There’s an old saying in tech that you can’t really understand a client’s experience until you’ve developed an app in their shoes. Or something like that.
Meet Alex Levin. He’s the cofounder of the creative agency L+R, which he started about two years ago in Dumbo, with a partner. When one of their developers, Kenny Sun, recently announced he was leaving the company, L+R decided it would do something special for him as a going away present. They decided on making a game.
“We call it a casual mobile game, something you’d play on the subway,” Levin explained about the game now called Coloroloc. “It’s basically like a sequencing game, kind of like DDR, picking colors based off concentric circles. As you progress in the game it gets faster and the time you need to make your selection speeds up. It’s a way to get people to think of color, like if you’re thinking of orange you’re thinking really of red and yellow.”
Ryan Regnier (left) and Alex Levin (center) make up L+R. (Courtesy photo)
The fun little side project turned into something more as the weeks went on. The team was comfortable enough designing marketing and branding projects for companies and products, but making their own product? It got them thinking from the client’s point of view.
“We were using the development of the app to work better as a team,” Levin explained. “When we were both the workers and stakeholders it changed a lot of people’s perceptions.”
And then something else happened. Levin noticed that with the greater understanding of the full process of a product, the team was doing better work than it ever had before.
“Everyone had a sense of ownership and it increased the quality of work for our client work after. It was definitely unexpected, we were just trying to have fun,” Levin said.
For his part, Sun is no stranger to games. He’s got an indie hit on his hands with the newly released Circa Infinity game he created.
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