Banekin

I've been coding for about two years. At this point I can more or less hack together the game I want, but the code won't be very efficient. It occurred to me that I could open source the game, forcing me to confront my own limitations.

Here's the part I have trouble with. Ideally I'd like to get compensation for my work, and if the game is in paid app form (Android), is open source a good idea at all? Is there a way for me to protect my app while still making the code available?

I could contribute to an already existing project, but I feel that at my current level I would just mess up their codebase.

I'd like to build up a little hype for a game I'm making by having a landing page with a video, and collecting emails before I launch.

Are there any good services that create something like this? I would make the page myself, but I think my time is better spent improving the app.

Thanks

Hi,

I posted before on HN about this, but at the moment I'm working on a series of sound toys for Android. Each one is 'organic' in its design, and resembles more an organism that produces sound than an instrument.

Initially I was planning on pricing them at $1 each, but maybe this is too steep for something that isn't a game, or has value that increases measurably over time. Should I package several of them into one app and sell it for $1? I've read somewhere that if people are given too much choice they have a hard time making a decision, so would it be best to package the organisms into one app? Also, is it an evil marketing trick to set a price when there is buzz around a product and say it only exists for a 'limited time'?

I suspect that my situation is sort of unusual so I'll try to explain it first as best as possible. I've decided that generative art/music is an interesting market, and so I originally was going to make synthesizer apps for Android. After much thought, I decided that a musician centric app, (not to mention a professionally useless one) excluded too many people. So my compromise was to make a series of sound organisms, each with a distinct sound, behavior, and visual style. Similar to RJDJ(1) or Brian Eno's generative sound apps(2). I figured this would be a good idea because IMO the aforementioned apps are a bit too hard to grasp for the average user. People might sympathize more with a creature that produces sound as a byproduct than a generative sound application with abstract visuals. At least that was my reasoning.

So the actual project is going along nicely, but from reading HN a lot I realize that the launch and marketing are pretty important as well. I don't know anything about marketing or launching a product. I was planning on charging $.99 for each app (each creature would be an individual app), and for my website I would have a splash page with a video, some QR codes and links to the apps in the market. Besides posting to HN and Reddit, what else can I do to spread the word about my apps? Should I set up the splash page now and gather emails? I don't know if people would be that excited about something that is kind of hard to explain without watching a video, which is why I'm hesitant about trying to build excitement without a finished product. Any advice would be appreciated, thanks.

tl;dr How do you market an app?

http://rjdj.me/

http://www.generativemusic.com/

I'm a sophomore right now and lately I just feel like school is completely irrelevant to anything I will do in the future, besides the credentials I will have I guess. With all the talk about Khan Academy and education recently I felt the need to post this. Also to clarify I don't want to claim that school isn't important for everyone, but in my case 95% of the material I can confidently say isn't.

So I guess my question is how much should I be allotting my time to personal projects, and should I feel bad if my grades suffer because of it? (By suffering I mean having about a 90% GPA as opposed to a higher one if I really applied myself. I'm not going to do poorly, I'm just not going to be exceptional academically.) I have a really hard time grasping that grades != intelligence, so it does bother me when they are lower.

Anyway, you guys have more life experience than I do, so please convince me to do my homework.

All the logos and designs I'm able to produce look like they're from 2007, are heavily gradiented, and lack subtlety. I would like to be able to make more modern logos and designs. Are there any good websites or books for learning how to design elegant graphics and landing pages? I'm working in Photoshop CS5 by the way.

Is running a Linux distribution a viable alternative to the Windows/OSX? And if so, which distro is most suited to the web developer?

I'm a sophomore in high school at the moment, and have been thinking about the future quite a bit. I decided to take up Processing, because I find visual feedback is helpful in being motivated to learn programming. It can produce beautiful images and interactions with very little code, and it's a lot of fun to work with. In your experience, do you think there is any market for creative coders? What would art buyers think about art that is created with a computer? Is it a gimmick, or an evolving medium with lots of potential? I would love to hear your thoughts, and thanks in advance.