In the last post in this series, we met Mélanie of Second Gear Games.

Now, we will meet the ladies with “the first female owned and run video game studio in Canada” – Silicon Sisters Interactive! They have developed a game for young teens called School26, which you can learn more about in this interview.

What is School26 and how did you come up with the idea for it?

Brenda Gershkovitch, CEO, Silicon Sisters: May 6 2010. I was at the Vancouver Video Game conference listening to Bill Mooney, VP of Zynga talk about video games. Zynga brought the world “Farmville” among other Facebook games, and was rumored to be valued higher than EA. The newcomer had overtaken the old guard, and I was listening closely.

Mooney said “games are about us playing out our fantasies,” and I found myself thinking of the games I’d made. Three Major league baseball games. Racing hot cars on the streets of Hong Kong. A physics game. None of these things were my fantasies. They were the fantasies of the predominant people in the games industry, they were male fantasies. What about female fantasy?

Silicon Sisters Interactive (www.siliconsisters.ca) was formed to do just that – to create high quality games targeted to the female audience. Games that are about more than shopping and fashion, but are truly aspirational, the female equivalent to sports games and racing games and shooters.

Our first game, School 26, is built for tween girls. There are so few high quality games built for that audience that we really wanted to create a quality offering there. The game focuses on the soft skills that are so important to how women and girls operate: negotiation, problem solving, and enhancing relationships. We wanted to build a game where you used those types of skills to win, and School26 delivered. There is a free to play version and a paid version available on Android Market for devices running 2.0 and up.

How did you learn what you needed to know to develop the game? (question edited)

Felicity Herst, Programmer, Silicon Sisters: I studied Computer Science at university where I learned the theoretical principles of software engineering, but not specifically how to program games. Even if I had studied game programming, Android didn’t exist 4 years ago when I was at school so I essentially had to teach myself on the job! The internet and other programmers have been a great resource for learning how to develop on Android.

Did you publish your app for Android first, or for another platform? Why did you choose to market it to Android users?

Felicity Herst: We released our first Android version at the same time as an iPhone and iPad version, having developed for both platforms simultaneously. School 26 is a casual mobile game so it made sense to have it on as many smartphones as possible. More recently we’ve noticed that Android is becoming pretty popular with School 26’s target audience of young teen girls, especially in Asia. And interestingly, our second biggest market is Saudi Arabia.

How have you reached out to your target audience to tell them about the game? Have you gotten a good response?

Brenda Gershokovitch: Silicon Sisters has a great press agent, and we’ve done exceptionally well in receiving press coverage. We’ve done interviews for new sites, blogs, and magazines all over the world including well known media sites such as the Guardian online, NPR, Elle magazine, and many of the gaming blogs like Kotaku and IGN. We were extremely fortunate to have been featured by Google on the Android market, which provided great exposure for the game.

As a female app creator, what is your overall impression of the app “world” as a whole – do you feel like a minority?

Felicity Herst: Having worked on big console videogames before this I’m used to being a minority, the only female in the room etc. I find the app world is somewhat similar but it’s easier to teach yourself and get into than the traditional game industry. Most of the Android programmers I know are men but I’ve been meeting more and more women who want to start making their own hobby apps or who have already released something, which is really cool.

The app scene is also a very diverse place where you can make anything you want and put it up on the Android Market, so I think that’s a great opportunity for minorities to express themselves by making something unique and personal. I try to make games that I would like to play myself, and since I’m female, that definitely impacts the type of thing I design and develop. That’s actually the goal of our game studio – women designing games specifically for girls and women.

Lauren Wood, Senior Game Designer, Silicon Sisters: Do I feel like a minority? Not at all. On the contrary, coming from the console world in which I struggled to find games that I truly connected with (as opposed to my male counterparts for whom the fourth quarter of the year was a time to take days off work to cope with the flood of male-oriented titles coming on the market), I find that there are a great number of mobile gaming apps that pique my interest. It’s an excitement that I recall from a childhood of gaming when game design was not too bloated with cinematic presentation, sprawling 3D worlds, endless dialogue and the requirement for 50+ hours of gameplay.

It’s not to say that women don’t engage with those experiences (I’m the world’s biggest Zelda fan!) but more often we’re wanting something that fits in with our lives – that is, typically something short and sweet with an intellectual edge or built-in social experience that fits into our commute or into our kids’ nap times. The mobile format has allowed us to escape the embellishments of the console era and brought well-crafted gameplay back into focus. I find that is advantageous to female users, who will find a great number of mobile titles accessible and interesting to them. As a developer, of course, this opens up our market too.

Does that impact what & how you design/develop your ideas?

Lauren Wood: Definitely. It’s almost a case of “anything goes”! If you can imagine a nugget of something that is compelling (for male or female users), you can develop a neat little feature out of it. The bite-sized nature of apps for the mobile platform allows developers to do a lot of R&D right now. It’s a great way of testing out groundwork for something larger further down the line at a fraction of the cost. It ultimately makes for better titles in the long run. You can’t really do that in the console market – one bad title and your franchise is toast!

How do other people react when they find out you have an app in the Android Market?

Lauren Wood: They think it’s cool. Other developers are usually interested in the technicalities of publishing, whereas non-developers tend to ask “What’s Android?” or ask about the app’s content or what specifically my job is. Generally speaking, the fact that it’s out there is met with a thumbs-up.

It’s exciting to be part of a community still sussing this thing out and paving the way for others to join in. And it’s always a kick to represent your industry to those who are being introduced to it for the first time and spread the word.

Do you have any advice for other women that have Android app ideas and are considering designing and/or developing an app?

Lauren Wood: You just never know what is going to stick in this market, so keep an open mind. Look at the app charts and marvel at the weird and wonderful array of brilliance and nonsense that people are buying. Try things out, don’t be afraid to follow a crazy idea. This is a great time to get creative and see some rewards for your efforts. Social media is key to promotion, which is something women are great at and can be used to great effect, so use it!

Felicity Herst: Jump right in! Don’t be intimidated or think you need somebody else to help you build your app idea. There are some great tools and examples out there to get you started regardless of whether you already know how to code, and the online Android community is an amazing resource to ask questions and learn from. Try out Google App Inventor, or PhoneGap if you already know how to build a website. Google some free tutorials and start making something! It’s the best way to learn. Before you know it you’ll be publishing to the Market

Kirsten Forbes (COO and co-founder), Lauren Wood (Senior Game Designer), Brenda Gershkovitch (CEO and co-founder), and Felicity Herst (Programmer)

So, we know about your team and your app, but we can’t help wondering, what’s behind the name “Silicon Sisters”?

Silicon Sisters is a bit of a play on words. Silicon is the chemical element that allows computers to run so quickly. Without it, we’d still be working on giant mainframes taking weeks to process simple requests. Silicon also makes us think of Silicon Valley, the hotbed of computer talent that birthed the modern era of computing, home to Hewlett Packard, Xerox/ PARC, Adobe, Apple, Yahoo, Palm, Google, etc. However, when we put the word “sister” close to the word Silicon, people automatically transform it into the word Silicone, the product used for breast implants. Why is that? Are we completely unable to think of women and computers in the same sentence? I just found it a fun way to poke fun at the technology gap. And no, none of us are enhanced in any way!

Where can we find more information about you & your app? Any last “plugs” you want to share?

Brenda Gershkovitch: School26 is available broadly now. Both the free to play and the paid version are on Android market, and available on Amazon.com for download on Android devices, including an HD version for Kindle Fire. The game is being released as we speak for PC and MAC through Oberon Media, and is available on iTunes for iTouch, iPad and iPhone as well.

If you enjoyed School 26, you can join our community on Facebook or Follow us on Twitter. Or, check out Silicon Sisters Interactive on Twitter, Facebook, or our website SiliconSisters.ca.

To those of you reading this interview, please support Silicon Sisters and check out the School 26 game in the Android Market, then come back and tell us and her what you think! If you are interested in becoming a developer and have any other questions for Kirsten, Lauren, Brenda, and Felicity, please comment below!

In our last post in this series, we met Jennifer Wong of Alt-12 games. Today, we meet another game developer, Mélanie Dompierre of Second Gear Games, makers of “Bubble Defense Free”, “Tropical Fish Shop”, and “Shopper’s Paradise”, to name a few.

Hi Mélanie! I see you have many successful apps in the Android Market, but for this interview, let’s focus on one you just updated in the market in November of this year, “Shopper’s Paradise HD”. How did you come up with the idea for Shopper’s Paradise, a game you describe as “Tower Defense meets Tycoon”?

Tower defense games are a popular genre, so it was not easy to find a fresh approach with so many of them on the market. And then I thought: “What if instead of killing poor dumb creeps the game could focus on something constructive like building a town or a shopping mall?” This is how towers became shops, and the ghouls were replaced by peaceful happy shoppers. And the only damage that is done in the game is to their wallets Also, I worked many years in retail industry as a store manager, so it was easy for me to introduce retail theme to the game.

Mélanie Dompierre of Second Gear Games

What was your involvement in the creation of this game? How did you learn how to do these things, did you go to school for it?

I was involved in this game on every stage of its creation, from early conceptual work to final balancing and testing. It is rare that a game like this is made by one person – it requires quite a diversity of skills and talents. In our case, we were lucky to have people with these skills among our family and friends. Not to forget James, the talented artist who worked on the second version of Shopper’s Paradise to help us improve the visual appeal of the game.

Making games is more of an art than science. I learned a lot from the process itself, trying to apply the lessons learned to each new game we make.

Screenshot from Shopper's Paradise HD

What is your target audience for Shopper’s Paradise, and how has it been received so far? Do you find you have a lot of female players? Do you think having a female on the development team makes the end-result more appealing to women?

This game was never intended specifically for female audience. However, women do download it more often than men (probably because of the title ) It was actually quite interesting to read the early comments, for example (I quote): “I’m a guy and I don’t think it should be called Shoppers Paradise. This game is a sweet strategy like the original ‘Lemonade Stand’ game. So fun!”

Overall, the game was received positively, as everybody can see by its rating. Its popularity actually exceeded my expectations. I do hope that the game’s appeal to women was the main reason for its success.

Did you publish your app for Android first, or for another platform? Why did you choose to market it to Android users?

The game came out on Android and BlackBerry almost at the same time. Both platforms are Java-based, both have a large installed base, so publishing on both was an easy decision. We have a long history of making apps for Android: we submitted our first Android app before the Market became available to general public. These days, Android is experiencing such an explosive growth that being present on this platform is a must for any developer.

How has your app publishing process changed over time? What was your first app, and what have you learned since that influences the design of future apps?

Our first game was actually created in Flash, long before smartphones became so ubiquitous. It was an easy transition for me: our games were always casual, and on-the-go style of mobile gameplay is a perfect match for this kind of game. What I learned is that you have to make your game easy to learn (ideally with no tutorial required) and with enough variety in the gameplay to keep players interested. Not an easy combination to achieve.

Do you have any advice for other women that have Android app ideas and are considering designing and/or developing an app?

Go for it! It is easy when you put your mind to it. I like challenges, and I was looking for a new career that I could do from home because we have two young kids at home with us, which some days is quite a challenge:) If you have enough passion and persistence, you can always find tutorials and tools no matter what your skill level is. If you don’t know anything about programming, look for visual design tools. If you need help with graphical design, visit online communities frequented by artists, and you might find somebody willing to participate in your project. As with anything else, if there is a will – there is a way.

Where can we find more information about you & your app? Any last “plugs” you want to share?

You may visit the Second Gear Games website, our Google+ page, or our Android portfolio. For our future project, I will keep you posted. We are working on something different this time.

Thanks for the interview, Mélanie!

To those of you reading this interview, please support Mélanie Dompierre and check out Second Gear Games in the Android Market, then come back and tell us and her what you think! If you are interested in becoming a developer and have any other questions for Mélanie, please comment below!

Earlier this week, we published an interview with Dora, creator of the JellyPlanner app.

Today, we introduce Jennifer Wong from Alt-12 Apps. I thought it was interesting to learn from her website that Alt-12 was named after the keystrokes (Alt+1,2) used to create the female symbol:

Alt-12 has been publishing apps for women since 2009, and now you can learn all about the creation of their app Pink Pad from Jennifer, who designed it!

Hi, Jennifer! Can you tell us about the Pink Pad app and how you came up with the idea for it?

Pink Pad is a social health tracker app. It allows women to track their health, from fertility, menstrual cycle to weight management and more. The most essential part is the health centric social network built right into the app which allows women to connect to women like them for support, advice and friendship.

Pink Pad is actually my company’s second app and the inspiration for it came out of our first app, BabyBump. BabyBump is a pregnancy app that I started working on during my pregnancy because I saw a lack of apps addressing the special needs of women’s health. Out of of BabyBump’s success we learned that a large portion of our users were women who weren’t pregnant at all but we’re either planning to get pregnant one day or enjoyed connecting with other women on health issues. It seem natural that we create an app that addressed the broader needs of women’s health, the stage before and after pregnancy, thus Pink Pad was born.

Jennifer Wong of Alt-12 Apps

Once you had the idea for Pink Pad, what were your next steps? What was your role in the creation of the app?

When creating Pink Pad, there were only myself and my co-founder involved. My strengths are in front end design and user experience so my role was heavy in the initial and early stages of the app development.

I started by researching the market and looking at potential competitor apps. It’s always a good idea to know what’s out there so you can figure out how you’re going to differential yourself and create something compelling that a user will love.

I created a wireframe of the product to hash out user experience and flow and then began taking the concept to design the front-end of the app while my co-founder implemented the back end.

Because our skills sets are so complimentary, we were able to complete the first version in just a few months.

How did you learn how to do these things – did you go to school for design?

I’m pretty much a self-taught. In college, I studied some design but it’s always been my personal interest in being creative that has kept me learning. Prior to starting Alt12 Apps, my career started in design and marketing so I was able to continue to develop my design skills.

Did you publish your app for Android first, or for another platform? Why did you choose to market it to Android users?

Because we were a small and a resource constrained team of two we published Pink Pad on iOS first but we always had plans to port to Android as soon as we could. We launched Pink Pad on Android just three months after our iOS launch so I’d say there wasn’t a huge lag. As a developer, I feel Android is a necessary platform to develop on. You have the ability to reach a much broader audience because of the range of devices using Android. I love that we have teen users [on Android] who are able to track and learn about their health.

What is your target audience, and have you gotten a good response from them?

Our target market is any woman who’s interested in tracking their health or wants to connect with others for advice or support. We’ve gotten phenomenal positive feedback from the women who use our app. Word of mouth from our community of users seems to be the strongest and most successful marketing tool. Pink Pad Pro has been the #1 Health App in the Android Marketplace for a while now. Our users have said they are more addicted to our app than Facebook. I take that as a huge compliment!

Screenshot from Pink Pad Pro

As a female app designer, what is your overall impression of the app “world” as a whole – do you feel like a minority? Does that impact what you design & how you develop your ideas? How do other people react when they find out you have an app in the Android Market? How does that feel?

When I first started in 2009, I definitely felt like a minority. Most app developers were men, which reflected in the type of apps that were created. I think things have definitely changed and the industry is realizing that women are strong consumers of social media and mobile usage. I see a lot more apps being created with women in mind and it has definitely influenced our development.

For starters, we’ve always believed in paying attention to quality of design and User Experience (UX). We chose to develop our apps natively to ensure the best UX that was fast and felt natural to the device.

People are often surprised to learn that I’m a developer. But they’re usually even more surprised to learn that I’ve been doing it since 2009 (while five months pregnant) and that our apps have been long-time category leaders with over three million downloads.

Overall, it just feels good to be producing something in which you really believe has a positive impact on people’s lives.

Do you have any advice for other women that have Android app ideas and are considering designing and/or developing an app?

I was just starting to write a blog article on my top ten tips for mobile apps, but here are my top two.

Deliver an experience out the door.
I see so many apps fail at this. You download the app and the first thing it asks you to do is register or input a ton of data before you can really begin exploring the app. You have one chance to make a first impression with apps. The retention rate is incredibly low, less than 5% [of downloaders] use an app after the first month. If you don’t wow the user with something upon their first experience, they’ll never come back.

Iterate, iterate and iterate.
You can never do this process enough. When coming up with an idea or feature you should be your biggest critic, stripping away at what’s not necessary in the app and that requires constant iteration. Don’t expect that your first idea or version will be perfect, it’s more important to iterate quickly to get it right.

Where can we find more information about you & your app? Any last “plugs” you want to share?

In the next month, we’ll be launching a new app for parents that we’re extremely excited about. It’s geared towards new parents to help them learn, capture, and share their child’s milestones. You can “Like” Pink Pad App or BabyBump App on Facebook to be notified as soon as it’s launched!

Thanks so much for the interview, Jennifer!

To those of you reading this interview, please support Jennifer Wong and check out Alt-12 Apps in the Android Market, then come back and tell us and her what you think! If you are interested in becoming a developer and have any other questions for Jennifer, please comment below!

You may remember back when we featured Diana Luckevich, developer of TextDooDad as one of the few female Android developers at the time. Well, luckily since the Android Market has grown, so have the number of women that develop apps for our devices. We have a special series this week in which we’ll introduce you to several of them.

First up is Dora, a European developer who started CheerApps and just released her first app, “Jelly Planner” to the Android Market in November. Here is our e-interview. Enjoy!

Hi, Dora. What is your app, Jelly Planner, and how did you come up with the idea for it?

Jelly Planner is a task list with a unique relaxing underwater interface. You use it to plan your tasks or long term goals. Each task is displayed inside a colorful jellyfish that smiles at you and moves its legs. You can easily prioritize your tasks by moving them around.

And how did I come up with this idea? Where I live, there exists a custom of making New Year resolutions – some people may laugh at it. Anyway, I find the end of the year a great time for reflection and making plans, choosing vacation destinations, thinking of things to learn and projects to complete. I used to write these goals in a small traditional paper calendar that I got myself every year. But last year I had a thought that it might be more convenient to have these goals in a place that I check more often than some page in my calendar. And then I thought of an application. I’m sure that I would have found an existing one that would do the job, but I wanted something cheerful that would make planning things fun and relaxing. A vacation on some seaside is always in my New Year plan – so this is why I thought of a planner with jellyfish :).

One more reason why creating such an app came to my mind is that I felt it’s fine (at least for me) to relax about some things – to avoid the trap of perfectionism – planning the future should be fun, it’s great if I realize most of my ideas, and it’s ok if others – that are not crucial – will be postponed to the next year.

Dora, the creator of Jelly Planner

Once you had the idea, what were your next steps? What was your role in the creation of the app? Did you design and develop the app by yourself, as part of a team, or hire someone to put your idea into action?

I’m a software developer myself, and my boyfriend used to write applications in the past. He is a great fan of iPhone. I didn’t have a smartphone myself at the time when the idea came to my mind, but we both thought it would be a great platform for this project.

So the first thought was to write an app for iPhone. We didn’t have an Apple computer that would have been ideal for the task, so I found a framework that makes writing for iPhone on PC possible in C++ programming language. After a few days of the application development I realized I didn’t like this C++ stuff, it wasn’t very friendly for human beings. And I read a little about Android: the documentation I found looked promising, I’ve been programming in Java for years, and it cost less than programming for iPhone. We decided it was a great choice for us, so I bought an Android phone and the development started.

I was responsible for the graphics, the main underwater screen and its logic, database site, alarms, etc.. And my boyfriend became the master of those Android forms – when there was a line in a form that was a few pixels too short, he was the patient one who always fixed it.

How did you learn how to do these things – did you go to school for software development or teach yourself?

I studied at a technical university, and then have been working as developer (mostly in Java) for more than 7 years. So after I set up a development environment for Android on my netbook, read some documentation, and took a look at a few sample applications, I was ready to write an Android app. We created the same setup for my boyfriend and began the work. Of course it was more like learning stuff at the beginning, we were making a lot of errors – but that’s how you get to know a new technology.

What is your target audience and how have you reached out to them to tell them about it? Have you gotten a good response from women?

The target audience are all those who like planning, but feel overwhelmed by a desire to organize every detail of their life precisely. Those who need to relax.
And anyone who is open to use a colorful, funny app to plan things in :).

Screenshot from Jelly Planner App

Our app is new and we’re still working on reaching out to potential users.

It seems that women are the greatest fans of Jelly Planner — My sister, my women friends, and myself are very happy users of the app.

As a female app creator, what is your overall impression of the app “world” as a whole – do you feel like a minority? Does that impact what & how you design/develop your ideas? How do other people react when they find out you have an app in the Android Market? How does that feel?

During my studies or in any job I’ve had, women have always been a minority, so I’m used to this fact. I’m not aware of how it looks like in the Android app world yet, but I do realize I have a tendency of coming up with cheerful / relaxing / sweet ideas :).

Everybody who hears about a finished Android app that appeared in the Android Market congratulates me and wishes me luck. And ‘finished’ is a very important word here, for it’s really hard for someone with a regular job to complete such a project. It took us almost a year to finish it – with vacation breaks or weeks when we had no time for the app development.

I work in a software company where I could find a lot of people with Android phones who were interested in testing the app. It was great to hear from them that Jelly Planner is a nice application that works well.

Do you have any advice for other women that have Android app ideas and are considering designing and/or developing an app?

It’s hugely satisfying to complete development of an Android app. It’s incredible when you think that something you’ve created is going to be available to millions of people around the world.

A very important thing when creating an app is to have it tested by many people and to listen to their opinions on what’s intuitive, and what they would like to see in the app. When you hear several times that the checkboxes should be bigger since it’s hard to tap them with a large thumb, it’s worth considering :).

And there’s one thing that I’ve just clearly realized after Jelly Planner has been released in Android Market in the middle of November: there are thousands of applications out there. And a new one is well visible on the ‘New’ apps list only for a day or two. When I enter ‘task list’ in search field in Android Market I get over 3000 results. On the top of the list are the apps that were downloaded over 250 000 times, and a new app with a small number of downloads is on the very bottom. Those who might like it have a very little chance to learn that such an app exists at all.

So it’s not enough to write an application these days. If you want to earn some money on it or simply find users for something you’ve worked so hard on, you need to be prepared that there’s a big task ahead of promoting the app that demands creativity and patience.

Where can we find more information about you & your app? Any last “plugs” you want to share?

We have a facebook page for both Jelly Planner and Cheerapps:
www.facebook.com/JellyPlanner
www.facebook.com/Cheerapps

And a web page:
www.cheerapps.com

I will also answer emails sent to cheerapps at gmail dot com.

Thanks so much for the interview, Dora!

To those of you reading this interview, please support Dora and check out Jelly Planner in the Android Market, then come back and tell us and her what you think! If you are interested in becoming a developer and have any other questions for Dora, please comment below!

Jelly Planner for Android on AppBrain

Related posts:

• “Women With Android Apps” Series: Jennifer
• “Women With Android Apps” Series: Mélanie
• “Women With Android Apps” Series: Silicon Sisters

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