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When I started working on a game database I thought it was going to be easy. Just gather up a list of games from various sources, put it in table form and presto, bestselling iPhone app!

My never-ending naiveté and vast skill at underestimating how long something will take is impressive, is it not?

At first, GameZen was to include games for North America, the UK, Japan and Australia. As it turned out, just looking at it from a data collection perspective that was a nightmare: multiple release dates, games that were cancelled in some countries but not others, the same game with different names in various countries, games that were only downloadable in some countries and only disc-based in others.

Plus I was including downloadable games and downloadable content.

Needless to say, trying to display all that data was a mess, not just visually, but from the perspective of giving the user control over what they wanted to see. Yuk!

Then in the fall and winter of 2010 I kept discovering other apps that were doing similar things, and in some ways better. Some had direct feeds from gaming sites, with instant access to nicely formatted information, and some had listings for (potentially) every game in existence.

At first I was, not surprisingly, quite depressed. Did I want to compete with other apps that on the surface offered at least as much to users as my app would, especially when some of the competition was free?

Then, oddly, I felt a renewed sense of purpose. Seeing the competition forced me to focus on what my app really needed to be.

Simple.

It seems obvious, right? Isn’t everyone always saying “Keep It Simple Stupid”?

What no one ever seems to say, and it’s become my mantra: “Simple’s a ****”.

Blending simple with useful is one the hardest things I’ve had to do. I hope that I’ve done it. People have told me that I’ve done it (but they’re friends; you can’t trust friends, can you?).

With any luck GameZen looks like it was put together in a few weeks. I hope everything seems obvious and that everything was put in the place it was supposed to go.

It’s not perfect, by any means. Every day I see something else wrong and every day I think about what I need to add, or change, or remove.

But I need to stop deciding these things on my own. I need GameZen to be out there for people to use and for me to really see the ways it can be better.

Enjoy!

::ken pajala::