Work

Starting in April, I took on a full time gig over at Hewlett Packard, working on their HP Flow CM solution. We released a few iOS and Android apps for clients (more info on this later) and have started on a few more. I’ve invested in some small things with hopefully large ROI. And finally, I finished my first semester teaching over at Boise State University teaching mobile application development on the Android platform. Next semester will be taught using iOS, which I’m looking forward to.

Ana has continued her Water Engineering job with much success, working on plants all over Boise and the surrounding cities and Twin Falls.

As an engineering family, we got a lot done, a lot of projects completed and were rewarded for all that effort by being able to crush the final student loan debt I’ve been putting off paying, and investing in new opportunities.

Travel

This year we finished up a month-long trip to Florida and Colombia. We also made it to New Jersey, New York City, Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons. We’ve put hundreds of miles of hiking and walking under our belt, but not as many rock climbing routes as we would have liked. However, we put up a bouldering cave in our garage to help.

Projects

The bouldering cave that we built in our garage turned out better than we could have imagined. We still need to buy some more holds to set up different routes, but it’s been a blast setting up routes for ourselves and friends’ kids that visit.

We also bought a house that was only two years old, but we’ve still a lot of time into making it home.

I’ve done a lot of work on my bike with the help of my friend Nick who runs a motorcycle parts company, near Boise. I helped him put the site together and he’s helped keep my bike maintained.

2014

Overall, teaching has been the best opportunity. While it paid a little bit in money, it paid a ton in satisfaction of knowing I’ve made a difference in the lives of the 28 students that I had for Fall Semester of 2013; some more so than others of course. I look forward to improving the teaching of mobile apps to students and can’t wait to see their apps popping up on the app store.

The rock climbing gym should allow us to stay better trained to continue climbing the 5.10b’s that we’re able to climb at places like Smith Rock and City of Rocks.

Now that Matyas is a bit older, we can hopefully travel more, like we use to before he was born, although traveling with him to South America when he was 1 month wasn’t a bad trip.

In the past, I spent a few hundred dollars on some weights and since then, have never felt the need to sign up for a gym membership. Whenever I felt like it, I’d pick up some weights and do some reps. I’d do this fairly often and through out the day. So it started making sense to take that same idea and apply it to rock climbing. So we built a rock climbing wall, also known as a bouldering cave, in our garage.

Planning the Bouldering Cave

We have a 3 car garage but only one car, and we don’t have a lot of junk being stored in it. So when we first moved into our new house, here in Boise, our garage was feeling quite empty. The third car port didn’t have a garage door opener on it, nor did it feel like a car should go in there. The area itself just seemed perfect for a bouldering cave due to it’s U-shaped walls.

We did some research on cave designs and knew we wanted a 45 degree wall. Vertical walls are almost useless and a waste of effort. One problem was, we had a window on the left wall that we didn’t want to cover up. This would allow natural light to come in while we’re climbing and not have to burn electricity while we’re out there during the day. It would also allow cooling and ventilation in the summer so we just had to keep it open. It turned out to be a bit of a problem as a 45 degree wall would come right out and cover part of it up. We spent almost an entire day planing it out, thinking about pros and cons about different wall designs. We decided to make a 30 degree wall next to the window and a 45 next to it against the other wall.

We then decided to extend out and wrap around the dividing wall for some extra climbing surface. These walls are flat as we didn’t want them to jut out and take up more space, but they can serve as walls for kids or extra distance for traverse warmups.

Tools

We borrowed a lot of the tools from friends since there was a ton that we ended up needing.

• Circular saw (a table saw is better to cut the longer plywood)
• Chop saw – perfect for cutting angled 2x4s
• Plug in hammer drill – the hammering feature helped drive in screws to concrete.
• Power Drill – the ease of portability, the downfall of recharging batteries a lot
• Hammer – for hammering in the T-nuts
• Measuring tape – measure twice, cut once. Also great for planning and visualizing angles and how much material you’ll need
• Clamps – When you only have two hands, holding up plywood and other pieces of wood becomes a lot easier once you clamp them in place before screwing it together
• Drill bits – for various pilot holes, but also a special one for the t-nuts.
• Belt sander – sometimes you’re a few millimeters off and instead of recutting, you can just sand off that extra length. We always cut a tad long, sanded it down and made everything fit with high precision.

Materials

We made a ton of trips to the hardware store. This was mostly because we ended up wrapping our wall out and around the dividing wall that was there so we needed more materials than we first expected. We also were generous on the use of screws since everything needed to be tight and snug. Any movement of the wall as we pulled and climbed on it, would be a jarring experience as rock shouldn’t ever move.

• 5/8 inch plywood – We calculated the area, then added a few more for waste and extra features
• 2x4s for the main structure
• 2x6s for various structural componets such as tying into the ceiling and wall
• Concrete screws
• Wood screws of various lengths (2″ – 3 3/4″)
• Liquid nails – to glue the wood to the concrete after screwing it in
• Wood glue – ended up using vary little of this, but definitely needed it in a few places
• 800 t-nuts – we put t-nuts every 6-8 inches apart in the plywood

Structure

We built a frame for the wall in front of the actual wall to allow us to get back inside to fix fallen t-nuts and inspect the structure in coming years. This took some space away for climbing as it made the inner area smaller, but it’s well worth it and necessary.

Once we were done with the framing, we could build out the angles. Using clamps to secure some 2x4s at a 45 degree angle, we prototyped what the wall would look like. We sat under it to get a good feeling for what it would be like to climb at that angle and height, and moved the 2x4s up and down, adjusted the angle by a few degrees both ways and got it to “feel” right. Once it felt right to us, we screwed in the 2x4s and took off the clamps. We did this for the 30 degree wall as well to get it to work with the window. We had a little less choice with that, since a wall that was too steep would come out and cover the wall, so we brought it out as steep as we could to hit the top corner of the window.

With the main structure in place, we finished up the framing of the angled walls.

Facade

Once the frame was done, we started measuring and cutting the plywood for the wall’s face. We tried to keep waste to a minimum while cutting and planned out the cutting of the 4’x8′ sheets. We actually made the frame 8′ deep and 8′ wide to best fit the plywood. You can’t reliably climb on a wall that doesn’t properly span studs. It’s just not sturdy enough, so each piece needs to span multiple studs.

Once the plywood was measured and cut, we had to plan out where the holes were going to go, keeping in mind any adjacent walls. We ended up putting holes about 8 inches apart, starting 4 inches in. This allows us to avoid any studs on the edges, while keeping holes 8 inches apart spanning sheets of plywood. On the vertical, we had to keep in mind the widths of the holds and also try not to put them too close to the top or bottom to make them unusable. We marked out the studs on the plywood so we wouldn’t drill into them. If our holes came close, we’d nudge the marks left or right to avoid them.

The planning for the holes took a long time but once we marked them out, it was quite quick to drill the holes out and hammer in the t-nuts. We placed some scrap plywood behind the board we were drilling so the back wouldn’t splinter and blow out.

Texturing the climbing wall

Having something in your house, especially something you built yourself, should a source of pride and beauty. We knew we didn’t want to leave a plywood colored structure in our garage. Besides, the splinters alone are a pain. Also, using climbing shoes on a flat wooden surface doesn’t simulate anything except climbing on plywood. Instead of just painting it (which would have solved the splintering issue) we decided to research some texturing. We found some recipes for mixing sand with paint and joint compound but that seemed like a hassle. We happened across some deck restore that will take old wood and apply a concrete-like layer on it for a hardened surface you could walk on. You can even color it too. We bought a small amount to test it out and it worked beautifully. It’s very thick and heavy so we had to apply it in thin layers but the end result is like climbing on rough granite. Smearing is awesome.

Crash Pad

Like most garage floors, our is made out of concrete: one of the hardest materials known to a human’s skull. Not wanting to use concrete as a cushion we commissioned  Baboon Climbing to build us a crash pad that could fit in the space we had. What they came up with was a folding mat that we could break apart in the middle and use the smaller pieces around the gym. They did a great job and while it’s definitely softer than concrete, falling from our 10 foot tall bouldering cave is almost enjoyable, knowing they’ll be a soft but firm landing at the end.

Climbing on our Wall

We’ve had a bunch of fun on our wall since finishing it, but I think the most fun is had by the kids that come over and climb on it. We left some flat walls for them and we plan on adding large features to the others to make them more interesting. As you can see, we have two flat walls facing each other that’ll let us add features, but there’s also two other flat walls that wrap around the original dividing wall that can be used.

Starting your own project or have questions about ours? Let me know in the comments below!

Usually, I build out the skeletal structure as I’m doing the creative process details. As a reminder, here is our structure:

Main.lua in Corona SDK

In Lua, everything starts in your main.lua file. Most people will probably put a lot of logic and variables in this. We use the main.lua file strictly to launch our application and leave the rest of the logic up to the Game Controller, which we’ll create a file for called GameController.lua.

 

This is all we have in the main.lua file. It simply declares a function, and then adds an event listener that gets system messages for when the application starts, exits, suspends and resumes. For each of these states, we either save or load the data. For example, if we were in the middle of a battle and our game gets sent to the background, we’ll need to save the current state of the application to a file so that we can resume in the same place, even if the app quits completely. These might be things like current health, time, which enemies are still active, etc. When the application resumes again, we reload this data and we’ll check it later in the code to see what our state was, so we can handle the loading of that screen, just as if we never left.

If the application starts up, and there is no data, that means it is the first time we’ve launched our application. We call a special function in GameController.lua called firstLaunch() to handle this. You could put this logic in the GameController’s main function to make main.lua even simpler if you wanted but by testing for nil, we can handle it differently if your game had different needs.

First Launch

This first launch function might include a quick tutorial overlay to introduce the player to our game. Always after that, we save the data so the next time the app starts, data will be loaded in and firstLaunch() won’t be called. First launch may do other things like setting up and writing settings files, but we’ll want to separate out the logic for overlays and other things into other functions so that we can reuse them later, if the user wishes to go back through the beginning tutorial. In other words, if the user wants to revisit the tutorial via a menu item, we don’t want to run through all the first launch logic like creating settings files, user names, etc. We’ll simply want to call something like showTutorial() in order to bring that feature up. It’s important we separate out these steps for later use in the app. You never know what you’ll end up reusing or accessing from another execution path.

System Events

Finally, we print out the event.type variable if it is not nil, in case you’re interested in handling additional system events that Corona sends your way. In our case, I’ve simply commented out the print statement but keeping the handling of system events in one place is a good idea. In our case, we’re forwarding the handlers to our GameController since that’s acting as our master controller.

Game Stats

You may have also noticed we made a call to getGameStats() to serialize and deserialize our data. This returns the Game Stats controller that holds all the information about our game including character stats, level stats, scores, and everything else we want to keep. This will talk to our storage controller to read the file information and then put it into a format. We’ll also have a level loader, so we can load things such as those one at a time from storage.

Overview

As we mentioned in our last installment, our game will be a turn-based combat system. I first thought about having the main character’s home be a sort of base to defend, in a tower defense-like sub-game with additional element such as exploring the surrounding area, along with our combat system. While some great ideas came out on paper, I could see it quickly got out of hand to begin to program that. However, I continued to create the “ultimate” game and didn’t let myself be too worried about the programming. After I had exhausted ideas and creativity (sometimes that happens pretty quickly), I pared down the offerings and got rid of the tower defense idea (maybe in the sequel) and the other fluff. If we had the budget and the manpower, we might accomplish that, but given the budget and the time constraint, we’ll make this simple and hopefully still fun. The exploring a map part came back to a game like The Adventures of Link or Final Fantasy, where the character walks around a 2D map encountering enemies. I’m ok with that and drawing inspiration from games that work is what started this whole thing. Our game won’t win any awards for originality but that’s ok too.

High Level View of Our Game Classes

So we have two main parts to our game: a part where the player explores the city and the combat system. As the foundation to our game, we have the following base on which to build our game:

1. A Game Controller, the main controller of it all. This class will controller the main aspects of the game such as starting the game, which screens to present, and handling other organizational tasks. This is a singleton class that we can access from any other class to interface with it’s public methods. This is different from a global class in a number of ways. We’ll go into this in more detail later.
2. A Storage Controller will control loading and storing various aspects of the game. We’ll tell the Storage Controller to get us things and we’ll tell it to save things. We don’t really care how the Storage controller does these things, just that it does and does them well. Likely, it’ll be to a custom file that we write that’s stored on the mobile device’s memory but it could just as easily be to a database, a network or external storage. By abstracting this system, we can plug it into our future games.
3. The Display Controller will handle things like displaying items to the screen and removing them. We can build in some utility functions like fading in and out views. We’ll go through the Display Controller whenever we want to display our items. That way, everything that has to be displayed will be in one place. If your familiar with Corona SDK, under the hood, this controller will manage our Display Groups, animations and other display properties and organize them into screens.
4. The Combat Controller will handle our combat scenarios. This has to be stand alone so that during testing, we can simply pass in a bunch of inputs and begin our battle. The way this will work is, we’ll launch the app, and instead of going through the usual paths, we’ll construct the data (enemies, player stats, level, etc) and then pass that all into the combat controller, straight to the fight. Then we can test the combat system and tweaking inputs without having to go looking for a fight every time.
5. The City Controller will allow us to place our player in a city to explore. Again, this will need to be stand alone so that we can use different inputs to put our player into different scenarios. We can also manually change the files that the Storage Controller uses to advance the player through the game without having to play through it every time.

Of course, we won’t build everything into these controllers as they would become huge and unmaintainable, let alone buggy, but those details will be built out later. This is a good start and will allow us to start work on the individual pieces.

Our player will be either be in combat or exploring the map. Other interactions, like scavenging (this is a post-apocalyptic game after all), interacting with items and people or reading some part of the storyline are all secondary screens that will be shown on top of the combat or map. Menus and other things will work in a similar manner. These are sometimes referred to as modal windows since they will go on top our main display and capture all the interactions. These modal windows will likely have their own controllers or be grouped into controllers that make sense. These will all be organized by the Display Controller, so we’ll always know what’s on the screen and we don’t have to figure out if some lonely class somewhere deep in our game, is displaying something we don’t know about.

As we’re still in the planning stage, we’ll hold off on starting the code just yet until we build out some more diagrams. However, we won’t build out a diagram for every single class we need as things will likely change and will be better changed in code. Think of this as outlining a school report. These are just the main things we want to talk about and we’ll include some of the sub-items, but we don’t include every detail. Soon, when we start the coding, we can look back and see the general blueprints of how we build everything out.

So after paying the bills, and paying down huge chunks of debt, I decided to give a little back and support projects that people are trying to do themselves. One way I thought of was to fund a Kickstarter or an Indiegogo project. These are donations to projects people are trying to create and they usually give some kind of gift based on the donation amount, often times sending you their product or service if you donate enough money.

These are ok, but they’re not really an investment and I really wanted to invest in a project. So I decided to try Kiva.org and lend $200 with the idea that, that money will be used to fund small businesses and individuals around the world to give them working capital for their ventures. I decided to invest in Colombia since that’s the foreign country I know the best, it has a hard working lower class, and has a great potential to make a difference. While Kiva doesn’t give me a return on the investment, and the people borrowing the money are borrowing it at the rates that most people in the US pay on their credit cards, it does have an impact on these people’s lives. The borrowers usually provide updates on their progress throughout the lending period and you can follow along with their story. It’s a great way to find out what life and small business is like in countries you’ve never heard the name of.

With Kiva, the principal is paid back to me over time, which I can reinvest, or withdrawal. There’s about a 1-2% of default and other fees, so over time, that money will dwindle down, but until then, you can reinvest and help other people, all along hearing their stories of success.

Should we be teaching these people that borrowing is a terrible idea? Probably, but if we call it investing, it’s ok, right? Well, I figured $200 was a good number to figure out what this micro lending thing was all about.  I’m still skeptical, but even if I eventually lose all that money (hopefully not for several years), it can be recirculated many times to continue to help fund different people’s small business ambitions.

If you’d like to start your own Kiva investments, sign up here and Kiva will donate $25 to fund a project. Minimum is $25, so it’s easy to begin. I’ll let you know how mine works out and what my thoughts are on the whole process.

If you know any other great ways to invest in small businesses and help get it started, let me know in the comments below!

Welcome to the first part of our series on developing a game for iOS and Android. We’ll go through the process of starting from scratch: developing the concept, planning, architecture, graphics, testing, deploying the game and more. This is a full featured game, not a simple demo game. While the series will touch upon a bit of code, it’s not going to be code intensive. We’ll use code snippets to simply illustrate concepts and functionality as we build it out. Hopefully, everyone can follow along and see how we develop games.

The beauty is, we don’t already have everything planned out, so you’ll get to see us come up with solutions, change direction, refactor code, and maybe make a few mistakes along the way.

Be sure to subscribe to the blog or like us on Facebook to follow along. I’m also on Twitter.

Start Early, Start Often

The decision to start a game shouldn’t be taken lightly. If it’s your first game, start small. Potential game developers tend to be overly ambitious and get quickly overwhelmed when the reality of the creation hits them. While we’re not necessarily veteran game developers, this is not our first game. Even so, we’ll start off small and iterate to show how we approach development of this scale. This is our approach but certainly not the only one.

Coming Up with the Game’s Theme or Story

It’s extremely difficult to sit down and come up with a game in one sitting. For me, the process involved looking at a lot of games out there and picking my favorite elements of each, and thinking about how that would be built out. Whenever I see apps or games, I always think how it’s built and try to dissect it to see how someone might have built it out. I also couldn’t get it out of my head for the longest time, so I knew the motivation was there.

I’m a fan of post apocalyptic movies and other media (George Romero movies, The Walking Dead, etc). I find it extremely interesting, as a programmer, that if the world as we know it ever ended, what would a guy with computer skills do? I’d be one of the least useful people with that skill set. This is something I’ve been thinking about for years and have a real interest in.

I also love the Final Fantasy type games. The XCom series of games are still my all time favorite. Both of these games are role playing games (RPG) with turn based fighting, albeit very different approaches. This breaks down into having characters that all have characteristics and a fighting system that uses those characteristics, mixed with some randomization and probabilities and enemy intelligence (we’ll cover the topics of combinatorics and computer AI in later posts).

So, I want to build a post apocalyptic role playing game with some turn based combat. That’s a great beginning and it’s all we need to get started. Story is important, as well as depth of game play, replayability and ultimately monitization, but that’ll come later. We might even decide on a different combat system as we flesh out some of those details. We haven’t started coding yet, so changing our mind is as simple as crossing something out and writing down something new.

Requirements

We want to build the app for iOS and Android. While we could do this in OpenGL ES, we’re looking for a little bit of a faster build time and 3D graphics might be over kill for what we’re building, especially if we don’t have a 3D artist to help. In our case, we actually do have a 3D artist, but that gets expensive very quickly. Instead we can stick with a 2D game, and fake the 3D by scaling objects down that are far away and scale them up as they approach the screen.

Again, we don’t want to spend forever building this out, so let’s use an SDK that allows us to code once, and build natively for both. In this case, we can use Corona SDK which allows us to code in the programming language Lua (usually used as a scripting language for gaming engines) but compile to native Java and Objective-C for the Android and iOS platforms respectively.

We’ve used other SDKs in the past, but Corona SDK allows us the fastest build time while still leveraging hardware features of the two platforms. This is something HTML5 can’t do yet and the experience is always subpar.

We’ve been using Corona SDK for years for our previous games, but I’m not using it because I’m familiar with it. I invested a lot of time in learning Libgdx and figured I’d be alright deploying just to Android since its iOS capabilities are brand new and not mature, and require an additional $350 license for a 3rd party to make it work. I don’t like having to jump through hoops with my tools. So it wasn’t the right tool for the job for that, as well as other reasons. Corona SDK, while it doesn’t have the 3D capabilities that Libgdx has, we don’t need it for this particular game.

Budget

We have designers, but they cost money. We have 3D capabilities, but that costs money. We need an SDK to build fast 2D games, which costs money for the license. We need sound and music, which costs money.

To get started however is free. It doesn’t cost us anything to write down our ideas, architect the app and build the story. Even then, to use Corona SDK, is free until you want to deploy and test on a device (something that’s only needed right away if your app uses the accelerometer or other hardware specific features like that, that the simulator can’t simulate).

SDK

For the Corona SDK, we’ll eventually need a license, which is $349 (cheaper if you’re a student). But since we don’t need this until the end, this won’t stop someone from building a game.

Music

For past games, we’ve budgeted about $250 for quality, royalty-free music and sounds. Of course you can always find free music and sounds, and this may be more within your own budget.

Graphics

Most games require custom graphics so this is going to be the biggest hit to our budget. Since we don’t know what we need yet, we’ll pull from past experience and try to limit our graphic needs to about $1,500 for now. That may be unrealistic, but we can work within that limitation and work smart to keep that price down. If you don’t set boundaries early, you’ll find things tend to balloon quickly.

Programming

In reality, this would be the biggest expense. Since I’m doing all the coding myself, it’s technically free, but I do hope to get paid and feed my family. I’ll keep track of my hours for development (something we do for every project), so I’ll know the theoretical cost of development. It’ll also give you an idea of how long each thing takes to build out.

Financial Projections

Game Revenue

As I said, I’d love to make some money instead of spending it (we are a business after all), so how do we monetize it? I’m a little sick of companies offering games for free and then nickel and diming you for every little thing. Does it work? Oh heck yes. Does it make for a good gaming experience? Not really. People will pay for good content, so let’s focus on that first.

As we build out the game in more detail, opportunities may present themselves that make sense. Otherwise we’re not going to shoehorn something that doesn’t match the game model.

Market Research

Does a game like this exist? Simple answer: yes. So what makes ours different? We’ll have to figure that out. In the mobile world, everyone has short attention spans, so games tend to be quick arcade-like games. You get in, you get out. You play then while you’re in line at the DMV, you play then in between your connections at the airport. I do believe the platform can support games that people want to play as they do with regular console games. The problem is, there’s not a lot of games that have deep story lines. Everyone is trying to make a quick buck, appeal to the casual gamer and move on to the next project. Well I’m not a casual gamer and I believe there are a ton of people out there like me who want a more involved game. Plus, with a low budget, we don’t necessarily need to make that quick buck.

Conclusion

So we’re going to build a post apocalyptic role playing game, with turn-based combat, in Corona SDK, for about $2,100.

Will we make the top 100 list? Probably not. Do I care? Not if it affects the fun of building a game and the enjoyment I’ll get when people play it. Luckily, I’m not a starving mobile developer and do quite well with my mobile development company here in Idaho.

In the next post, we’ll talk about brainstorming ideas and requirements and concepting the game to bring it out of the fog my brain and into something more tangible. You see the process, rationale, and decisions made to create the overview of the game as well as the scaling back and limitations we’ll place on the game to stay within budget and release the app in a reasonable timeframe. So let’s start building a game that we’ll enjoy building and see where we’ll end up.

Please leave FEEDBACK!

I’m doing this to help others, since others have helped me. Please leave comments below so I know how I best help tailor the series to your needs and interests. Even if it’s just to say hi, I’d love to hear from you.

Don’t forget to subscribe to the blog or like us on Facebook to follow along. I’m also on Twitter.

Starting Over

I ended up starting a new LLC based on this website’s name, something I’ve been running for years. I registered another web domain name, setup another website installation, bought a theme for the website and filled it with content and portfolio items. Within a few months, we ranked #1, #2, and #3 (#3 was this site) when you searched “Mobile Development Boise.” The calls and emails started coming in. Some people just wanted to know how much it was to develop a mobile app, others were testing the waters, and still others had already committed, one way or another to having an app built and were just looking for the right people to do it.

That was as much marketing and advertising as we did. We didn’t cold call, we didn’t mass email. We simply had a product and service that people were interested in, and wanted to find out more. Surprisingly, more people have called than have used email to contact us. The calls are about 60%, direct email 15% and using the contact form was about 25% of our incoming inquiries. All forms of communication have resulted in very good clients so I can’t really say which one was better for us.

We picked up some web development jobs to pay the bills while we worked on the good ideas for client mobile apps. We didn’t take on every project that came our way. Some thought our prices were too high. Some were expecting the development to be only a few hundred dollars. And some just had bad ideas that either couldn’t be executed, or we didn’t want to execute them. You don’t want clients that have bad ideas or won’t pay you what you’re worth. When clients understand the cost, you know they’re running a good business themselves because they know what things are worth. When clients have bad ideas, they usually don’t have a proven business model to support it, or they simply aren’t familiar with the technology.

Don’t get me wrong. We’ve done our share of low-budget apps, just because we liked the people who came to us. We have a soft spot for startups and people just trying to live their dream. Most of the time, these people already want a working business model and just need a solution to their mobile needs. We try to be fair, we’re always honest, and hopefully that builds better relationships.

Anyway, we picked the right projects and the money started slowly trickling in. We got some large projects where we threw every resource we had at them. We hired a bunch of great people who did great work, and we accomplished a lot of things. We paid them fairly and we paid them on time. If I could help it, I paid them up front. I trusted all of them, I had worked with all of them before and everything went well. Luckily. I’m a firm believer in, “It’s who you know.” And if you know great people, they’ll enable you to do great things.

Don’t get jealous of people’s abilities and talents; get inspired.

Success Depends on Reach

How many people or businesses do you know that can send you $30,000+ projects? If you were to get said projects, how many people do you know that can help you execute on those? You need to get to a point where you’re doing less of the development, and more of the management. Everyone knows management does nothing and gets paid the most; so why wouldn’t you want to be in that position? But the worst managers are the ones who couldn’t do your job if the company depended on it. I’m not sure why non-technical people are hired to manage programmers, but the best ones either know how to do the jobs of the people they supervise, or they admit they don’t and instead listen well and take their advice to make the best decisions. Be one or both of those things, but most importantly, have people working for you that can give you good advice.

I built up that kind of network over the years by staying humble, listening and always remembering that I don’t need to be the smartest, best person to be successful.

How Successful Was It?

I technically started up the new LLC in March so it hasn’t exactly been a year. Remember that ten thousand dollars of income I made the first year? Well that LLC made a lot more than that, but that’s pretty much all I saw. This year, the company is projected to be almost a magnitude greater than that, for a period 12 months. Ok, so I’m playing with numbers and dates a bit for my benefit, but you get the point right? I’m making a decent, living wage after a year below the poverty line (although my wife made a decent salary, so technically as a family we weren’t).

I could have gotten a “real” job and made 2 or 3 times what I did. Sometimes, I’ll admit, when the bank accounts were getting low and I didn’t have any outstanding invoices due to me, I wish I had. But because we built a solid foundation with the website and our portfolio, the next call or email would come in, and off we’d be rolling again. A bit of a roller coaster, ulcer causing existence sometimes, but having retained earnings, diligent savings and always looking ahead, ensured we were always busy.

Looking at 2013, while we have a ton of things and ideas in the pipeline, to potentially grow the revenue even more, I still think: “Would it be better to just give it all up, get a ‘real’ job and not have to think or work so hard?” I think anyone trying to run their own company who thinks they’ll become rich overnight should take a long hard look in the mirror, and then laugh at themselves. While overnight successes happen, sort of, it mostly takes a lot of hard work, good decisions and a lot of talent to become rich. Sometimes it just takes a while to get all those things right.

Doing this kind of thing is not for everyone and there’s no shame in that. But regrets are a lot harder to justify than failures.

Post in the comments below about your successes, failures or questions and make sure you subscribe below.

Care to follow my progress?

My First and Only “Real” Job

In the spring of 2007, I graduated with my shiny new degree in Computer Science from Virginia Tech. Even then, I was very picky about who I wanted to work for. I had sold some of my own software in college and loved that experience. When going to job fairs, I would only consider companies that appreciated good User Experience (UX), and didn’t program in anything .NET. Why? Mostly, because I knew I wanted to be involved with anything UX, and I was an Apple developer since 2003, and loved working in that environment.

Eventually, I found a company right in Blacksburg that did online product demos in Flash. I had dabbled in Flash a bit but knew nothing about it. On top of that, this company had clients like Hasbro, T-Mobile, Verizon Wireless, Graco, Canon, Reebok, and the list goes on. As a freshly minted Computer Scientist, I was a bit intimidated.

What the job actually taught me was, those companies are run by people, and you can talk to and reason with people. They have wants and needs and are not some super force of power. The people are generally approachable, but very professional. You can’t play games, you can’t be immature and no one likes drama. You are a vendor who provides a service and you can be switched out at any given moment.

I ended up becoming very good at Flash and talking to clients. I created a ton of new technologies for the company that had never been created for that platform (although most likely existed in other places). But we got switched out.

What I learned from that is, nothing is a sure thing and things can change overnight.

Learn to Swim – Or How to Start Your Indie Journey Before You Jump Ship

We were down to our last client and before the ship sank into the sea of failed companies, I jumped on a little life raft and paddled my way to fame and glory. That life raft was iOS development, which I started about two years before I left. I asked my boss at the time, when iOS 2.0 came out, if he wanted to offer iOS apps to our clients. He kind of laughed and said he didn’t think anyone would buy apps for a phone. We could have been one of the first mobile development capable companies. Instead, I started my own, which became one of the first.

What I learned was, when you see a clear and present opportunity, take it.

So I worked nights and weekends on our first mobile applications: BarNinja, Unprinted, a game on wake boarding, an app that helps municipalities clean up streets of debris and potholes, an Inbox Zero email helper app, a comic book app and a few other smaller projects. It was hard. My girlfriend at the time complained about how much I was working and we got into some fights about it.

What I learned was, how to write iOS apps of various types, including games, and apps that use native hardware features.

I didn’t just write one app and call myself a mobile developer, I took on challenges that I didn’t know how to do and did them. I didn’t make much money. I made enough to buy a new 13″ MacBook Pro and pay my utility bills each month (less than $100/month). What helped, was, I didn’t have cable and I really loved what I was doing.

When the time finally to put in my 2 weeks notice, I had half a dozen completed apps under my belt and I had lined up about $10,000 of client work in the next 2 months. Everyone says, have 6 months to a year of savings. I probably had a month or two and a load of student debt. When you have a salary, your expenses seem to fit your income. If you plan on going indie, you need to become a lean and productive worker. Cut out all luxury expenses, like cable TV, prepared meals, turn lights off when you leave rooms; whatever it takes because you’re going to live off of nothing for the foreseeable future.

Plan for a Very Sparse First Year

That $10,000 in two months turned into about 12 months. That is basically how much money I made in 2011. Let me repeat that, I made about $10,000 in my first year as an independent.

Here’s what went wrong:

• The $10,000 jobs were with people I had never worked with before. The projects dragged on, requirements changed and of that projected $10k, I got about $1,500. That’s about a months living expenses for me.
• I moved from Blacksburg, VA to Boise, ID. I knew not a single sole in Boise, ID, let alone any potential clients.
• Besides spending a lot of time in the move, and various other chores and errands, I wasted a lot of time chasing ideas that never came to fruition. I felt like I was thrashing in a giant sea and all around me, passing me by, were big cruise liners filled with cash, waiting for me to climb aboard.

Here’s what I did:

• I married the girlfriend way before jumping ship. She was the best thing in my life and when you have something that special, you chain her down with a fancy ring and you keep her happy no matter what. She was my anchor, my support, my goal, my dream and she kept me going. We had our fights about money, about time, about everything. But she supported me and sacrificed to let me have what I wanted. For that, I will be eternally grateful to her.
• Twitter is an amazing tool to meet people in another city, say, one you’re planning on moving to. Once I knew I was moving to Boise (since my wife got a great job there), I followed everyone I could that listed their location in the City of Trees. A month after we moved to Boise, I saw a tweet from someone looking to work with a mobile developer. Hey! I was a mobile developer. A sit down and coffee later, I had my first Boise gig.
• I dropped the idea of doing web development and concentrated on what my passion was: mobile apps. I also concentrated heavily on networking. I went to any meeting of professionals and industry people that I thought was interesting and a good opportunity to meet people. I went with the attitude of just meeting people, not trying to sell anything. I talked about what I did, but I mostly listened. Finally, I started to recognize some faces on the cruise liners. A lot were even willing to throw me a line. Some became live savers.

Financially, the first year pretty much sucked. Socially, I met some really great people, so at times I felt rich. That’s what good friends and good people can do for you. But you still need to pay the bills. Next time, I’ll talk about starting over and how to actually start a business that makes money as I did in 2012. Subscribe to the mailing list below to get the latest on what I’m up to. I keep them short, sweet and infrequent. And, follow me on Twitter.

Read Going Independent – Part 2

Care to follow my progress?

7 pounds, 3 ounces

20 1/2 inches long

Baby Matyas arrived Wednesday morning at St. Luke’s Medical Center, in Boise, Idaho, perfectly healthy and with almost no fuss. We all spent Thanksgiving in the hospital with friends and ate a wonderful dinner in a cramped but wonderful hospital room.

Both mom and baby are doing well and should be released from the hospital Saturday morning.

What’s with the long name?

Matyas’s mother comes from a culture of combining both parent’s last names for their children. His last name is technically “Ziray Arango” and his middle name is Andrew, named after his great grandfather, Andrew James Ziray, Sr., and his Grandfather, Andrew James Ziray, Jr. His uncle is also Andrew James Ziray, III.

As for his first name, Matyas (ma-TEE-us) is a name that works in both Spanish and English, with the benefit of also being the name of Hungary’s first king, Mátyás Corvinus. Matyas also means “gift of god,” which has a bit of irony since Michael means, “Who is like god?” This latter part is purely coincidence. The Spanish version is Matias, while the English version is Matthias. Either way, it is a unique name and in our opinion, tasteful to the mixed heritage of this young little guy.

Matyas Ziray

Last week, Ana and I found out we’re having a baby boy. We’re expecting the little guy November 29; just an early Christmas present to both of us.

The baby is healthy, within the 75% percentile for growth (which might just mean they’re 2 days or so behind the estimate) and moving all around inside Ana. This week was also the first week she definitively felt the little guy moving around. We found out her placenta is just on the other side of the tummy, so the extra padding makes it hard to feel the baby.

Ana doesn’t even look like she’s pregnant one bit. No one believes us when we tell them, but she hides it well anyway. She’s definitely feeling the pregnancy though but we’re still rock climbing, camping and other things to try to stay active. Rock climbing is of course perfectly safe and falls are limited to a only a foot or two on a nice stretchy rope. Plus Ana bought a full body harness instead of the one that wraps around the waist.

20 Week Ultrasound Video 1

20 Week Ultrasound Video 2

20 Week Ultrasound Video 3

20 Week Ultrasound Video 4

Ultrasound video 1 – 7 Weeks

Ultrasound video 2 – 7 Weeks

Ultrasound video 3 – 7 Weeks

Smith Rock Rock Climbing

Anyway, since I figured it wouldn’t be too hard, I took about two hours while I was in a chat-based meeting with a few of my developers, and threw together this app that scrapes the HTML for the website and compiles it into a native iPhone app:

It’s all dynamic and pretty cool, although not very pretty. But what do you want from 2 hours of work?

I’ll probably release this on the app store after a bit more polish and maybe a big “Call Crime Stoppers” button that tells your iPhone to dial the hotline to report your sighting.

Other ideas:

• Display bounty information – Some of these suspects have bonds as large as 10s of thousands of dollars!
• Have a separate listing for the Arrested section. Because don’t you feel all warm in fuzzy when you see direct results of the police force’s hard work?
• Aggregate the daily incident reports for easy reading on your phone.

What are some other ideas to add to this app?

Would you think this app would be useful to the general population of Boise and surrounding areas?

Do officers even have iPhones?

This was just one of those ideas that seemed like a good idea at the time, but I need honest feedback if I should continue development on it. So, let me know what you all think in the comments below!