I found out about Gamamia through Assembly, a great community of designers, developers and entrepreneurs who work together on web products. Your stake in any given project depends entirely on the work that you put into it.
Gamamia was a product that piqued my interest. It was originally conceived by an Assembly user as a way for people to track games that they’ve played. But after some discussion with him, we decided to shift it a bit, so that it was simply a place to discover and hold discussions around indie games. We worked out the design in a few weeks, and then Assembly pushed us to do a 7-day launch sprint, and we were off to the races.
The core team is made up of myself and two other people, a designer and back-end developer. I take care primarily of the front-end with a little bit of back-end development when needed. By the end of the week, we had version 1 up and running.
The whole thing is built on top of Rails, which allows us to move quickly with the product’s development. We started with a very basic MVP, but have been layering on new features every week. A typical feature gets done in a few days, with our back-end developer handing me a feature to get through the front-end.
We experimented a bit with React at the beginning of the project, but I found that it slowed things down tremendously, and it made it harder for other to contribute to the project. At the moment, structured jQuery handles most of the on page behavior interactions, and AJAX is handled the Rails way, sending a re-rendered template down the pipe when JSON is submitted.
We have a lot of plans for the future of Gamamia, but for now I have put the finishing touches on the responsive design, and am working on making tweaks to user interface, implementing feedback from the community.
