VegaStars

FA Development Apps

About this game

VegaStars is a short, practical guide to building a mobile application for a business, arranged as ten stages you work through one question at a time.

Each stage covers one part of a real project. Discovery is about finding the people who will actually open the app every day and the systems it has to live with. Specification is about writing the scope down — and writing down what is out of scope — before development starts. Design covers the shortest honest path through the main task, one-handed layouts and error messages that say what to do next. Platform weighs native against cross-platform. Build covers secrets, version control and repeatable releases. Integration covers documented APIs, offline queues and who owns the data. Testing covers the devices people really carry. Submission covers what gets an app rejected. Launch covers staged rollout and the numbers worth measuring. Support covers the annual OS releases and the difference between a fault and a change.

Every stage asks five questions with three answers each. Read the question, choose the answer you would defend to a client, and the tip behind it appears straight away — right or wrong, you always get the reasoning. Fifty tips in total.

A wrong answer, or a question left until the clock runs out, costs one of your tries. The early stages give you three tries and a comfortable clock; by the last stage there is one try and twelve seconds a question, so the thinking has to be sharp. Clear all five questions to unlock the next stage.

Your score for a stage is built from the answers you get right, the run of correct answers behind them and the time left on the clock, with a bonus for finishing a stage without a single mistake. Best scores are kept for every stage, and the stats screen shows how many stages are cleared, how many tips are unlocked and your best score so far — so there is always a reason to go back to an earlier stage and beat it.

The app is written for people who commission, plan or build business apps: founders deciding what to ask for, project managers writing a brief, and developers who want the short version of the practice around the code.

Features:
- Ten stages that follow a real app project from discovery through to support
- Fifty practical tips, one behind every question
- Quick one-handed play — read, choose, learn
- A per-question timer and limited tries that tighten as the stages climb
- Best score kept for every stage, with a bonus for a clean run
- Stage, tip and score totals on the stats screen
- No accounts and nothing to buy