Steel Sky LLC was started by Jeff Weinstein, first as a hobby, and then as a serious business once the first (top secret!) application showed promise and had a working proof of concept that could run on iOS and Android phones. There are several product ideas in the pipeline, each being evaluated based on complexity, time to complete, and taking costs/benefits into account.

Jeff has been doing all of the work as a one-man hyper-motivated machine. That means all of the cross platform mobile client development as well as all of the server-side tech. This ability to handle the complexity and scale of the tasks involved originates from his over decade-long tenure developing video games for PopCap Games (now owned by Electronic Arts). Joining PopCap as the 8th employee, the norm throughout his career was small teams: one programmer (himself on his assigned projects), a small number of artists and some talented QA staff. With such small teams, everyone was required to wear multiple hats and learn a diverse array of skills beyond simply “draw this”, “code that”, “find bugs.” While certainly requiring a lot of dedication and effort for all involved, this ensured a nimbleness and ability to rapidly adapt. It also quickly teaches members how to triage and prioritize and allows for quick decision making.

In addition, the company’s hyper-fixation on user-friendliness, ease of use, simplicity and easy to understand design formed the basis of his work going forward even after departing the game development scene. The number of apps that have a terrible or ugly user experience is staggering. Most companies tend to focus on the product and revenue first over the user and how they perceive their application. At PopCap, we realized that you have maybe about 5 seconds for the user to look at your product before they either decide to stick with it for a bit or uninstall it forever. You can’t make money if you can’t attract and retain users.

That’s why Steel Sky is so hyper-focused on the user experience and accessibility. A user shouldn’t have to read instructions or go through a tutorial or view pop-ups to understand how your app works. It should just be intuitive right from the start.

At the moment, Steel Sky has the luxury to be self-funded. Once a prototype reaches a more mature stage, we may decide to look for extra funding. Until then, when we have a product to announce we’ll be sure to update our site as well as social links.