In late 2015, Jamie received an email from a friend of a friend with an idea for a kid’s game. They were thousands of miles apart, had never met and had never built an app before. Just six months later they released Melody Jams, which went on to top the App Store charts in 130 countries with more than 500,000 downloads worldwide. It also received a Communication Arts 2017 Award of Excellence.

Melody Jams is an allegory for the creative process. In essence, it’s a game teaching kids about empathy; to show how pieces can be more than the sum of their parts. In this talk, Jamie will lift the curtain on how that applies to design and technology: building culture on new teams, learning new languages and processes quickly, the value of prototyping and the eccentricities of the world of apps.

For my talk at CAMP Festival 2017, I spoke about the iOS game I made, Melody Jams. I walked through the history of the game from initial idea to launch, as well as the response from the world. In it I outlined some of the challenges involved and how the team overcame them. I made a ton of friends at this CAMP and will never forget the experience!