Ministudio is a funded AI startup based in NYC building creative tools for children to unleash their imagination with the power of AI. We combine traditional computer graphics / vision methods with modern advances in generative models, e.g., LLMs and Stable Diffusion. You will be joining a stellar team of experienced founders working on cutting edge technology to make creative tools accessible to children. As an early stage employee you will have the autonomy and responsibility to drive our next phase of growth.
We are looking for folks proficient in computer graphics/vision, game development, applied machine learning, AI research, or iOS development.
Please get in touch with CV and/or links to projects you've worked on: akash@ministudio.ai
Working on making quick dashboards/data visualizations in your browser. Would love to get feedback on the kinds of features that folks would find useful and what problems you run into with current offerings.
I work in the healthcare space, for HIPAA reasons in-browser tools for quick analysis is appealing. Curious what kind of data transformation/excel macros functions will be available.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" -- Alan Perlis
It's not solely just about if it is ready for commercial/real-world applications right now. The language itself is interesting and it definitely shapes a different mode of thinking.
Haskell is evolving rapidly and in interesting ways and those that are interesting in programming (as most of us here are), it's a good place to look and learn from.
As an interesting side note, Microsoft just open sourced Bond. It's written in Haskell, and is a high performance, cross-language, schematized serialization tool. The project describes itself as widely used in many of Microsoft's high scalability services.
Microsoft has many proponents and detractors on HN, but no one can deny that they have plenty of services that get lots of traffic. If Haskell is serving a critical role in many of those services, then it seems that it is ready for commercial/real-world applications.
I read somewhere (references below), that most "gluten sensitivity" cases in the US is actually sensitivity to certain pesticides that are used in wheat farming. That's why most people who suffer from gluten sensitivity in the US do just fine when they eat bread in Europe. Have you considered moving to non-GMO certified organic wheat products and seen any difference in your health?
Are you using any sort of acceleration data-structures to manage your voxels or just storing everything in plain 3D array of positions? I imagine you can run into memory issues there if you don't account for spatial sparsity in your voxel data?
I'd be curious to know if you're something something like run-length encoding (RLE) or something hierarchical such as a B-Tree?
This seems to be one of those arguments where we programmers tend to optimize for the wrong problem. Sure, we may be able to input more text more comfortably with the merits of one text editor over another, but really, I think most of the time spent during programming is reading APIs, headers, other code and most importantly thinking. Typing is hardly the bottleneck.
Except when it is... If you can edit fluently and quickly, _then_ coding is more of a nonissue, you're free to try things out, you can find and fix an error and Alt-Tab without blinking, you can harness this kind of physical flow of noninterrupted work, etc. I've worked alongside programmers for whom typing and editing were indeed quite the bottlenecks. Of course, any programming editor is probably good enough if you learn it.
Any insights during the development? What worked? What didn't? How big was your team? How did you split the work? How long did it take from inception to release? Would love to hear your thoughts.
One lesson was that we should have invested more in our tools upfront. We largely depended on Unity's built in editor to create our content. If we had built level editor tools, and an art workflow based around that, content creation would have gone much faster. And we might have gotten to the point where we could have offered a level editor to players.
Our team was four core members, with a composer and a GUI / 2d artist helping out on contract. We also had help on the business side. With the game starting as a hobby project, we didn't have much structure, and the work got divided simply by people taking on the jobs that they had the time, interest, and skills for. On that front, we are fortunate that things worked out as well as they did. The project started at a Global Game Jam in January 2012, so we were a little over two years from start to release.
I think this is a fairly typical scenario. The "honeymoon" period as you call it is the phase when everything thing is new and you are learning quite a bit in this new environment. Meeting new people, learning new processes, dealing with new problems. After a couple of years you've become the cog in the machine and little new is left to learn -- it becomes routine allowing you more time to pay more attention to management decisions without actually being in their shoes.
Just like any relationship that fizzles out after the initial honeymoon phase when you're learning about each other, it becomes your responsibility to keep things interesting. Take initiative on starting new projects, look for needs and innovate from within the company (being an entrepreneur doesn't always mean you have to start a new company), and most importantly always keep you manager in the loop.
I would be curious as well. What is your marketing plan? I also released a game a month ago after working on it for about a year, but soon realized that it is very tough to break through the noise on the app store and get your game noticed.
What has your experience been with this? I see that you are doing pay-up-front model. I'd be curious to get your sense of why you went with that as opposed to the freemium + IAP model.
I also released as a paid app initially, it almost seems as if there is an expectation that games should be free to try and then either progress via upgrades or IAPs.
The game was all developed in my spare time. Mostly through staying up really late after work.
This was the first time I've gone out and tried marketing one of my games, and I've learned a ton.
The number one thing I would recommend is to get eyes on the project as early as possible. I'd hit up TIGSource and start posting a dev log as soon as you can. Be sure to take it out to local events, and definitely start showing other game developers.
The game took a lot longer to make than I was originally planning for, and a lot of that was due to some design decisions that I struggled with. However when I took it out and started showing some local developers they had tons of ideas to help contribute, and actually helped me through the problems that I had been stuck on.
As for the pay model, The whole reason I made this game is because I love to make games. I don't think there was really any strategy behind the monetization. I just put it out there for a couple of bucks. Honestly I expected this to come out and maybe a few people play it, and then I'd be onto my next one; to me that was totally cool.
Actually this morning I had posted a thread on touch arcade and I got 1 response about how a mom had played the game with her daughter and they both had fun. Really if all the game amounts to is that, I'd be happy.
So far though I've been pretty humbled by the response, and all I can say is thanks!
If your only goal is to have people play it and have fun, you should make it free but have In-App Purchases.
Many more people will end up downloading your game, and it may spread better that way (since it's multiplayer).
Now the question is how do you make money with IAP? Maybe keep some awesome game modes locked? Unlock them by getting enough coins (e.g., 100K). You can do this by playing enough, by sharing the app with friends on FB/Twitter, or by purchasing coins through IAP.
Ministudio is a funded AI startup based in NYC building creative tools for children to unleash their imagination with the power of AI. We combine traditional computer graphics / vision methods with modern advances in generative models, e.g., LLMs and Stable Diffusion. You will be joining a stellar team of experienced founders working on cutting edge technology to make creative tools accessible to children. As an early stage employee you will have the autonomy and responsibility to drive our next phase of growth.
We are looking for folks proficient in computer graphics/vision, game development, applied machine learning, AI research, or iOS development.
Please get in touch with CV and/or links to projects you've worked on: akash@ministudio.ai