I am going to pitch a Codea application as a project for a startup idea at the Auckland Startup Weekend (http://auckland.startupweekend.org/) on May 10,11,12 (or in US time May 9,10,11).
The idea of the weekend is that people pitch ideas then teams form around the best ideas. My pitch is to write an app over the weekend and put it in the App Store on Monday.
Should be lots of fun and if our team wins should also be good publicity for Codea.
I will blog about the experience right in this discussion. Maybe an update every three hours. Maybe ask for help too.
I have some questions and I welcome suggestions for how I should run the project. Please feel free to contribute and to check the blog during the event if I need help.
Teams will be formed on Friday night - I don’t know who I will get to join and they will be strangers to me. I imagine NONE will be Codea programmers or even Lua and not all will have iPads. But Lua is easy to learn and I have some really useful code samples from contributors to this forum. Thanks! Particularly the Github stuff which will be invaluable.
Some questions:
Am I nuts?
How feasible do you think it will be to develop Lua code on a PC for syntax checking and maybe some simple debugging?
Using Codea 1.5.2 is it feasible to send an app to the App Store on Monday? Or do we need to wait for the 1.5.2 runtime?
Can I demonstrate the final app on Sunday night on a VGA projector? Not sure if Codea supports second screen output.
How feasible do you think it will be to develop Lua code on a PC for syntax checking and maybe some simple debugging?
Debugging might be tricky, but writing is fine. The BIG thing to remember is to kill the app on the iPad before saving the files. If Codea is holding a project in memory then it will simply overwrite the existing project files when it saves them.
Using Codea 1.5.2 is it feasible to send an app to the App Store on Monday? Or do we need to wait for the 1.5.2 runtime?
I believe this is possible using the current Xcode exporter. I’ve yet to get to the submit stage but I’ve used it to build an app for beta testing.
Can I demonstrate the final app on Sunday night on a VGA projector? Not sure if Codea supports second screen output.
It’s not true second screen output, but the second screen mirrors the iPad so it can still be seen on the second screen and thus this is perfectly possible.
I’ve used export for three App Store apps. It works quite well.
Do note that getting apples clearance to get your app visible can take a week or more. If you want to do a Codea competition, it’s probably best to judge it just on code submitted here.
Judging will be on Sunday night. The criteria will be business criteria - the quality and prospects of the business - rather than just the quality of the game or the code. But, hey, a quality game will really impress the judges.
In my 60 second pitch I am going to focus on this project as being an opportunity for programmers to learn how to program apps for the iPad. If someone had made that pitch at last year’s event I would have jumped in. So I expect my team will end up with a small handful of Lua newbies.
And I will also mention the possibility of ending up with the next Angry Birds (over a billion downloads). Who could resist learning how to do that in a weekend?
80 people at Startup Weekend, 40 projects pitched, 3 votes per person - 240 votes in total. Of these the Codea game project received zero. Well, one, but that was mine.
I guess that writing games is not as attractive to other people as I expected.
I’m working this weekend on a project that is gamifying interpersonal challenges - I’ll use Codea to prototype the iPhone app.
I don’t know why people wouldn’t be interested in the chance to make that one app or game that goes big.
Probably because it is a lot of work and you constantly have to update and release new content.
I really want to learn how to code Lua but reading through code and all does me good.
Post pitch research showed that people were looking for long term projects rather than a fly by night quick project that had little chance of success even though it would have been a really good project for a weekend.
The problem with that argument is that hardly any of the “regular” startups succeed either and they can take a lot of one’s time before dying. At least a game even if not profitable would be a complete and permanently alive project.
@TheRogueBatcher This was posted over seven months ago and is a very old and dead discussion. Next time, check for the date to the left of the poster’s name.
