First Steps

The very first step was to come up with a publisher name.  It wound up being fairly easy as the combination of both my daughters' names had a nice ring to it with ellava studios.

With a name under my belt, deciding on the first app to create was the next step.  I began my development on the Windows 8 release preview and was hoping to create something before the official launch of Windows 8.  I installed the release preview (much to my wife's enjoyment!) with about 4 weeks to go before the official launch.

With that in mind I settled on making a simple matching game with a slight twist.  I figured this would be something that my daughters help me test and give feedback as I went, yet something that wasn't so complicated that I would miss my self imposed deadline of 11/1.

For the twist I settled on arranging the tiles in a different manner than normal matching games and with each successful match revealing a new piece of a picture to complete an overall scene.  I hoped this twist, plus my confidence that I could produce a high quality product would be enough to separate this matching app from the multitude of others that would surely be in the store ( one of the Windows 8 examples was a matching app so I was concerned that there might be a plethora of copies in the store with no real innovation )