The field of game design is ever expanding, and it has even reached the halls of RBHS. Junior Jakob Nordenstam and former German exchange student Johannes Gundlach programmed an app of their own, “Tile Tally,” which can be downloaded from the Google Play Store.

“My friend and I, Johannes, both liked programming, basically, and so we were just looking for something to do,” Jakob  said.

Jakob and Johannes decided early on that they wanted to create a fun reaction and reflex based game.

“When we started coding for Android we pretty soon decided that we wanted to write a simple 2D game that should be that easy to understand that it could be played by anyone at any time,”  Johannes said. “Pretty soon after that we did the first sketches of the app on a piece of paper that would later be the plan after which we coded ‘Tile Tally’.”

The students also wanted to create a unique app.

“We were looking for something that someone hadn’t made already,” Jakob said. “If you make something that’s already out there then you lower your chances of being found.”

Jakob and Johannes went into creating their app from scratch in a professional manner. This made creating the app an extra challenge.

“[Jakob and Johannes] went in to making the app how game developers at companies like ELA and 2K would,” RB student and “Tile Tally” marketer Nick Mascitti said. “So it’s like the same thing, really, but I think it’s difficult because there are no ways to find out what you did wrong without looking for it. Obviously there are thousands of lines of code.”

Jakob and Johannes will continue to update their app, and may even create a brand new project in the future.

“As far as new things completely, I think it’s possible but I don’t know what that would look like yet,” Jakob said. “But yeah, I think it could happen.”

Johannes is overall happy with the finished project.

“Creating ‘Tile Tally’ taught us both a lot of new skills in the field of programming apps,” Johannes said. “For example, we realized that it is very important to plan ahead how you want to structure your app. If you don’t get important parts of your app right in the beginning, that might make things unnecessarily difficult in the end. I’m very happy with the current version of tile tally. Of course it’s not a final yet. We will always keep on working on it in the future and try to improve ‘Tile Tally’ to its best.”

Nick is also happy with how the app came out.

“This isn’t an app that is basic and unentertaining,” Nick said. “It’s an entertaining app and I really think it’s the challenge and the competition.”

The app can be downloaded from the Google Play Store for Android devices. It can be found at https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=arcticmetropolis.tiletally2.