.focusatwill.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psych Dave Kimura https://nucleoapp.com/ https://calendly.com Andrew Mason https://www.codewithjason.com/rails-testing-book/ https://twitter.com/josh_cheek Charles Max Wood www.vrbo.com www.audible.com Lori Olson https://alteregoeffect.com https://www.jetbrains.com/ruby/
In this episode of Building Infinite Red, we are talking about clients and some of the assumptions that often need to be challenged when creating software. Throughout the episode, Todd, Ken, and Jamon touch on the importance of knowing who your audience is, what they value, and how your ideas will meet their needs. Show Links Dropzones App Release by Mark Rickert A Dark Room by Amir Rajan Uncommon Sense by Derek Sivers Episode Transcript CHRIS MARTIN: Today we are talking about clients. It's an important topic and one that pretty much every business owner inevitably gets asked a variety of questions. The question that we could start with is: what's your favorite moment in working with clients? JAMON HOLMGREN: You would think it would be when you launch their app or their site, or something like that, but I often find that actually to be a little bit anti-climactic 'cause there's so much going on. There's usually already plans in place for a version 1.1. It's not usually like everybody gather around the big green button and then the founder pushes the button, and it goes live. Although a little side note, Mark Rickert, who is one of our developers has released an app to the app store while in free fall during a skydive. That is true. We can link to it and there's a YouTube video of it. But that's not usually how it works. KEN MILLER: It wasn't a client app I don't think. I think it was one of his apps, but still. JAMON: That was a pretty cool way to do it. But no, you would think that would be the most exciting time. The exciting time is usually during design, for me, because I feel like you start getting a lot of enthusiasm, the energy. A lot of those things start coming out during the design process. And when we get a chance to use our design process—some clients will come to us with something already designed, others will come to us who need design. When they're going through the design process, it's really exciting, you can see a lot of the possibilities. The development side of things is also fun, but a little slower moving. TODD: I agree with Jamon on the design side. Once we get through the product development and start getting into design, probably past the wireframing and into some more concrete examples, it's pretty fun to see the client get really excited. Especially if it's a situation where they show people who are interested in their product, or their stakeholders and investors, or whomever, and they had a good reaction to it. I would add the second most fun time with clients is once there is a beta or an alpha available for their beta testers. And again, they send it to them and they use words like "blown away," or something like, that's awesome. I'm not gonna lie and say, that's always what happens, but those two times I think are the most fun to me. CHRIS: One of the things that Jamon wrote in Slack that was interesting is: what are some common assumptions that clients bring to the process that have to be corrected? TODD: I don't know if there's anything that's common or consistent across clients. There are some things that come up. I would say, depending on the experience level of the client with software product development, we may have a little to a lot of teaching to do. And that's one of the things we like to do is teach. I find it particularly fun when our start-up clients are newer, they're not on their series B or something. Because there is a lot of moments that you can help them and give them kind of golden information. Both from our personal experience running start-ups, but also we work with a lot of start-ups. So we've been through this before. There are some misconceptions about software. Not necessarily from our clients, but from people who weren't a good fit for us. For example, it's very common in the world at large, to believe software is orders of magnitude cheaper than it really is. People also get very used to the quality that they see in apps like Facebook or Gmail, or these kind of things. And they think they can spend less than a car to get those things. When you're in our industry of course, that doesn't seem super logical, but from their perspective it makes sense. An app costs nothing, or $1.99. JAMON: Right. TODD: Or $4.99, so of course something like that seems cheap. What they don't know, of course, is Facebook has tens of thousands of employees. JAMON: Yeah. TODD: And even a smaller app, let's not chose Facebook, which is huge. But like Instagram, for example. And not what it is now, but what it originally was, probably cost half a million to make. JAMON: Yeah, I think I saw that they put $250,000 into their MVP originally. And it's a very simple app when you look at it, compared to a lot of apps out there. I think that's definitely something that, as Todd said, it's not necessarily the clients who end up being good fits for us. But usually we get calls from everybody, all kinds of people. KEN: Well, even those prices are reflective of just how far software has come in terms of developer productivity. JAMON: Right. KEN: Because half a million dollars doesn't even get you a house in the Bay area. And the people building your house, most of them are being paid 20, 30, 40 dollars an hour and not $200 an hour, or $100 an hour. The Bay area is full of software engineers being paid $150,000 a year and up, many that are way higher than that. And you can still build software for half a million dollars, which is actually is pretty impressive when you think about that in terms of it's inputs. JAMON: Another interesting thing that the clients don't necessarily realize when they come to us is the impact that the design process can have on their product. Usually you're thinking of design as making it look pretty, making it look nice. But there's a whole lot more that goes into that. The visual design aspect of design is usually, maybe, the last 30%, something like that. It's not the bulk of the design work. But there's a lot of value that can be added there. You can avoid expensive mistakes during design by spending the time upfront to really learn as much as you can about your core customers and the features that are necessary. Because software is expensive, so you wanna build as little of it as possible until you really know the direction that you need to go. TODD: Yeah, and I wanna be clear. You can make, for instance, a mobile app for $100,000 to $200,000. It's not a half a million. But something that's larger could be millions as well. Just wanna make that note on that price there. JAMON: I think another misconception that some clients might have when they come into it, is they don't understand necessarily all of the breadth of things that need to happen to make an app. We've had people come to us and want to build an app, but they don't necessarily realize that they also need a server and they need some sort of cloud connectivity. They might need offline support. They might need access to certain APIs for GPS or whatever. And beyond that, how to get through the app store. And how to get through Google Play. What is a compelling app store listing? What does that look like? You know, what screenshots are important? And one of the most successful apps that I've ever been involved with, which is called A Dark Room by my friend Amir Rajan, he actually only has one screenshot on the app store, and it's a very uninspiring one. But he has millions of downloads. It's just, he hit it right on the head. TODD: You know which store is incredibly hard to get through? IKEA. (laughter) Just saying. KEN: It's true. TODD: We've mentioned before in this podcast, but it's worth repeating, design is not how things look. Design is how things work. And through the very first part of our design process is product discovery. And that's even before how things work. That's what product is you want to make at all. Since we work with a lot of start-ups, we also sometimes coach them, if they need it on coming up with a customer acquisition plan and a revenue plan, which their investors, prospective investors that they pitch to, will definitely ask them about, having pitched to them myself. So design is very important and it's also one of the most difficult things that we mentioned in a previous podcast was getting from zero to one. Product discovery and design really help our clients get from zero to one. JAMON: And they're starting a business, you know, it's not just building an app. They're starting a business, or they're continuing a business that they already have. And there's a lot that goes into building a business for sure. I think that's one of the things that, maybe some friends of mine who might message me and say, "hey Jamon, I've got this app idea, it's a billion dollar idea." (laughter) "Promise not to go off and rip me off. I wanna tell you it." And it's fine, you know, the ideas are a very necessary part of this, they're a spark. They're really important. But the execution side of things involves designing and building the app, which we can do. We're really great at it, we've done it a lot of times. But also, the business side of things. There's no one right answer to how to build a business. You can see that with many different business models. And that's the tough part. Now, it can be very rewarding though, the whole journey and it's been really fun to watch our clients build business models that are sustainable and come back as they grow, as they succeed, they find new opportunities and they come back to us and say, "hey Infinite Red, we need some new features. We need a new app. We need to rebuild the app for maybe a different purpose." Those things are very fun to see. TODD: Ken, you had a great thing about ideas, when people have an idea for a business. You've talked about a lot and I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. KEN: Oh, and how they're not usually worth the paper that they're written on. (laughter) TODD: Yes. KEN: Where this came from was that, like back in the days of the dotcom boom, when everybody and their brother had some amazing idea. I would be at a social dinner with somebody and they would be like, they'd whip out an NDA and be like, I wanna talk to you about this idea I have and I need you to sign this NDA. And I'm like, "No. I'm not gonna sign your NDA." Ideas, per se, are not worth very much. Right? A high level idea, per se, is not worth very much. Like my idea's like, "hey, I have an amazing idea. What if you took a car, then you made it fly?" Right? And people will be like, "that's an amazing idea." Now, how are you actually gonna do that? And so it's kinda like, just because I have this amazing idea, "oh what if you made cars fly," doesn't mean that when somebody goes and actually makes cars fly that I have any right to that idea. JAMON: Mm-hmm (affirmative). KEN: Right? Because the high level idea by itself, although cool, doesn't actually get you there. It's the millions and millions of other good ideas that follow that, that really make something work. Jamon, do you wanna tell the dating with music, I could tell you wanna tell the dating with music story. JAMON: That's exactly what I was gonna interject. So Derek Sivers, who founded CD Baby, he has a YouTube video, it's very short. We can link to it in the show notes. Essentially it's talking about ideas versus execution. And the general premise is sort of this, that he met with a friend of a friend, and they were having lunch. And this guy had this billion dollar idea. And he says, okay, what's this great idea that you have? And the guy kind of leans over, very intense, and says, dating with music. (laughter) And Derek's like, is there anything else? (laughter) Is this ... He's like, no, dating with music dude. And it was ... he's like, okay, this idea is worth maybe the price of a lunch. Right? Like, the execution of it is the multiplier, you know, you can have a multiplier ... a great idea, not execute it at all, is really not worth much. A bad idea, executed really well is also not worth all that much. But a really good idea executed really well, is a multiplier that becomes your billion dollar idea. I don't think it necessarily tells the whole story, you know, that particular anecdote because there's also timing and other things like that. KEN: Well and that idea isn't even a multiplier idea. That's like a hint at a maybe multiplier idea. Right? JAMON: Yes. TODD: He was just being nice to the guy. KEN: He was being nice, right. So it's kind of like, when I say there's a chain of ideas, the first germ of the idea is the kind of idea that someone might get when high. Kind of like, "hey man, what if it was like dating, but with music. Yeah." (laughter) Right? That's exactly a high person's idea. I would almost bet money that that was a high idea. But anyway. The next thing is like, oh well you get people to put in their music that they like and we match people up. That's starting to be an actual idea. JAMON: Yeah. KEN: Right? That's starting to be like, what's the actual hook. And even that, there's still, like well how does it work? What's the UX? What's the viral engine around that? JAMON: Yeah. KEN: It's not just programming. Like, we're all programmers historically, so we're gonna tend to see all of the stuff that's gonna go behind that. JAMON: Mm-hmm (affirmative). KEN: Really, it's the product development of design that, or really, what's important. And a lot of the details that matter, are sometimes the ones that are not obviously to your competitors. TODD: Almost always. KEN: Almost always. So this idea that your super secret idea is gonna make everything work is, frankly, BS. JAMON: Yeah. KEN: You have to keep having those good ideas over and over and over again. Every techy who's been in Silicon Valley, or a similar environment, and around the sorts of people who have these sorts of ideas, every single one has a story of being approached by somebody who's saying, "hey I've got this great idea. I'm gonna get you in on the ground floor with it. But I just need somebody to make it." JAMON: Mm-hmm (affirmative). KEN: And we'll split it 50/50. Young techies fall for this. Very quickly you learn, uh, no. You'd better have a lot more than that for that to be a 50/50 bargain. TODD: I'm not even joking when I say that in San Francisco at least 50% of your Uber drivers will pitch an idea to you on your ride. JAMON: We got pitched in an Uber, us three. We were in an Uber not that long ago and we got pitched on an idea. And I think that it's kind of interesting because the apps that do tend to be more successful that we're involved with, they're often not big ideas. They're good ideas, they're not like huge ideas. They're existing companies that have a need that their customer base has kind of expressed, they can see it's fairly obvious. And they come to us and they say, hey we need really good execution. And that's what we're good at. They've identified the need. Have a lot of the infrastructure already in place. They already know how they're gonna monetize it. They already know how it's gonna impact their business. They just need a really great app. And that's where we really plug in. Now it has been kind of interesting to watch start-ups where they don't have that in place and how they develop that. And where they go with that. It's much more risky. A lot of them do fail. And one of the things that I've heard from some of those clients sometimes is, "Jamon, why aren't you so excited about my idea?" Now I'm not trying not to come across excited, I am excited about their idea. It's just that I've seen so many of these where there's certain other parts of the business that they lack. From my standpoint, if I was in the business of picking winners and losers, I'd probably be doing my own start-up, right? But, honestly, there's a lot of moving parts. There's a lot of variables. And not all of them are in your control. So I think it's been really cool to see the ones that do succeed. See how they piece it all together. I have a lot of respect for them, it's a difficult thing, but it's very rewarding. And then, of course, the companies that come in, like, we just started a project recently, this week actually I think. And they are an established company, they have a very big user base. A lot of people have heard of them, but they need a much better app. And they need a better app experience. And that's really where you see the clients that really shine. KEN: There may be a few people listening who are kind of mentally going like, "hmm, is that me?" What I would say is, if you think it's you, it might be. (laughter) If you wanna know, like I wanna do this thing. And I don't program and I'm not a designer, like, I don't know how to make these things and I don't really wanna be that person. If the idea isn't what's important, then what is important? What do I bring to the table that is gonna help me succeed and help a company like Infinite Red, or even just an individual programmer who I happen to find? What am I bringing to the table that will help beyond the big idea? And there's really two things. And they're big ones. And you need at least one. And preferably two. And one is, access to capital. Not just building this, not just paying us to build this. But all the marketing and everything else. Right? You're gonna need money. And you're not gonna want to be in a position where when you run out, it just dies. You need to have a plan for that. That's number one. Number two, is access to audience. If you have one of those, in good form, then you can usually get the other one. Having both is ideal. But those are the two things, those are the things that the makers that you're coming to work with, don't necessarily have. And so, if you wanna know what you can be busting your hump to be doing right now, it's getting those things. And then, if you have those and you come to somebody with your big idea and you want them to turn it into something real, you actually have something to offer. JAMON: One of the things that I think Ken and Todd bring to this conversation that I don't necessarily bring to the conversation is I haven't been on the other side. I've been a consultant for a very long time, so I see our side of it. But both Ken and Todd have worked for start-ups, probably who have used consultants. And seen the ones that have succeeded. Ken you worked at Yammer and there was an acquisition that Microsoft made there. And so it was a successful exit. And then of course there are some other start-ups that you and Todd have worked at that failed. That's something that I, maybe, don't necessarily bring that perspective to. But the consultant's side of it for sure, I see all kinds. I see all kinds of start-ups that rise and fall. TODD: I hope no one takes this as a reason not to try, for sure. I would recommend to focus on your customer acquisition strategy and your revenue strategy. You have to remember Zappos when it came out, and if you're not familiar with Zappos, it was a large company and eventually hired by Amazon, and they sell shoes. KEN: Acquired, not hired. TODD: Sorry, acquired, not hired. They sell shoes, which is probably the second oldest profession in the world. (laughter) So, obviously not a new idea. Hey, I have an idea, I'm gonna sell shoes. And you're like, horse shoes? Space shoes? No, shoes, like you put on your feet. But they had some innovation ideas inside there. Mainly extreme customer sport, and the big one was, buy five pair of shoes, send back four. Good ideas, but once again, there's a series of little ideas, like how do we allow them to buy five pairs of shoes and send back four and still make money? There's a hundred and fifty ideas in there, maybe a thousand ideas in there that matter. So it's hard to be an A-list actor, right? But if no one tried, we'd have none. So you can succeed. We get a lot of clients and sometimes their very obvious that they'll see just because they have a lot of experience or they just really understand. But we have people who don't know what they don't know. And don't know what they know yet, and that's fine too. Those people may succeed also. KEN: The number one problem that we see is under capitalization. Over capitalization can be a problem too, incidentally. If you raise too much money all at once then it can lead you to be too profligate. I've definitely seen that at start-ups. JAMON: It's way harder to say no. KEN: Yeah, that's a problem with venture capital backed companies that have just seen a bunch of interest all at once and then they have issues with that. But, under capitalization is definitely a much bigger problem because it means that every single decision you make, you're terrified. TODD: If your problem is over capitalization, please send an email to hello@infinite.red. KEN: We can help you with that problem. TODD: Today's episode is brought to you by, too much money. KEN: I'm actually being serious. (laughter) I mean, we're joking. But I'm also serious. Like, we actually know how to make your money go farther. JAMON: Yeah, and I agree with that. And we can also help with saying no. I think that that's actually one of the things that's probably surprising about working with us, is often we are pushing for not adding features. TODD: This is sounding like a commercial this time. KEN: Yeah, I'm sorry, but we're not the only ones. I'm just saying that experienced people will tell you no. And you need that if you've got a lot of money. JAMON: I think that's an important port, you look at some consultants and their not necessarily pulling in that direction, but we want people to succeed 'cause obviously that looks good on a portfolio. It's a benefit to us. One of the things we've always said, and we tell customers this, if we finish your project early, and don't spend all of your money, I'm sure you're gonna come up with more ideas. You know? It's not like we're gonna miss out. It's never been the case. If we finish a project early, the founders aren't just pocketing the rest of the money and going home. What they're gonna do is say, what about 1.1, let's get on the schedule. Let's move. There's always something else. 'Cause during the process of building an app you learn so much. And there's always more ideas. KEN: I've never seen a software project where at the end people were like, phew, I'm sure glad that everything that we could possibly think of was in that. (laughter) Like, that has never ever, ever, happened. TODD: You never know. There was that app where you just said "Yo" to people. Yo. JAMON: Yeah, didn't they raise a whole bunch of money to add more stuff? KEN: And what happened to that app? TODD: I don't wanna rant about VC. Some VC's ... not all. Some are great. Another thing, going back to your original question Chris, which we've been talking a lot about, is, common things that customers or clients may not understand. Another one is just the pure complexity of software. It's hard to understand because it's not in the real world. You can't hold it. In your house, if you ever owned a house and had work done on the house, you'll know that doing something in your living room is relatively cheap. Doing something in your bathroom is extremely expensive. Doing something in your kitchen is extremely expensive. The reason why a tiny room like the bathroom is so much more expensive than a huge room, say like, your living room. Is because the bathroom has tons of different contraptions in it. Lots of different moving parts. Lots of different things can go wrong, from your sinks to your plumbing, fans, lighting, that kind of stuff. So the number of pieces matters a lot to cost. Because software is virtual and because we can fairly easily throw on pieces. Software tends to be an order of magnitude, or more, complex than any other physical machine. A bathroom, even a car engine, is less complex than software is. KEN: It's compensated for somewhat by the fact that our tools are also more powerful. TODD: Yes. KEN: I mean, there's countervailing things there, but your point about the complexity is right. If you run out of lot when you're building a house, then your contractor says, hey we can't build there, your lot ends there. There's no such constraints for software and that makes it easy for things to get kind of hairy. TODD: If you completely disregard our part in the complexity, meaning we have to build all the moving pieces and test them and make sure that they coordinate together. Even disregarding that, sometimes people are shocked at how much they have to think about, and they're not building it all. If you just said, I wanna login screen, for example. Every app has that. That's simple. Right? The number of questions that you could be asked by someone like us, to someone who's less experienced will be shocking. And they won't have the answers to it. And each one could be thought of. Now of course we always give people common things that they should do, or whatever. But if you were to really think through the whole thing, just that one screen is way more complex than anyone imagines. JAMON: Recognizing our experience, the fact that we've done hundreds of apps and encountered so many different scenarios, I think is important for working with a company like ours. I think back, in prior years, there have been some projects that haven't gone as well. And one of the common traits of those projects is that the person I'm working with, they feel like they kind of know it all, because they do have a pretty big picture of it, and they want to put their vision down into software. It often comes with blind spots of, what are you missing here? So having a high degree of trust and communication between the two parties is one of the hallmarks of a successful project. We certainly respect what the founders bring because they have the vision, a lot of the times they have a much closer relationship with their potential users than we do. KEN: Absolutely. JAMON: We're not trying to impose our view of what that might be. But we can often bring things, like Todd was saying about the login screen. Like, you didn't think of this aspect like what happens if you forget your password, or if you don't have access to your email or something. TODD: Or you're on a plane, or Facebook changed the rules and half the users can't login. That kind of stuff. JAMON: Exactly. TODD: Another thing too, is we sometimes experience this when we get designs outside of our company. Now, a lot of designers are great, but they're never have been trained in, or have experience in software design. Our designers are classically trained designers. They can do all the normal things people think of designs, but they chose to specialize in software and website design. So, sometimes when we get an outside design, we never used to do this, but we kind of now require it. The bare minimum is we'll do a half week of design review. And we did one recently. And from a cursory look at their design, it looked like they had everything. Looked good, seemed to make sense. The design looked fine. But after a half week of a couple of our designers reviewing it, they went through in great detail and produced a map of the whole app and how everything interacts with each other. And the flows and the different actors, different type of users. That kind of stuff. JAMON: There were dozens of screens, right Todd? Like dozens. TODD: There were a lot of screens, and probably half of them weren't in the original design at all. JAMON: It was striking 'cause you could see the outline of the screen, it was empty and there's a title of whatever that screen was supposed to be. TODD: So that's an example of, even at the design part, where you have to factor in all these different scenarios that you may not have thought about. And how the user would experience it if those scenarios happen. And also make a business decision whether or not you're gonna address some of those scenarios. Sometimes you don't because it's a very small minority of your users, edge case as we call it. And it's just not worth ... the ROI and something like that would be poor. So that's something too, where it's just half the app is really missing. JAMON: And that's where, I think having that high degree of trust is really important because then our spidery senses are saying, hey, there's something missing here. Let's spend the time up front, I know you wanna get started right now, but let's spend the time up front to map this out and see if everything is here. CHRIS: I'm actually curious when someone comes to you with an idea, how do you know when to start challenging the idea? And when to write the idea off? KEN: I wouldn't say that there's very many ideas that we would write off. Because lord knows if we knew which ideas were going to succeed in this business, we would be billionaires already. And frankly, the people who are billionaires don't even necessarily know. There is a healthy degree of luck in terms of like, who ends up on which gravy train. But, that said, there's always gonna be a variety of factors that go into whether something is successful. Some of them are universal. And some of them are highly specific. And it's a little bit of a judgment call on which is which, however. We think that things like software quality and good UX, these sorts of things, are basically universal. Like that humans are humans. In those regards, we are going to push for what we think is right. When it comes to the intimate understanding of the customer, the end customer, right, the people that these start-ups are trying to attract. That's where we defer to them. We're always looking for clients who clearly have that intimate understanding of their customer. And this sort of leads into another point, which is that, someone on their team, whether it's the founder, if they're the only ones. Or someone on their team, had better really have that intimate knowledge. And they're gonna have a full time job working with us. Basically. JAMON: Yeah. KEN: Right? And that's also something that I think people have not understood. It's kinda like, hey, here you go make the software and I will dip in periodically. JAMON: Yeah. KEN: Uh-uh (negative). No. Yeah, you gotta be really committed because you're the one who really understands that like, so we're gonna be working with you to go after this. And we need you, obviously. JAMON: Yeah. KEN: Not just to write the checks, but also to tell us who this person is and what they're really gonna need. And sometimes our idea of a universal solution won't work for something specific. But that tension is really important. We're always fighting for those sort of universal values, but we're also listening to hear what specific values are and the ways that they might override universal value. TODD: Yeah, and there's not one right answer and one right design to solve any particular problem. I would pile on with Ken, the people coming to us, the founders or the department heads or whomever they are, coming to us. They really wanna understand the end user and be able to articulate that to us. And over time we learn them too. And some industries have very strong cultures that you have to be within, and if you don't speak that cultural language it instantly turns off those people. It's not just culture, but for example, we did a project for a company called PRO-TREAD, which does training for truckers. I don't know if they're the largest, but if they're not, they're probably closest to the largest in the country. And this traditionally was done if you had a trucking company, you would set up computers in the corner and then when that driver was by their home base, they would sit at that boring computer and do the forced training that they're required to do by law. Not fun. No one wants to do it. The people at the company don't wanna pay for it. Truck drivers don't wanna do it. Of course it does increase safety and stuff, so it's important to do, but it's just human nature not wanna do something that's, you know. JAMON: And I believe, Todd, that PRO-TREAD was one of the first to even computerize it. Before that is was paper tests and in classrooms. So they were kind of moving that direction already. Now this was another iteration of their platform. TODD: Correct. And this is a great example of an idea because it's simple, everyone understands it and it's obvious. Truck drivers spend a lot of time in the sleeper cabs of their trucks. At truck stops and whatnot on the side of the road and stuff. So, obviously making the training mobile was important because the training materials being on a tablet or an iPad was important. Making it not so painful for the person, so that it's not ... If you're the manager telling the drivers that they have to take this testing, getting 50% less push back because it's not as painful is a big deal to you. And also, they do need to not just get through the training material, they do need to understand it and internalize it. It actually does help, even though no one wants to do it. So the basic requirements was, it has to be mobile, it has to work inside of a sleeper cab on the side of I-80. And it still needs to maintain their already high level of guaranteeing that people actually pick up the information, and they had a variety of ways to make sure that happened. And also, be more engaging and not as painful. That was the directive to our designers. JAMON: I believe that when they first came to us they sort of envisioned the app looking basically like their web version and no real changes other than that. And we talked to them, this was a situation where we had a great rapport with the owner of PRO-TREAD and we're able to talk with him and explain where design could really add a lot of value to a touch interface. TODD: Yeah, so we actually did re-design it, not just to make it more mobile appropriate, let's say. But to really push those goals they had. Now, designers and us and them now understood the goals. I just stated them. Fairly straight forward, the goals. However, we can take those goals and we can design to those goals for sure, but we probably don't know truck drivers as well as our client PRO-TREAD does. So them having been in this industry for a very long time, really understood the nuances that would make meeting these goals through design possible. Having them really understand their users, having us really understand how to solve problems. Us having the problems be both simple, straightforward and well defined, that was a successful project and although maybe not as exciting as Uber for gerbils. Because gerbils have to get around too, and no one likes to walk. JAMON: Well gerbils do, actually, don't they? TODD: They kind of do, yeah. And they like tubes. So maybe be like Elon Musk's ... JAMON: Hyper loop. TODD: The hyper loop for gerbils. JAMON: For gerbils. TODD: Yeah, so that's a very exciting, so if we had a client came and said we want a hyper loop for gerbils and we respond, "of course. Who doesn't?" But it's just funny, but teaching truck drivers important lessons is more fulfilling when you know, when it rolls out, there's gonna be tons of men and women out there on the road having a slightly less painful day because of something worked on. And probably saving some lives. It's not as sexy, but it is very satisfying in my opinion. JAMON: Yeah, I totally agree. I actually have five uncles who are truck drivers. Very strong truck driving kind of familial influence. And maybe one or two of them might actually listen to my podcast here. So, hi uncles. (laughter) But what I think is kind of cool about this is I do know truck drivers. I didn't get a chance to work on that project myself, but there's totally a personal connection there. I understand what they go through and the types of things that they care about. TODD: I only have one brother and he owns a shipping company and he has lots of truck drivers, so I'm going to trump your four uncles. (laughter) JAMON: Let's have them fight. They're all six foot four. TODD: Although in the past he did drive, so, but anyways. Yeah. Ken, how about you buddy? JAMON: Any truck drivers there at Harvard? TODD: Aww, pick on the Harvard kid. KEN: No, I don't know any truck drivers. (laughter) You got me. TODD: Today, brought to you buy Captain Obvious. You can cut that, that was a bad joke.
Amir Rajan is CEO of RubyMotion, a tool that helps you turn your ruby code base into an iOS app. He shares his own app building experience, and what developers should know when turning their project into a mobile app. Show Links Digital Ocean (sponsor) MongoDB (sponsor) Heroku (sponsor) TwilioQuest (sponsor) Metaprogramming A Dark Room RubyMotion Codeland Conf Codeland 2019
Amir Rajan is the creator of minimalist text-based gems like A Dark Room, The Ensign, and A Noble Circle. As someone who creates games often rooted in literature and filled with socially relevant themes, he's seen profound response to the things he creates — both positive and negative. Join us as we discuss dealing with interpretations of your work, creating lasting art in an ever-changing digital landscape, and reconciling your past with your creative future.
Panel: Charles Max Wood Dave Kimura Special Guest: Amir Rajan In this episode, the Ruby Rouges speak with Amir Rajan. Amir is a game developer and is the most successful Ruby game developer. Amir is also the owner/CEO of RubyMotion. RubyMotion allows you to write Ruby for the Mac platform. Amir will be speaking at Ruby Dev Summit this fall. Amir talks about being apart of not web part of Ruby and the innovation including mobile. The panel discusses building application for mobile in Ruby Motion and the OS platform. The panel also discusses the easy of building with RubyMotion and how the language has come along way since Mac Ruby and others. Also, how to get started and all installations required to build with RubyMotion. In particular, we dive pretty deep on: Ruby - not on the web Mobile Ruby Google and Android don’t provide the same thing for app building. Mac Ruby Language Translation compiler LLVM bit code - Low-level virtual machine How RubyMotion works with LLVM Complier backends LLVM Kaleidoscope Understand one level below Ruby Ruby Source code Learning RubyMotion - Red Potion, AF Motion, Bubble Wrap Masonry Understanding Apple’s documentation Ruby Motion does Android Why pick RubyMotion? and much much more. Links: We are the designated survivors/digging into Ruby: Heredoc pull request LLVM Kaleidoscope RubyMotion Twich - Game Development with Ruby Amir Rajan @amirranjan Picks: Amir Nier: Automata Idle Thumbs Podcast Literate Gamer Podcast (favorite show) Dave Rerun Chuck Ruby Gems FriendlyID Ice_Cube Recurring_Select
Panel: Charles Max Wood Dave Kimura Special Guest: Amir Rajan In this episode, the Ruby Rouges speak with Amir Rajan. Amir is a game developer and is the most successful Ruby game developer. Amir is also the owner/CEO of RubyMotion. RubyMotion allows you to write Ruby for the Mac platform. Amir will be speaking at Ruby Dev Summit this fall. Amir talks about being apart of not web part of Ruby and the innovation including mobile. The panel discusses building application for mobile in Ruby Motion and the OS platform. The panel also discusses the easy of building with RubyMotion and how the language has come along way since Mac Ruby and others. Also, how to get started and all installations required to build with RubyMotion. In particular, we dive pretty deep on: Ruby - not on the web Mobile Ruby Google and Android don’t provide the same thing for app building. Mac Ruby Language Translation compiler LLVM bit code - Low-level virtual machine How RubyMotion works with LLVM Complier backends LLVM Kaleidoscope Understand one level below Ruby Ruby Source code Learning RubyMotion - Red Potion, AF Motion, Bubble Wrap Masonry Understanding Apple’s documentation Ruby Motion does Android Why pick RubyMotion? and much much more. Links: We are the designated survivors/digging into Ruby: Heredoc pull request LLVM Kaleidoscope RubyMotion Twich - Game Development with Ruby Amir Rajan @amirranjan Picks: Amir Nier: Automata Idle Thumbs Podcast Literate Gamer Podcast (favorite show) Dave Rerun Chuck Ruby Gems FriendlyID Ice_Cube Recurring_Select
Panel: Charles Max Wood Dave Kimura Special Guest: Amir Rajan In this episode, the Ruby Rouges speak with Amir Rajan. Amir is a game developer and is the most successful Ruby game developer. Amir is also the owner/CEO of RubyMotion. RubyMotion allows you to write Ruby for the Mac platform. Amir will be speaking at Ruby Dev Summit this fall. Amir talks about being apart of not web part of Ruby and the innovation including mobile. The panel discusses building application for mobile in Ruby Motion and the OS platform. The panel also discusses the easy of building with RubyMotion and how the language has come along way since Mac Ruby and others. Also, how to get started and all installations required to build with RubyMotion. In particular, we dive pretty deep on: Ruby - not on the web Mobile Ruby Google and Android don’t provide the same thing for app building. Mac Ruby Language Translation compiler LLVM bit code - Low-level virtual machine How RubyMotion works with LLVM Complier backends LLVM Kaleidoscope Understand one level below Ruby Ruby Source code Learning RubyMotion - Red Potion, AF Motion, Bubble Wrap Masonry Understanding Apple’s documentation Ruby Motion does Android Why pick RubyMotion? and much much more. Links: We are the designated survivors/digging into Ruby: Heredoc pull request LLVM Kaleidoscope RubyMotion Twich - Game Development with Ruby Amir Rajan @amirranjan Picks: Amir Nier: Automata Idle Thumbs Podcast Literate Gamer Podcast (favorite show) Dave Rerun Chuck Ruby Gems FriendlyID Ice_Cube Recurring_Select
Tweet this Episode Jason Swett is a former Ruby Rogues panelist and the author of Angular on Rails. He's also a contractor and corporate trainer. Jason and Chuck dive into Jason's story getting into programming, Ruby, and talk about his current and past ventures in entrepreneurship. We also talk about writing courses and ebooks and blog posts. Links: Pascal Geocities Angelfire Perl Symfony framework PHP CodeIgniter Drupal Laravel Lisp Clojure Python Django Ruby Rails Amir Rajan's My Ruby Story Angular on Rails Basecamp Microconf JasonSwett.net Amazon AWS Indie Hackers Post Justin Gordon Justin Gordon's episode on Ruby Rogues Phoenix Elixir React Vue Webpacker Prototype.js JQuery Todd Motto Green Bits Email Jason @jasonswett Picks Jason: Amazon Web Services in Action awsrails.com Chuck Gitlab Mattermost The Daily Lasagna Entreprogrammers Ruby Dev Summit
Tweet this Episode Jason Swett is a former Ruby Rogues panelist and the author of Angular on Rails. He's also a contractor and corporate trainer. Jason and Chuck dive into Jason's story getting into programming, Ruby, and talk about his current and past ventures in entrepreneurship. We also talk about writing courses and ebooks and blog posts. Links: Pascal Geocities Angelfire Perl Symfony framework PHP CodeIgniter Drupal Laravel Lisp Clojure Python Django Ruby Rails Amir Rajan's My Ruby Story Angular on Rails Basecamp Microconf JasonSwett.net Amazon AWS Indie Hackers Post Justin Gordon Justin Gordon's episode on Ruby Rogues Phoenix Elixir React Vue Webpacker Prototype.js JQuery Todd Motto Green Bits Email Jason @jasonswett Picks Jason: Amazon Web Services in Action awsrails.com Chuck Gitlab Mattermost The Daily Lasagna Entreprogrammers Ruby Dev Summit
Tweet this Episode Jason Swett is a former Ruby Rogues panelist and the author of Angular on Rails. He's also a contractor and corporate trainer. Jason and Chuck dive into Jason's story getting into programming, Ruby, and talk about his current and past ventures in entrepreneurship. We also talk about writing courses and ebooks and blog posts. Links: Pascal Geocities Angelfire Perl Symfony framework PHP CodeIgniter Drupal Laravel Lisp Clojure Python Django Ruby Rails Amir Rajan's My Ruby Story Angular on Rails Basecamp Microconf JasonSwett.net Amazon AWS Indie Hackers Post Justin Gordon Justin Gordon's episode on Ruby Rogues Phoenix Elixir React Vue Webpacker Prototype.js JQuery Todd Motto Green Bits Email Jason @jasonswett Picks Jason: Amazon Web Services in Action awsrails.com Chuck Gitlab Mattermost The Daily Lasagna Entreprogrammers Ruby Dev Summit
MRS 015 Amir Rajan Today's episode is a My Ruby Story with Amir Rajan. He was on Episode 272 of Ruby Rogues. Amir talked about where he used Ruby and how he got into RubyMotion. Listen to learn more about Amir! [01:40] – Introduction to Amir Rajan He was on episode 272 of Ruby Rogues and he talked about Game Development and RubyMotion. That was in August 2016. [06:35] – How did you get into programming? Amir had his Intel 80386 and was trying to install Win Commander on it. It came with this green booklet that says “cd C: /…”. He installed that exe command but he didn’t have enough space on the computer. He ended up deleting the operating system – Windows 3.1. He reinstalled it myself and he thought that was programming. His first exploration in programming was actually a business development course like a business programming course. They’ve built applications using Visual Basic 4 and 5 but he didn’t understand the concept of variables. After that, StarCraft 2 came out. That was around 1998. It has a map editor so you can actually create your own campaigns. You have to use a scripting event-based quasi-DSL to get that working. That was when Amir started looking at C, C++ and Visual Studio 6.0. He had to go to the library because a lot of information wasn’t readily available online. He also got some dummies book and random C++ books but he still didn’t understand programming. He already figured out variables but he didn’t understand functions. What he was doing is output a void method, throw an exception, and catch it in the parent code to get the return value. Amir went to college and got a degree in Software Engineering in Computer Science. He entered the work force doing Visual Basic 6.0 and SQL server. His SQL jobs involve taking forms over data and everything was stored and back-end processed. It was a payroll company, payroll insurance so there was an immense amount of time card tracking, clock in, clock out, all done in SQL. Visual Basic was used to get the data, store them in record sets, send them into the database, and do all their processing there. He stayed on the .NET stack. His career was built on converting legacy applications to the next version of Microsoft tech. It was not until 2010 that Amir actually started using Ruby. In 2010, the way he ended up using Ruby was actually built automation for .NET projects. All his Ruby-isms came from trying to codify build automation in Rake. He also did Rails for 8 months. He looked at Rails to see how they handled some of their attributes for shoveling across JSON from different areas or things out of the database. [22:00] – Did you continue working on .NET and just use Ruby where it made sense? Where Ruby fit in was basically when Amir wanted to build automation or he wanted to test his REST API. Trying to use HTTP client requires a strong type DTO to map to. He had a ton of Rake scripts that would make tons of HTTP calls do link from hypermedia and get additional information. He used Ruby to cut all that up and potentially make changes just over an HTTP endpoint. He has an endpoint that could reset himself as an administrator or open up some management studio to execute some stuff. It ended up an efficiency tool. [24:15] – How did you get into RubyMotion? Around 2013 is where Amir started getting this identity crisis about the languages he’s used. He started getting into Ruby and that means getting into Shell scripts, more Linux environments. Linux and Ruby are better than any of the .NET he’s done. There seems to be a more open mentality to approach and solve problems that aren't specifically related to some higher governing authority telling him how to write software. At that point, he needed to take a break and reflect on where he wanted his career to go. That’s when he stepped back from doing .NET. He bought a Mac and did things that are not .NET. During that first three-month period, he was in an exploration of Ruby. Picks Amir Rajan Twitter: @amirrajan community.rubymotion.com Mobile game: Mini Metro Mobile game: Alto’s Adventure Mobile game: Doug dug. Charles Max Wood Quora Ionic framework Udemy
MRS 015 Amir Rajan Today's episode is a My Ruby Story with Amir Rajan. He was on Episode 272 of Ruby Rogues. Amir talked about where he used Ruby and how he got into RubyMotion. Listen to learn more about Amir! [01:40] – Introduction to Amir Rajan He was on episode 272 of Ruby Rogues and he talked about Game Development and RubyMotion. That was in August 2016. [06:35] – How did you get into programming? Amir had his Intel 80386 and was trying to install Win Commander on it. It came with this green booklet that says “cd C: /…”. He installed that exe command but he didn’t have enough space on the computer. He ended up deleting the operating system – Windows 3.1. He reinstalled it myself and he thought that was programming. His first exploration in programming was actually a business development course like a business programming course. They’ve built applications using Visual Basic 4 and 5 but he didn’t understand the concept of variables. After that, StarCraft 2 came out. That was around 1998. It has a map editor so you can actually create your own campaigns. You have to use a scripting event-based quasi-DSL to get that working. That was when Amir started looking at C, C++ and Visual Studio 6.0. He had to go to the library because a lot of information wasn’t readily available online. He also got some dummies book and random C++ books but he still didn’t understand programming. He already figured out variables but he didn’t understand functions. What he was doing is output a void method, throw an exception, and catch it in the parent code to get the return value. Amir went to college and got a degree in Software Engineering in Computer Science. He entered the work force doing Visual Basic 6.0 and SQL server. His SQL jobs involve taking forms over data and everything was stored and back-end processed. It was a payroll company, payroll insurance so there was an immense amount of time card tracking, clock in, clock out, all done in SQL. Visual Basic was used to get the data, store them in record sets, send them into the database, and do all their processing there. He stayed on the .NET stack. His career was built on converting legacy applications to the next version of Microsoft tech. It was not until 2010 that Amir actually started using Ruby. In 2010, the way he ended up using Ruby was actually built automation for .NET projects. All his Ruby-isms came from trying to codify build automation in Rake. He also did Rails for 8 months. He looked at Rails to see how they handled some of their attributes for shoveling across JSON from different areas or things out of the database. [22:00] – Did you continue working on .NET and just use Ruby where it made sense? Where Ruby fit in was basically when Amir wanted to build automation or he wanted to test his REST API. Trying to use HTTP client requires a strong type DTO to map to. He had a ton of Rake scripts that would make tons of HTTP calls do link from hypermedia and get additional information. He used Ruby to cut all that up and potentially make changes just over an HTTP endpoint. He has an endpoint that could reset himself as an administrator or open up some management studio to execute some stuff. It ended up an efficiency tool. [24:15] – How did you get into RubyMotion? Around 2013 is where Amir started getting this identity crisis about the languages he’s used. He started getting into Ruby and that means getting into Shell scripts, more Linux environments. Linux and Ruby are better than any of the .NET he’s done. There seems to be a more open mentality to approach and solve problems that aren't specifically related to some higher governing authority telling him how to write software. At that point, he needed to take a break and reflect on where he wanted his career to go. That’s when he stepped back from doing .NET. He bought a Mac and did things that are not .NET. During that first three-month period, he was in an exploration of Ruby. Picks Amir Rajan Twitter: @amirrajan community.rubymotion.com Mobile game: Mini Metro Mobile game: Alto’s Adventure Mobile game: Doug dug. Charles Max Wood Quora Ionic framework Udemy
MRS 015 Amir Rajan Today's episode is a My Ruby Story with Amir Rajan. He was on Episode 272 of Ruby Rogues. Amir talked about where he used Ruby and how he got into RubyMotion. Listen to learn more about Amir! [01:40] – Introduction to Amir Rajan He was on episode 272 of Ruby Rogues and he talked about Game Development and RubyMotion. That was in August 2016. [06:35] – How did you get into programming? Amir had his Intel 80386 and was trying to install Win Commander on it. It came with this green booklet that says “cd C: /…”. He installed that exe command but he didn’t have enough space on the computer. He ended up deleting the operating system – Windows 3.1. He reinstalled it myself and he thought that was programming. His first exploration in programming was actually a business development course like a business programming course. They’ve built applications using Visual Basic 4 and 5 but he didn’t understand the concept of variables. After that, StarCraft 2 came out. That was around 1998. It has a map editor so you can actually create your own campaigns. You have to use a scripting event-based quasi-DSL to get that working. That was when Amir started looking at C, C++ and Visual Studio 6.0. He had to go to the library because a lot of information wasn’t readily available online. He also got some dummies book and random C++ books but he still didn’t understand programming. He already figured out variables but he didn’t understand functions. What he was doing is output a void method, throw an exception, and catch it in the parent code to get the return value. Amir went to college and got a degree in Software Engineering in Computer Science. He entered the work force doing Visual Basic 6.0 and SQL server. His SQL jobs involve taking forms over data and everything was stored and back-end processed. It was a payroll company, payroll insurance so there was an immense amount of time card tracking, clock in, clock out, all done in SQL. Visual Basic was used to get the data, store them in record sets, send them into the database, and do all their processing there. He stayed on the .NET stack. His career was built on converting legacy applications to the next version of Microsoft tech. It was not until 2010 that Amir actually started using Ruby. In 2010, the way he ended up using Ruby was actually built automation for .NET projects. All his Ruby-isms came from trying to codify build automation in Rake. He also did Rails for 8 months. He looked at Rails to see how they handled some of their attributes for shoveling across JSON from different areas or things out of the database. [22:00] – Did you continue working on .NET and just use Ruby where it made sense? Where Ruby fit in was basically when Amir wanted to build automation or he wanted to test his REST API. Trying to use HTTP client requires a strong type DTO to map to. He had a ton of Rake scripts that would make tons of HTTP calls do link from hypermedia and get additional information. He used Ruby to cut all that up and potentially make changes just over an HTTP endpoint. He has an endpoint that could reset himself as an administrator or open up some management studio to execute some stuff. It ended up an efficiency tool. [24:15] – How did you get into RubyMotion? Around 2013 is where Amir started getting this identity crisis about the languages he’s used. He started getting into Ruby and that means getting into Shell scripts, more Linux environments. Linux and Ruby are better than any of the .NET he’s done. There seems to be a more open mentality to approach and solve problems that aren't specifically related to some higher governing authority telling him how to write software. At that point, he needed to take a break and reflect on where he wanted his career to go. That’s when he stepped back from doing .NET. He bought a Mac and did things that are not .NET. During that first three-month period, he was in an exploration of Ruby. Picks Amir Rajan Twitter: @amirrajan community.rubymotion.com Mobile game: Mini Metro Mobile game: Alto’s Adventure Mobile game: Doug dug. Charles Max Wood Quora Ionic framework Udemy
Amir Rajan - developer of A Dark Room on iOS/Android, joins us again to talk about Mobile Gaming, and the topic is addressed from both a development and an end user perspective. Amir provides a comprehensive list of his favorite games, which will be available in the show notes on LiterateGamer.com
The App Store is a crazy place, so why not learn the ins and outs from someone who has been through it all? In this episode we sit down with Amir Rajan, developer of the hit game A Dark Room, to talk through his experiences building a successful game, backed by a mountain of data around metrics, revenue, and more. Special Guest: Amir Rajan.
Literate Gamer returns to A Dark Room's Amir Rajan the developer that ported A Dark Room to iOS and Android and who contributed unique touches of his own. Amir discusses the porting process, going viral, and shares some of the more creative criticism he received on A Dark Room.
You may know Amir from his #1 AppStore Game "A Dark Room." Amir is a programmer who has learned (and continues to learn) multiple programming languages. Is being a polyglot programmer a good idea for all programmers? Which languages should you start with?
01:42 - Amir Rajan Twitter GitHub Blog A Noble Circle Surviving The App Store: How to Make It as an Indie Game Developer by Amir Rajan 02:24 - A Dark Room (ADR); Revenue and Downloads Revenue Updates for A Dark Room et al 09:16 - Quality, Heart and Soul, and Putting Yourself Into a Product iPhreaks Show Episode #161: Successful Indie iOS Game Development with Amir Rajan 14:31 - Choosing RubyMotion Albacore NeXTSTEP 17:43 - Objective-C vs Ruby HipByte/Flow 21:51 - Cross-platform Availability 23:53 - ADR => Watch/TV Capability with RubyMotion 26:17 - The Ecosystem in iOS and RubyMotion 28:11 - Code Structure 29:58 - Testing; UI Automation mac_bacon 31:29 - Open Source and Proprietary 33:15 - Other Components UIkit SpriteKit motion-game Cocos2d-x CocoaPods 34:07 - Going on a Sabbatical 40:58 - .NET => Ruby Inversion of Control; (IoC) Container Picks Transistor (Amir) Hoplite (Amir) Alto's Adventure (Amir) Shadowrun: Dragonfall (Sam) Minecraft: Story Mode (David) Sriracha and Egg in Ramen (Chuck) Ruby Rogues Facebook Page (Chuck)
01:42 - Amir Rajan Twitter GitHub Blog A Noble Circle Surviving The App Store: How to Make It as an Indie Game Developer by Amir Rajan 02:24 - A Dark Room (ADR); Revenue and Downloads Revenue Updates for A Dark Room et al 09:16 - Quality, Heart and Soul, and Putting Yourself Into a Product iPhreaks Show Episode #161: Successful Indie iOS Game Development with Amir Rajan 14:31 - Choosing RubyMotion Albacore NeXTSTEP 17:43 - Objective-C vs Ruby HipByte/Flow 21:51 - Cross-platform Availability 23:53 - ADR => Watch/TV Capability with RubyMotion 26:17 - The Ecosystem in iOS and RubyMotion 28:11 - Code Structure 29:58 - Testing; UI Automation mac_bacon 31:29 - Open Source and Proprietary 33:15 - Other Components UIkit SpriteKit motion-game Cocos2d-x CocoaPods 34:07 - Going on a Sabbatical 40:58 - .NET => Ruby Inversion of Control; (IoC) Container Picks Transistor (Amir) Hoplite (Amir) Alto's Adventure (Amir) Shadowrun: Dragonfall (Sam) Minecraft: Story Mode (David) Sriracha and Egg in Ramen (Chuck) Ruby Rogues Facebook Page (Chuck)
01:42 - Amir Rajan Twitter GitHub Blog A Noble Circle Surviving The App Store: How to Make It as an Indie Game Developer by Amir Rajan 02:24 - A Dark Room (ADR); Revenue and Downloads Revenue Updates for A Dark Room et al 09:16 - Quality, Heart and Soul, and Putting Yourself Into a Product iPhreaks Show Episode #161: Successful Indie iOS Game Development with Amir Rajan 14:31 - Choosing RubyMotion Albacore NeXTSTEP 17:43 - Objective-C vs Ruby HipByte/Flow 21:51 - Cross-platform Availability 23:53 - ADR => Watch/TV Capability with RubyMotion 26:17 - The Ecosystem in iOS and RubyMotion 28:11 - Code Structure 29:58 - Testing; UI Automation mac_bacon 31:29 - Open Source and Proprietary 33:15 - Other Components UIkit SpriteKit motion-game Cocos2d-x CocoaPods 34:07 - Going on a Sabbatical 40:58 - .NET => Ruby Inversion of Control; (IoC) Container Picks Transistor (Amir) Hoplite (Amir) Alto's Adventure (Amir) Shadowrun: Dragonfall (Sam) Minecraft: Story Mode (David) Sriracha and Egg in Ramen (Chuck) Ruby Rogues Facebook Page (Chuck)
00:58 - Amir Rajan Introduction Twitter GitHub Blog A Dark Room (App) Surviving The App Store: How to Make It as an Indie Game Developer by Amir Rajan A Noble Circle 03:08 - Building A Dark Room 07:14 - Marketing the Game A Dark Room (Web Version) Twitter Facebook Ads Reddit Accessibility Raising Awareness, the Blind use iOS Devices AppleVis 23:40 - Earning a Sustainable Income 29:03 - Amir’s Developer Experience John Sonmez (Simple Programmer) 33:22 - Reviews 37:05 - The Iterative Aspect of Building an Application Flatland appstorepromotion@apple.com Surviving The App Store: How to Make It as an Indie Game Developer by Amir Rajan Picks Hoplite (Amir) Alto’s Adventure (Amir) Transistor (Amir) Blackbox (Andrew)
00:58 - Amir Rajan Introduction Twitter GitHub Blog A Dark Room (App) Surviving The App Store: How to Make It as an Indie Game Developer by Amir Rajan A Noble Circle 03:08 - Building A Dark Room 07:14 - Marketing the Game A Dark Room (Web Version) Twitter Facebook Ads Reddit Accessibility Raising Awareness, the Blind use iOS Devices AppleVis 23:40 - Earning a Sustainable Income 29:03 - Amir’s Developer Experience John Sonmez (Simple Programmer) 33:22 - Reviews 37:05 - The Iterative Aspect of Building an Application Flatland appstorepromotion@apple.com Surviving The App Store: How to Make It as an Indie Game Developer by Amir Rajan Picks Hoplite (Amir) Alto’s Adventure (Amir) Transistor (Amir) Blackbox (Andrew)
Mobile game maker Amir Rajan (Noble Circle, A Dark Room) speaks to Peggy Anne Salz and Shahab Zargari about his successes with top-selling mobile apps. A Dark Room went on to be critically and commercially successful with 2.26 million downloads in under two years. It stayed at the top premium app spot for 18 days straight in the US. Without Apple's cut that means that it made $697,270 or $191,810 net for Amir in two years. Its prequel, The Ensign, has been downloaded 132,780 times in a little more than a year and made $29,765 for Amir. Finally, Amir's latest and experimental game A Noble Circle was downloaded 23,118 times in seven months and netted $3,064 for Amir.
Amir starts by introducing himself and then shares about how he got started in game development. The panel then discusses their favorite video games. Amir then describes how he builds games and his toolset. He then goes to talk about his best selling game, A Dark Room, and how he brought it to life. Amir then talks about his next game and his inspirations for making games. Richie then asks Amir if he plays any board games. Amir then shares some knowledge about how to get started in mobile game development. Cecil then asks Amir about his new book ...
The holy grail for any iOS game developer is have their game featured on the front page of the App Store. Whether it's in a coveted "Best of.." spot or as a deeper cut in a creative sub-category, App Store attention converts to downloads. Downloads convert to dollars. It's not a coincidence that the most successful games in App Store history have all been heavily featured. This week on the show we talk about an incredible reddit post we found by Amir Rajan, the developer of the iOS port of "A Dark Room". In the post, Rajan lays out a step-by-step guide to help give your game the best chance for being featured in the iOS App Store. I know iOS might be a bad word for some of you, but fear not; Rajan's post, and this episode, are chocked full of so much great, general game development advice that you might not be able to handle it. Thanks for tuning in this week and we hope you enjoy the show! Feel free to send us any questions or comments to: thedebuglog@gmail.com
TheSparkAndTheArt.com/98 – we talk about an article I read on Reddit by Amir Rajan about his success in the iTunes App store. The article is basically a how-to for working with Apple to have a successful game for iPhones and iPads. Amir's success was in the range of $700,000 USD over the course of about 3 years.
In this episode of ABTS, Doug interviews Amir Rajan who had the #1 game/app in the Apple App Store for 19 consecutive days! We also get to play another round of 10 Questions.
The EntreProgrammers Episode 47.1 A Dark Room for iOSAmir Rajan is the featured guest in this episode, creator of A Dark Room for iOS.“Notable events are listed below along with any pertinent information about how it affected downloads, reviews, emotions, and anything else that influenced the success (or failure) of A Dark Room for iOS,” writes Amir Rajan.Be sure to check-out “Amir’s dev log for aspiring indie devs” for the blow-by-blow action leading up to the creation of this highly rated app.Looking for “the official web site of ADR iOS?” And/or go to the web site of Amir Rajan.Amir discusses the marketing value of the media (press) which turns-out to be surprisingly low. Interviews and write-ups in many areas did not translate into what might be considered an appropriate number of “downloads” for his extremely popular app.He talks about the power of word-of-mouth; if engagement is involved, the results are incredible – an extremely insightful analysis of marketing and promotional strategies, how it all plays out in the highly competive entrepreneurial arena. Listen quite closely.Audio is used in the form of a “developer commentary” by Amir to promote engagement ending with a personal conversation with interested folks in code-land.He reveals a rather influential marketing tactic, here, that would be employed by a wise entrepreneur seeking to increase visibility of her/his products and services across the web. Highly impressed in another promotional aspect, Amir mentions and compares in detail how long of a tail that his creation has cast.If you are developing software, regardless of your level of achievement, you won’t want to miss the discussion that Amir has with The EntreProgrammers in this episode – no really, it’s true.Test it for yourself. Jump right in with your comments.Derick strikes a good perspective when asking Amir how it all came about. Did it happen quickly like an overnight success, or was it ten years in the making.Ten years is more like it reveals Amir, but a very calculated several years it was. You can hear in another interview explicit details governing the journey of Amir on another popular podcast in John’s:
In this episode of Get Up And Code, I interview developer Amir Rajan about how his app "A Dark Room" became the #1 app in the Apple App Store and stayed there for 18 days.
Novice No Longer Podcast: Escape Novice-dom and Build The Life You Want With Dann Berg
awake. head throbbing. vision blurry. So begins one of the most unique games to ever hit the App Store. What follows is an experience that takes the player through a dystopian world that starts with the simple gathering of wood and slowly grows in scope to places you’d never expect. Amir Rajan discovered the original web-based […]
"A Dark Room" was the #1 App in the Apple App Store for weeks and weeks. Surely that's made its creator, Amir Rajan a millionaire, right? Amir explains exactly how the finances work, shares tips on how to make a #1 app, and sets YOU up for success.
Carl and Richard talk to Amir Rajan about an amazing tale of getting to the number one spot on the Apple App Store! The app in question is called A Dark Room, a simple text-based game with an awesome story and experience. Originally a web game, Amir helped build an iOS version of the game. The conversation then digs into all the subtle things done in the game to help encourage players to promote it - when to ask for a review, when to put the game on sale, the impact of magazine reviews of the game, and more!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations
Carl and Richard talk to Amir Rajan about an amazing tale of getting to the number one spot on the Apple App Store! The app in question is called A Dark Room, a simple text-based game with an awesome story and experience. Originally a web game, Amir helped build an iOS version of the game. The conversation then digs into all the subtle things done in the game to help encourage players to promote it - when to ask for a review, when to put the game on sale, the impact of magazine reviews of the game, and more!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations
Carl and Richard talk to Amir Rajan about his Oak project on GitHub. Amir discusses his approach to building Single Page Applications (SPA) using an array of open source tools including Rake (from the Ruby stack), nSpec, Canopy, Growl and more. The conversation digs into how C# fits into the equation and how Oak provides the dynamic typing that C# needs to work well in the JavaScript driven world of SPA. Amir also talks about how this development stack works well with different editors since it is file focused for compilation, testing and deployment. There's a little taste of DevOps in this great conversation on modern web development!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations
Scott sits down with NSpec authors Matt Florence and Amir Rajan to talk about Behavior Driven Development (BDD). Where does one start with BDD? Is BDD just TDD with a fancier name or can it really change how you design software? The NSpec guys set Scott on the right path.
Carl and Richard talk to Amir Rajan about his Oak project on GitHub. Amir discusses his approach to building Single Page Applications (SPA) using an array of open source tools including Rake (from the Ruby stack), nSpec, Canopy, Growl and more. The conversation digs into how C# fits into the equation and how Oak provides the dynamic typing that C# needs to work well in the JavaScript driven world of SPA. Amir also talks about how this development stack works well with different editors since it is file focused for compilation, testing and deployment. There's a little taste of DevOps in this great conversation on modern web development!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations
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