Matthew Abbott

I've been building software since I was in my late teens, and now hitting the grand age of 42 I have - for some reason - decide now is the right time for me to learn how to build apps. Having fostered a great many conceptual ideas for years, I've finally found the drive to try and build product. To take a conceptual idea and see that through to launch. To see the way users explore, good or bad, through the app. To create something that was mine, and not someone else's.

So that's where I have landed today, and while I am dipping my toes into product development, starting off with something small and niche - I hope it gives me the drive to build my next product in the near future.

Have you ever started a match, carrying a popular or sought-after sprite, only to be followed off the jump, deleted, and that sprite lost to a sweaty mess? I have, a great many times. But whilst that isn't directly related to the feature, it demonstrates that the game has a problem. It fosters some not-so-nice behaviours in its players. And these behaviours extend out to the concept of trading and indexing.

Now, Fornite itself doesn't have any sort of trading system, but as a community one has somewhat developed outside the game. Users will organise themselves, share their Epic usernames and attempt to jump into a game to make a trade (or an index, which is a special variation of a trade where the same Sprite is returned to the person who shared it originally). This trades might go just fine, but quite often, one of the parties has other ideas - they steal the sprite leaving the other party footing the bill, and the bad experience.

This is really simple. Because the app has running costs. We're running on Cloudflare D1, and we're pushing notifications through Firebase, which bridges over to Apple, etc. As my first product, I've tried to be lean where I can, but there are also a number of unknowns in terms of costs, etc.

There are some very good, free alternatives online, and I would never begrudge anyone for selecting an alternative, I just hope that users can see the value proposition in what Dustbound offers.
I chose an approach that offers a plain, low, simple price up front, with no subscription, and no in-app advertisement. I wanted the user experience to be clean and not be marred by association of an ad network, which historically for me has always been a turn off. I wanted Dustbound to have that polish, and I felt I could only do that by offering it at a cost, albeit a low cost.