Team Q&A: Herman Chan, Software Developer and Chief Hustler

Player Info
Name: Herman Chan
Role: Software Developer and Chief Hustler
Location: Belfast, Northern Ireland
Started with GoPrezzo: Summer 2012
Twitter: @hermiechan

What do you do at GoPrezzo?
I’m the Chief Hustler of GoPrezzo, my job entails looking pretty for photo shoots and when we’re not playing I’m a Software Developer. I have specialized in Java for a couple of years so working with Grails at GoPrezzo is pretty groovy. (Get it? Grails is Groovy on Rails.) I work on most of the backend development.

How did you get involved with GoPrezzo?
One day I was just browsing around on Twitter and noticed GoPrezzo — at the time they were called Gogamingo. It was kinda random. I tweeted my congrats on their investment and jokingly said… ‘Any jobs going?’ and the rest is history!

What did you do before GoPrezzo?
I used to be a big time online gamer, the lavish lifestyle of being an armchair athlete was great but being able to work with gaming platforms led me to work with GoPrezzo.

What’s your educational background?
I never did very well at school, barely made it into University… Fortunately, I was rather enthusiastic about computers and mathematics. I enrolled into University of Ulster to study Computer Science and graduated in 2010. Currently I’m in the process of completing my PhD in Computing. I research in mobile devices and machine learning in supporting gait analysis.

If you could win anything in a tournament, what would it be?
I would like to win a yacht! It has always been my dream to sail around the world, go on an adventure and become a pirate! Arr! A fun pirate, not the scary ones… sort of like Luffy from One Piece… I love that manga.

How do you spend your Friday nights?
In my younger days, I’d find myself loitering around the bars and clubs of Belfast. However in my old age of 25, I have become accustomed to a more relaxing Friday evening. I would come home with a nice bottle of red wine and discuss the on-goings of the week’s events with a couple of close friends. We’d share many giggles and banter are sure to be had by all.

Weird or embarrassing hobbies?
I do have a strange hobby, of collecting squished pennies! It is when you put pennies into these penny press machines, these flat pennies come out with pretty designs of famous places and people of the place. I have found myself doing this quite often when I travel around the world. Recently I was in Prague on an adventure to find them! Before that, I was in Barcelona… along the road to Parc Guell on a Sunday, this shop had a machine inside but it was closed. I was really upset, though I could see it right in front of me! So I reached in through the gate and started pressing pennies through the gate, every time I turned the wheel, my arm would hit against the gate! I still have bruises on my arm from it! Also I almost missed the Spanish Grand Prix because of this!

Superpowers?
How about… the power to move you? Okay okay I stole that from Wonderboy by Tenacious D. Though, I bought a juicer recently because I read that people gain healing powers from the juicing diet!

Favorite game(s)?
My all time favourite game is Final Fantasy 7. I recently got the raspberry pi set up to run retro games on it! So been playing Metal Slug, Super Mario World and Megaman X on the SNES! Best investment ever! I occasionally play Counter Strike, but the competitive CS times are behind me. I also had a dark past with World of Warcraft, but let’s not go into this. Let’s talk a bit about mobile games. I highly recommend playing Boom Bugs. It’s quite addictive and you can win stuff through it! I recently finished playing Middle Manager of Justice on the iPhone. It’s where you play as a manager to all these Super Heroes – train them up, gain super powers and fight baddies! Currently and for the past 6 months or so, I have been trying to complete Candy Crush on my phone. It is possibly the most addictive game ever. Also it’s one of those things you don’t need to dedicate your life to as you run out of life after 5 go’s and I’d just go do other stuff like eat cakes for like 3 hours until I get full lives again. NomNomNom

Our New User Interface

Two months ago, we rolled out a brand new user interface (UI). If you’re a longtime player of our tournaments, you know that the old UI was clunky at best. It looked nice on the outside, but some of its functions were unintuitive.

Out with the old!!

The new UI has a completely different look and feel. Not only is the white background is more modern, but the new UI makes much better use of the space on the screen. Your position in the tournament is explicitly stated on the leaderboard, making it much more clear for you to figure out where you stand in terms of winnings! When viewing the leaderboard, the new UI allows you to navigate back to the main tournament menu or simply go back to playing the game. Navigating back to the main menu in the old UI required some loop arounds like going through the settings. I know because I tried!

In with the new!!

Speaking of navigation, that’s definitely the strongest point of the new UI. It’s much easier to browse the different prizes. In the old UI, players often reported being confused, thinking that only one tournament was available at a time. Lastly, once you’ve entered a tournament, the new UI allows you to view the leaderboard at anytime. This option wasn’t available at all before.

We’re super excited to offer something much more user-friendly! Let us know what you think of the new interface and feel free to shoot us any suggestions to make it even better!

Playing The Legend of Fat Ninja

The Legend of Fat Ninja is a casual mobile game that is part Angry Birds and part pinball game. Your goal is to defend your noodle stand and defeat the resident chef who’s been hoarding a famous ingredient. After launching Fat Ninja into the air a la Angry Birds, you control his movements by tapping the screen. You can hit objects to build up power or you can jump off people (!) to avoid the floor. If you hit nothing though, you’ll wind up belly-flopped on the ground. The chaining mechanics and arcade scoring are reminiscent of pinball games.

Fighting is good… and so is eating.

I really like the comic book art style. The combination of colors, sound, and fluid movements also give The Legend of Fat Ninja some real polish. Like many casual mobile games, it’s simple to play and easy to learn. Once you get used to chaining Fat Ninja’s movements, you can pull in some high scores.

Launch, Survive, Thrive!

So the GoPrezzo team survived the UK launch today and it looks like our fans across the UK did just about too, helped along by a string of great giveaways! Thanks for the support and the PR coverage – we had some tough competition there in Andy Murray but we broke through the headlines!

We’re pumped to finally be able to say “yes” to all those UK gamers who’ve been hitting (not literally of course) our platform since last November and sent packing for their troubles. Come back mateys,  we’re ready for you all now!

Our UK prizes include some of the US favorites like Birchbox and Paul Frank. We’re also delighted to bring a new partner Simple Things on board. Check out their shawls, and scarves, and luxury housey stuff. Enough goodies there to convert even the non gamers amongst you? We thought as much.

Now that Launch Day One is behind us we’re up late preparing for our next milestones. Look out for our Corona Labs partnership announcement and our go live on iOS over the next few weeks. There’ll also be a bunch more Android games coming on board, so more games to play and more prizes to win – or prezzos as we prefer to call them please. 🙂

Prepare Yourselves… We’re Hitting the UK Soon!

On the off-chance you haven’t already heard, we’re launching in the UK this coming Monday, July 8th!! As GoPrezzo’s community manager, I’m super excited because we’ve had A LOT going on. In addition to our usual tournaments, we’ve had two giveaways in honor of our opening in the UK. The first giveaway ended on July 4th. The prize was a Doctor Who TARDIS cookie jar. We just announced Michaela McManus as the winner today!

If you missed that giveaway, don’t worry. Our second giveaway is still going! The prize is a Tetris Light and you have until 9pm GMT on Sunday, July 9th to enter. See our Facebook page for info on how to enter.

I asked if I could enter the giveway, but I was told no. Something about being an employee of the company. Bummer!

Speaking of buzz-worthy news, we’re also excited that Boom Bugs is now available on the Kindle. Kindle users, start squishing those spiders!

Last but very far from least, we’re psyched, proud, and all manner of joyous to announce Simple Things as our new brand partner for the UK launch. Simple Things has a beautiful array of alpaca scarves, shawls, and throws.

Like this? Hold tight because we’ll be offering it as a prize soon!

This means that you’ll have the chance to win one of these gorgeous scarves by entering our tournaments. If it weren’t for that darn employee clause again, I’d totally play to win one of them. Consider my loss your gain!

That’s it… for now! There’s still so much more to come! And it’s not even the launch yet!

Playing Run Run Hamster

Run Run Hamster is a side-scrolling runner. Like Temple Run, your character runs automatically and you have minimal control over its movements. In Run Run Hamster, your hamster has broken out of its cage to chase after its lost love. The only thing you control as the player is when your hamster jumps. You score points for each sunflower seed you collect along the way. This eager beaver little guy, however, runs so fast that if you’re not careful, he’ll run right off a cliff! Eeek! With the help of rocks, flowers, worms, and various other objects though, you can slow down just enough to get that one last seed!

Tap to jump! Just don’t fall off!

My favorite part of Run Run Hamster is the cute and wonky design of your hamster. His lopsided eyes convey that he will not give up! Like all of our casual games, you can easily play Run Run Hamster in short bursts. Despite its simple one-touch controls, it can be quite challenging!

We’ve Been Busy in NYC!!

Idleness is not for us at GoPrezzo, oh no. 🙂 There’s the monthly demo nights and deep dives the NY Games Forum organizes where we’ve been spreading the good news about how to monetize using the GoPrezzo tournament platform. There’s also the Corona meetup and the IGDA meetup where we (and others) sing GoPrezzo’s praises and connect with great Indie and small studio developers. We love to see what local devs are creating and to make connections with new people. If you also attend some or all of these events, please say hi and tell us what you think about monetization. We’re happy to help you in any way we can.

The April Games Forum Deep Dive was all about crowdfunding. It was a great and thirst inducing event.

The women of GoPrezzo!

And hot off the press –  we’re expanding soon into the UK. That’s right. Monetization is going global. Stay tuned for updates!

Developer Interviews – Andrew Kallem + What the Block?!

Andrew Kallem recently shook off his suit and finance background to join the world of game development. I met with Andrew to talk to him about GoPrezzo. He’s just brought out his first casual puzzle game What the Block?! and is interested in incremental monetization opportunities like GoPrezzo’s real world tournaments.

Like many game developers Andrew started to develop his game when he was still working a full time job. “I didn’t have much time to integrate ad networks or other monetization options, so I decided to release a paid version, even though I knew freemium is the way to go these days.  But the benefit was that I was able to get helpful and honest feedback from real users.” He’s now bringing out a free version of What the Block?! on both iOS and Android, and he’s integrated with multiple different ad networks to see how well they work from a monetization perspective. “It’s important to integrate with as many networks as you can, because early on you may not know which networks perform best for you.  I’ve set it up so I can adjust the weightings on-the-fly to whichever networks turn out to perform best.”

Andrew likes the idea of integrating a real world prize tournament platform like GoPrezzo: “It’s conceptually a good idea and definitely a motivating factor for many gamers. The design looks cool, and I like the fact that some prizes are gift cards as well as brand specific prizes, so there’s always something for every player to win.”

Andrew uses Corona as a development platform and LUA as a coding language, and he’s a big supporter. We’re also happy to hear this as GoPrezzo signed a partnership deal with Corona Labs recently and we’re just about to officially launch the plug in.

Good luck Andrew in the launch of the free version of What the Block?! With a name like that success must be just around the corner!

GDC – It’s not all about the parties but almost…

First time at GDC but I tried to look like a regular. So many of the people I met during the week said they’d been attending for years and years which was strange because everyone looked about 22. At least in the dim lit bar rooms where we found ourselves every night. Every party felt super exclusive when you were in a line at the door but once you got inside it was the usual elbow to elbow mayhem topped with free food and drinks.

There were a lot of great business conversations to be had at GDC and GoPrezzo worked ninja-hard at connecting with the best mobile game developers we could find, talking endlessly about our great platform and our vision. The reaction was pretty consistent; “A cross game platform where gamers from any game can compete for prizes? That’s pretty cool!”, “Real prizes, like real, live, valuable prizes? That’s cool!”, “A proven, lightweight SDK? Really? Send it to me and we’ll see if it’s true!!!!”.

So thanks GDC! We enjoyed ourselves, took some photos, made some new friends and closed partnerships with a bunch of new developers we’re excited to work with. I returned to NYC with only happy memories, and enough parties down to do me till next year. Well, maybe next month.

Playing Rope Rescue

Rope Rescue is a spatial puzzle game where your goal is to free your bird friends by stringing a piece of rope around wheels. Your rope is limited and there is no shortage of foes and obstacles.

Beware of knives, fire, and bats!

My favorite part is collecting the little birds in my bird sanctuary. The colors and visual design of the entire game are beautiful!

The cute little birds are happiest when they’re free!

Like all GoPrezzo games, you can play Rope Rescue in short bursts. It’s also incredibly easy to learn. But make no mistake! Some of the puzzles are quite challenging!