Trial By Fire - Our First Android App - Roll Tracker

The beginning of something new

The year was 2016. A childhood friend of mine reaches out saying he’s starting to dabble in 2D art and animations, and wants to collaborate on a project.

Both excited to dive in, we started brainstorming ideas. Apps, games, and other projects were on the list, but we decided to start out small with an Android app, mainly because that market at the time had the lowest barrier to entry.

We paid the $25 Google Developer fee and named ourselves HellWeb Studios. We were off and running in the mobile development space like a herd of turtles.

---

The idea behind Roll Tracker

Playing Settlers of Catan regularly, over the course of a game we had no way to track what numbers were rolled and how frequently.

“Those pesky sevens got us again! I wonder how many times we’ve rolled them in this game?”

The idea was to create a generic app for board games that used two six-sided dice to record and track the rolls throughout the game.

It would also include:

• A built-in set of dice if you didn’t have physical dice
• Basic bar and pie charts to visualize roll distribution

---

Learning Android development fast

The first order of business from my end was to get acclimated with Android development—and quickly.

I was an eager beaver looking to build a kickass app and make millions, but I had no idea where to start.

My next natural step was to queue up YouTube, StackOverflow, and Google’s “Intro to Android Programming” guide across multiple tabs and start soaking up information.

A few tutorials got me to the point of installing Android Studio, setting up Android emulators, and building a simple app I could run on a physical device.

I had cracked the code—and even sent this first build off to my partner for early validation testing.

A “Hello World” app of sorts was all we needed to start fleshing out our concept.

---

Building without structure

We were very fast and loose with our project management, source control, and work cadence.

Working on this project in our free time, we had the ability to pick items from our backlog, which at the time was a shared Google Sheets document.

We would take our time to learn, build, fix errors, and repeat.

Source control consisted of maintaining various versions of the project on my computer, blissfully unaware of modern version control systems that were free, powerful, and relatively easy to use with a little bit of learning.