What is something you’ve created that you are proud of?
I’m incredibly proud of the work I did on my first company, MegaBits (which was incredibly similar to Pokémon Go, 3 years before Pokémon Go). As founder and CEO I was directly responsible for a lot of MegaBits’ product and operations, but a few things stand out for me.
The Technical Standouts
Much of our technical achievement was in service to building a fully decentralized MMO infrastructure. This lead us to some interesting and innovative solutions, like developing a lazy-loading map-interpolation library. The library took screen data from any mapping system (we used Apple Maps), extracted metadata from the tile image (such as “isWater” for water and “hasAOI” for areas of interest), and replaced the tile with a corresponding game tile. This let us re-skin the entire world into a game world without leveraging a central resource.
We also developed a procedural generation algorithm for the in-game content that was both pseudo-random and based on environmental heuristics. For example, if you were near an “isWater” tile at night in the rain within a certain geofence, the algorithm would predictably generate a cycle of various monsters, all of which would be either nocturnal or aquatic. The algorithm was predictable so that we could lazy-load an entire planet’s worth of content only when a player encountered that space.
To synchronize the lazy-loaded content, we built a room-based, real-time state synchronization service. By corresponding Redis rooms to map tiles, creating those rooms on-demand, and using them to synchronize content state between clients, we were able to simulate an MMO-like experience almost entirely client-side.
The Non-Technical Standouts
As technical as MegaBits was, much of what’s stuck with me is the artistic scale of the project, and the passion that went into it. The early art, music, sound, and game design was all done by volunteers. Channeling their raw enthusiasm into a reliable production pipeline for professional quality assets took a lot of organization discipline, clear communication, high expectations, and empathy. It’s hard to quantify, but it got us to a beautiful product. The resulting works of art punch well above their weight.
The team collaborated on dozens of clever creatures and novel game mechanics. And we cultivated an audience who loved it — by the time Go was announced, we had 1,000 active players. We each knew most of the players, and we put a big emphasis on responsiveness, reactive support, and fun very early in our player base growth.
The MegaBits team was phenomenally talented, and if I take full credit for anything, it’s this. As a first-time founder, I recruited a fantastic iOS developer with a penchant for AR, a brilliant full-stack engineer just out of school, two senior pixel artists who had worked on popular indie titles like Duelyst, and a handful of dedicated game designers, musicians, sound designers, and writers. All on a budget of $275,000 over 3 years.
It was definitely a little sad when Nintendo announced that they were moving into the space (more on that here), but I’m still immensely proud of what we were able to accomplish.
