You may know VisitApps as your DMO's mobile, in-destination marketing tool especially for DMOs. Yet did you know that two of our Simpleview VisitApps crew, Director Geoffrey Schultz and Product Engineer Lance Tipton, each created their own personal apps before joining our mobile solution team? Lance's is an amusing and addictive mobile game, detailed below, and Geoffrey's helpful trail guide application, described in last week's blog.
This week we'll tell you Lance's story ... how a childhood on a farm, a determined engineer with a playful gamer's perspective, and Simpleview's VisitApps tool came together to create a fun and unique goat-rolling game. Yes, you read that right. We've got the latest on goats rolling down hills in barrels and how you can get in on the game.
App: StormyGoats
Description: "There's a storm coming in and Farmer Jon's goats are in trouble. They're out eatin' grass and don't know of the dangers looming. He's paying you to come in and save the day. So grab your boots and grab your barrels. It's goat rolling time."
App Creator: Lance Tipton
App Inspiration: Lance's app, StormyGoats, was inspired by his childhood growing up on a California farm. His favorite animals were-you guessed it-the goats. He wanted to create a game that would be fun to play and remind him of his youth. Although he's never actually put goats into a barrel and rolled them down a hill, the concept lends well to a fun mobile game. StormyGoats is available in both the Apple and Android App stores.
About Lance: No stranger to hard work after life on a farm, Lance grew up to join the Marine Corps for six years as a Radio Operator. He followed up his service in the Corp by earning his college degree in Audio Engineering, then working as an Audio Visual Technician throughout the bay area doing contract work for tech companies such as Google, Twitter, Yelp, Uber, and more.
Still, Lance found he wanted to do more on the programming side, so he attended a coding bootcamp called Dev Bootcamp in San Francisco. The day he graduated he was hired as a Rails Engineer for a company called GreatLyfe. He and his wife later moved to Tucson to be close to her family, and Lance joined the Simpleview family in 2015. Starting out as a CMS Developer, Lance now fills the role of Product Engineer for VisitApps. He builds mobile and video games in his spare time.
Lance's Cool VisitApps MAS Tip:
The Pocket tab on the right, next to the Draggables tab, can be really useful in certain situations. Use it to copy a container from one location to another. Just drag the container you would like to copy over into the pocket area. Then navigate to the location where you would like to copy it. Once there, drag it from the pocket area over to the content area. Super quick, and super easy.
Your childhood, your job, your creative escapes ... What inspires you?