Interview: David Lewis

He's currently working as a front end architect in an online publishing company (or at least for another week, before he departs to his next adventure). But outside work, he's the brain child of a recently launched ipad and iphone game called Doodle Duel, where he did all the creative work - ideas, design, illustrations - as well as coding it. Meet David Lewis, one developer with a great creative mind. 

1. How did you start creating ipad / iphone apps, how long did it take you from ideas to realisation?

For me, creating apps was a natural progression from making websites. They can both use very similar skills, but how those skills are applied is a little different. Understanding this difference was the reason for me to start creating apps.

For Doodle Duel I had the idea on a train when coming back from a concert, 3 weeks later it was in the App Store. This sounds impressive, but I was able to build it so quickly because of what I learned in 2011 from my unfinished game, Barnyard Balance.

Illustrations from Barnyard Balance

2. Did you find your full time job helpful for your personal work?
My fulltime job is very helpful for my personal work, the only difference between the 2 is that in my personal work I also do a lot of work on the creation of the idea and its design. My full time work gives me the technical skills required to implement my ideas.

3. How do you find balance between your job, personal work and your life?
The only way I can find balance is to throw myself at my personal work for a set amount of time, then leave it whilst I do things that are a little more social. When I work on a personal project I’m very single minded.

4. If you could do anything else, what would it be?
I don’t think there is anything else I would like to do. When I was at school and the career counselor asked me what I wanted to do, i said that I wanted to work with computers but I didn’t know what it would be. The counselor told me that there weren’t any jobs that just let you play around with making things on computers and I should probably think about banking. Fortunately for me, the internet came along and things really opened up.

Doodle Duel iPhone and iPad app

5. Are you ever stumped creatively? What do you do?
I’ve found that if I’m ever stumped creatively I can do a few things to help me get through. I can throw myself into the technical side of my job and work with creative people, they always inspire something in me for later. or I can go for a really long walk and take in everything around me.

6. How do you keep yourself motivated?
My motivation goes up and down, I’ve learned that if my motivation is dropping it’s because I feel alone, so the simple answer is to find people who are passionate about similar things to me, and to talk to them. It can be as simple as taking someone you have a lot of respect for out to lunch, and letting them tell you about the things that they love.

Oh, and David is also a photogenic lad who once modelled for this news article.

7. Any tips or words of advice for people approaching creative briefs for Sparkapolooza?

Get a strong idea to start from, but don’t expect that you’ll find that idea from a google search. Leave your phone at home and go for a walk around your suburb, something will come to you that you never expect.

8. Favourite websites for inspirations?

I don’t have any specific websites that I go for for inspiration. But I tend to spend a lot of time on websites that cover 1970s and 80s video games.

9. What’s next from here?

My transition in the last few months has been from working on desktop websites to doing things on phones and tablets. I think that will continue and I’ll branch out into more devices, like TV and e-readers. I’ll do one more update to Doodle Duel, and move onto my next game which will reflect this transition.

By Laura

On the subject of Wheel of Fortune in Vietnam by Tabitha Carvan

Televisions in Vietnamese homes are always on, so the television was on when I had lunch with my friend’s family.

It was showing the Vietnamese version of Wheel of Fortune. The game has an added difficulty in Vietnamese, as tones must be guessed as well as letters. My friend told us that sometimes the letters are all revealed but still the contestants can’t work out the phrase, because an identically-spelled word in Vietnamese can have six different meanings, depending on its tone. I felt vindicated for finding the language so difficult.

The contestants, surprisingly, sang between rounds. Apparently the Vietnamese Wheel of Fortune has a performance section where you can show off your “special talents”. My friend said the talent is usually always singing.

Nathan mentioned that his Auntie Roz went on Wheel of Fortune in Australia. I had heard this story before, how she was robbed of victory by supposedly mispronouncing Gwyneth Paltrow’s name. Ridiculous! It’s not like she could have meant somebody else.

My friend asked Nathan if his Auntie Roz sang when she was on the show, but we explained that no, in the Australian version you don’t get to show your special talents.

“Is that the only difference?” she asked.

We watched the show, and ate. Her mother had cooked a fish on a charcoal burner that was out on the front steps, near the motorbike ramp. The motorbikes themselves were parked in the same room as us, a kind of combined garage-dining.

Her father was finding it difficult to eat, and couldn’t use chopsticks, because he’d lost his thumb in a factory accident. The hospital had tried to rebuild him a new thumb out of flesh taken from his arm, but it looked more like one of those homemade stress balls, a balloon filled with rice.

There was a glass cabinet with an unopened bottle of whiskey – not for drinking, just for show – which you see in almost every Vietnamese home, and a clock, branded “Money”, or at least that’s what it said in the middle of the dial.

I realised I was wearing two left plastic house slippers.

The Vietnamese Wheel of Fortune continued. The female assistant touched the letters to change them, another woman displayed the prizes on stage.

“Yes” I said. “Everything else is the same.”