Nothing against those games whatsoever – they’re extremely well-done and polished, and set the standard in a lot of ways for mobile gaming. You know – the kind of thing you see in Cut the Rope, Angry Birds, or Subway Surfers. When you’re working with someone as talented and as passionate as Harry, it just works.Īfter playing Tiny Wings, I realised that video games (especially mobile games) didn’t all have to have this almost typical cartoon-y kind of look. Jordan and I definitely had a vision for a minimalist and almost “moving art” kind of look that we wanted for the game – otherwise we wouldn’t have pursued it – and Harry’s art style seemed to fit exactly in-line with what I was picturing deep within my own imagination. It was actually Harry who did all of the visuals. I wrote a pretty in-depth article about the story behind Alto’s Adventure on my personal blog here. That artist was the extremely talented Harry Nesbitt, who, luckily, was interested in working with us on the project. I had an artist in mind that I’d spoken to a few times and had been thinking of in the back of my mind. Since Jordan and I grew up snowboarding together, it was a natural theme to explore. Jordan also got me into Ski Safari, which I really enjoyed playing, but felt the emotional style and actual terrain/physics left much to be desired. Tiny Wings showed me that a mobile game could be beautiful – it could be a piece of art. At the time I wasn’t into gaming at all – I had left that behind to be a “grown up” for the last 7 or 8 years at the time. Jordan and I were tossing around the idea of making a snowboarding game after he had insisted I played Tiny Wings for a bit.

We started working on Alto’s Adventure back in late December of 2012. And that’s how Checkmark, our first app at Snowman was born. I picked him up and we chatted about it, and then went back to my place and started sketching out ideas.

I was driving and immediately pulled over and called Jordan – said we needed to meet. I remember when I had that “lightbulb” moment. I quickly learned that the creation process in Apple’s Reminders app was quite cumbersome, and that it could be done a better way. I was using Apple’s Reminders app during the iOS 5 developer preview, and fell in love with location-based reminders. We had tossed around the idea of making an iPhone app for a while, but never quite had a solid idea we wanted to run with.įinally, in mid-2011, I had an idea I really wanted to see through. We’d both worked together before a few times back in high school, and had always wanted to work on something again. I started Snowman in 2012 with my longtime childhood friend, Jordan Rosenberg.

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