Regarding ASP.NET, I forgot to mention is Microsoft Bizspark http://www.bizspark.com . They give startups free software which helps.

Great tip about http://dribbble.com/! Many of the best designers showing off their latest work/experiments. The quality of designer is high, it’s invite only so the stinkers can’t get in.

I enjoyed the show with Taylor. He actually seemed to have helped balance the energy flow between the two of you!

A comment on “don’t do things in ASP.NET”: I think it’s a fine platform for internal business web apps especially when you need to interface with a myriad of systems over SOAP, XML over HTTP, message queues, etc. It can also be ok if used judiciously in a sizeable company (e.g. at my work). But I agree that if you’re an entrepreneur, unless you already have some deep .NET devs it could be challenging to deploy and scale. Although Microsoft Azure seems like it will eventually be a solid platform for deploying and scaling .NET sites to the cloud, it is still in its infancy. So maybe in a year or two it will be ready.

In the same vein, it is true that the cost of experienced .NET or .Java developers will be reasonably high especially if they are enterprise developers skilled in the full breadth of the platform. I suspect that the cost of similarly skilled Ruby developers would also be high if they have worked on scaling, distributed databases, sharding, queuing, CRON and so forth. At the same time for a startup, it would be easier to leverage more affordable and maybe less experienced Ruby devs.

On the topic of finding good designers, I have literally just been through that and its tough especially because: visual appeal is very subjective, designer portfolios can’t capture the “feel” part of the look and feel. That is it is difficult to gauge what usability expertise a designer has. Also it is challenging to estimate the cost of web design. Because the appeal is subjective, the designer may need many iterations to get where you like to be. As opposed to development where you can see convergence on feature completion and bug fixing.
By the way the Ruby On Rails podcast just had a podcast (http://bit.ly/9RNZ6u) on http://dribbble.com/ , a site for designers share tidbits about what they are working on.

Thanks Taylor for the interesting discussion!

I agree with some of the comments above that Techzing has become the podcast that I look out for and get happy when it shows up each week. Keep up the good work, guys.

@Robin, you really made me laugh with that one! LOL 🙂

@Charlie – Yikes! UDID Faker. Well the hope is that not too many people use that kind of thing….

1. Limit the computer’s playing strength. Especially for Swarm, everyone is coming in as a novice.
2. Lock the ability to pause games, take back moves, hints etc.
3. Lock any analysis tools. e.g. Pychess has a nifty graph that shows who is in front and by how much at any given move.

All of these relate to how serious the player is, so they can’t hack their way around the limitations and it doesn’t really cause pain until the player is serious enough to shell out for the paid version.

By the way, ChessMaster by Ubisoft is a brilliant example of how to make a strategy game more human and fun. It’s clunky and a bit ugly, but things like having ‘personalities’ to play against instead of just a playing strength makes for a more engaging experience.

Good luck with it, it sounds like a pretty cool game.

RE: Swarm app
Justin, people are always going to find a way to pirate your app (e.g. cydia or UDID Faker) so you need to roll with it. The 50 plays for free sounds like a great idea to me but you could also try to get a recurring business model: by getting people to do in app purchases to pay for another 100 games. This might increase the total potential revenue.