I’ve always loved playing around with code. There’s something almost meditative about getting it to do what you want, and then unraveling the chaos caused when one tiny change breaks absolutely everything else.

Spending weeks wrestling with a single problem can be frustrating. But when it finally works, it feels good. I feel smart. Well, except for that one time I couldn’t get my apps to talk to the internet. And by “that one time,” I really mean “all those years of stubborn failure.”

I used to build websites for fun, some solo and some with friends. Most of them are long gone now, but The Internet Archive has preserved a few semi-working relics.

Talkingdog.Freeserve.co.uk was my first attempt—a site for the Pleasure Dominators alliance in KJC Games’ Quest.

Then came scoobydoo.co.uk, which I mostly created because I wanted a memorable email address ([email protected] was a lot easier to remember than [email protected]).

That site included Scooby-Doo-themed games and magic tricks and let people create their own scoobydoo email addresses. I even got invited to the London celebrity premiere of the live-action Scooby-Doo movie – before Hanna-Barbera took legal action to claim the domain, despite my claims of fair use. (Spoiler: I won the case but lost the appeal. But that’s another story.)

When I lost the scoobydoo email address, I needed something else memorable, which is how monkeysandpirates.com was born

With Pixie and Casp I made Questpbm, darklore.co.uk – and some others I forget!

Eventually, we stopped playing Quest and Less than Daily became my main project for a while, but when it went on hiatus, I needed a new challenge to scratch that coding itch.

Enter app development.

Under the studio name Monkeys&Pirates&Robots

By this time, I’d fallen in love with competitive card games. I avoided Magic: The Gathering but dove deep into A Game of Thrones: The Card Game and Legend of the Five Rings (L5R). I traveled thousands of miles to tournaments and even became the Australian Champion at one point. And represented Australia twice in the international L5R Olympics 😀

But this post isn’t about my frankly astonishing card game credentials – it’s about the companion apps I created for those games: A Deck of Thrones, and A Deck of Five Rings.

Both were basically card databases, with some unique coding to make them do cool things. And by “unique,” I mean creatively cobbled together, because I never know quite enough about coding to do things the ‘right’ way. The apps gained surprising popularity – at their peak, they were opened over a million times a year. Not bad for something I built mostly for fun!

Keeping the apps updated was a lot of work. New cards were released or spoiled every few weeks, so I was constantly adding content manually. If I’d ever figured out how to make the apps talk to the internet, I could have automated much of the work. But I didn’t, so I couldn’t!

I never tried to monetize the apps – I made them for myself more than anything. That said, they did bring some unexpected rewards. For a while, I was sponsored by a company that made accessories for the games. And at a tournament in Melbourne, someone recognized me and bought me a coffee. Fame, at last!

There were challenges along the way. Apple was particularly touchy about my use of Game of Thrones artwork and frequently threatened to pull the app from their store. I’d counter with fair use arguments (hmm, that sounds familiar somehow..), which worked – for a while.

In the end, Apple did remove the app, though by that point the game itself had ended, so the card database was complete. On top of that, Adobe abandoned the software I used to build the apps, meaning I’d have to start from scratch to keep them running. It felt like a natural stopping point, so I let it go.

For a few years, though, I was a bona fide succesful app developer. And that feels pretty good.

These days, I’m invested in the blog once again. I’m almost certainly only one reading this, but that’s fine. Writing and coding it scratch the same itch – and I love it!