People know I build apps. What they can’t see is everything around the apps: how six games, a national parks app and a text adventure keep moving across the iPhone, the web and now Android without me explaining the same thing twice. This post is about that part.
I’m the producer, not the crew
The easiest way I’ve found to describe it is a film set. I don’t write every line of code. I work with Claude, and each app has its own sessions doing the building. My job is the producer’s: decide what the thing should be, keep the whole production consistent, and make the calls only I can make.
Like a film, it runs on documents.
The bibles
Every app starts from an app bible, which says what the app is, how it plays and what it will never do. There’s also an art bible for how it looks and sounds. When a new session opens, it reads those first. I don’t have to repeat myself to a new app anymore. The bibles already said it.
The playbooks
My six games are a family: free, with a tip jar, and no ads, ever. Decisions get tried in one app first. Backgammon is the pilot, and what works there becomes the playbook the others inherit. The tip jar, the leaderboard and the way sound behaves were all settled once and passed down, not argued six times.
The twins compare notes
This is the part I find hardest to explain and most satisfying. When an app comes to Android, the Android version isn’t a copy of the iPhone code. The two share no code at all. The Android version is built fresh from a written brief, and it comes out playing exactly like its sibling.
That makes the two versions twins who can check each other’s work. Each Android port keeps a feedback log. When the Android twin finds something the brief didn’t cover, like a missing number or a rule that could be read two ways, it writes it down. I carry the log to the iPhone side, and it makes the ruling. Neither one touches the other’s files. I’m the courier.
The notes go both ways, too. On EmberDice, the Android twin is now where I try new ideas first.
I visit the set
Most days I don’t build. I visit. I read the logs, see how things are going, and make the decisions that are mine.
Some of those decisions are the parts I enjoy most. EmberDice started as Claude’s idea: a dice game where you burn dice instead of busting. I changed banking so it takes everything left on the table. Later I added water: your opponent can throw a bucket on your push, and a fire-engine siren goes off. My Cribbage game plays like a Formula 1 race, with starting lights, a racetrack for a board, and a drag-race sound for a big hand. The rules stay classic, and the fun is what’s wrapped around them.
And some of it is plain legwork. Lookabout has to be tested in the field, with both phones at the same spot, to make sure each one sees what the camera sees. I don’t mind tedious work. That’s the one job the documents can’t do for me.
Why it works
Six apps and three platforms don’t take six times the explaining, because the explaining is written down once. The bibles hold the vision, the playbooks hold the decisions, and the feedback logs hold the conversation. I hold the calls.
If you’ve wondered how one person keeps up with all of it, that’s how.
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