#STACK THE STATES APP COMPATIBILITY PLUS#
Maybe the iPhone 6 Plus has some obscure bug that causes your app to do something weird and you have to spend half a day tracking it down and fixing it. But of course you have to do really boring things like updating apps. But the biggest challenge is wearing all those different hats when I’d rather just create things all day and put them on a conveyor belt to the public. Not just to make money, but to make a mark on the world in some way or make something valued by people.
But motivation has never been a problem for me.
And there’s making the game, but you also have to market it and support customers. It’s work just to make the company function. It’s a lot of work because I have a corporation that I’m running here. It’s up to you to decide how much you want to take on. You can put out one app per year or you can put out four apps per year. What does that mean, workload-wise, as the only developer?ĭan Russell-Pinson: It’s as much work as you want to make it, is one answer. : You’ve released three games in the last two years, along with multiple versions and updates. I didn’t necessarily look at game companies and go, “Wow, I want to be a part of that!” because a lot of times you just end being the guy who draws backgrounds all day or creates sprites all day. It doesn’t mean they made a bad game, it’s just different. It was more interesting to see what one person came up with, whereas a bigger company has lots of financial pressures, they make decisions based on consensus and committee and they choose the games they want to make based on their potential profit and so forth. I sort of look back at the Atari days, all the games I enjoyed were made by one person. : Why didn’t you begin making educational games right after college?ĭan Russell-Pinson: I think the main reason I didn’t pursue it was there were so many games produced by large companies, and that just didn’t interest me.
I realized it’s probably better for me to engage with groups purely within game development groups instead of app development. So even though we deal with similar issues, like coding or provisional profiles for our apps, the craft is totally different, like apples and oranges. It’s almost as if we’re working on totally different things. They worry about lots of little things that I never do. I was at an app developer conference recently, and after a couple days I realized that most of what they talked about doesn’t apply to me at all. Why?ĭan Russell-Pinson: I guess I’ve noticed a big difference between people who make just apps, like time-management apps for example, and someone who make games that are also apps. : So you consider yourself a games developer and not an app developer. This transcript has been edited for time and clarity: Roughly five years and twelve educational games later, Russell-Pinson has explored a diverse range of subjects, including physics, history, math and geography.īut even as Russell-Pinson imagines a not-too-distant future where children use virtual reality tools like the Oculus Rift to fully immerse themselves in cleverly designed fusions of education and entertainment, he still says it was that blinking cursor that was an invitation to create, a blank-slate challenging you actively develop instead of passively absorb. But he didn’t transition into a full-time game developer of what he calls “cerebral” games until 2007, when he started making Flash games for fun in his spare time. Russell-Pinson first started making games on an Atari 800 personal computer in the 80s, and after high school, completed a bachelor’s degree in computer science at Clemson University. His latest game, a sandbox-style roller coaster maker that teaches the science behind the speed, received a nod from the Washington Post as one of best news kids apps for 2015. His work has received attention from several game-focused parenting blogs, and children’s tech review sites. That game, combined with income from his eleven other educational apps, allows the Charlotte, N.C.-based developer to create games full-time under the banner of his company, Freecloud Design, Inc. Nearly four years after its release, parents and teachers are still downloading the map building game for their children and students, pushing Stack the States to the top of the heap as the most downloaded educational app in the country as recently as January 15, 2015. Stack the States has spent years bringing in revenue and users to Russell-Pinion’s firm.Īnd much of it can be tied to Stack the States.
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