Episode 8: Number Tap With Dean Murphy

Dean Murphy joins me to discuss creating math challenge game Number Tap. Relatively new to development, Dean used the Corona SDK to build the app and learn programming fundamentals. Dean is a hobbyist developer from the North-East of England with dreams of going pro one day. Dean is a hobbyist developer from the North-East of England. He's been learning to program in his spare time for a couple of years. Professionally, Dean does server support & administration in the public sector, but he got started on this journey with only some basic web scripting experience. In his spare time, he now creates apps & games for himself and on a freelance basis to sharpen his programming skills, with a view to eventually change careers to developing full time. Number Tap is a fun, quick paced, math game of racing against the clock to get answers right, and earn more time. Originally created by Dean as a fun way to encourage his nephew's studies in math, Number Tap is a fun, quick paced math game where you solve math questions that get increasingly harder to prevent the timer from running out. Number Tap is perfect for children to improve their math skills in a fun way. With Game Center Support they can even compete with online leaderboards and hunt for achievements. Number Tap's simple & quick gameplay is a great tool to train your brain with. By straying away from conventional multiple choice style quiz games, and no pause button, Number Tap offers a truly unique game play experience. Number Tap is the third app, and first game Dean created. Dean had only been programming for 5 months when he first started this app. Coming from his server side and web backend experience, he created Number Tap by leveraging the Corona SDK, a 3rd party framework to create mobile apps for Android & iOS, with the Lua scripting language. He's since arranged to have it translated into several languages, and also ported Number Tap to Android only a few months after launching for iOS. Dean tells us some of the interesting challenges that porting the game to Android presented, especially with user expectations on certain hardware features. He also details some of his creative strategies in ensuring Number Tap always had accurate answers. Contact Links: Number Tap on the web Dean on Twitter Vic on Twitter App Story on Twitter Support Dean & the show by using these links to get the Number Tap on the App Store: Number Tap on the iOS App Store Number Tap 2 on the iOS App Store Additional links: Murphy's Apps - Dean's company web presence If you're an indie developer and you'd like to tell your app's story on the show, click here. If you are enjoying App Story, please consider reviewing/rating it in iTunes. I'd also love to hear your feedback and to know how you found the show. Please feel free to use the twitter links and let me know! Thanks so much for your support!