Recent content in Home on Andrew McAlister
A while ago I needed to start producing short looping video clips for a work project. It’s an app that involves collecting cards with real-life sport moments that we’ve been building. Each card needs a square clip of a moment. 512 pixels square, no audio, a couple of seconds long, sized and compressed to autoplay on a card without anyone noticing the bandwidth. We started as a team of…
We’ve always enjoyed seeing birds in our garden and putting out food and water for them. As RSPB members we enjoy going birdwatching at reserves from time to time too. A few months ago I stumbled across BirdNET-Pi and it’s just great. It uses my Raspberry Pi to listen to our back garden through a microphone and identifies every bird call it hears in real time. The results are then…
In the past, whenever I joined a new team or switched analytics platforms, the first week was always the same: figuring out table structures, adjusting to whatever SQL dialect the new data used, and writing throwaway queries just to understand what the data looked like. This was the job. If you were a PM who wanted to have the flexibility and reactivity that comes with pulling your own data, you…
GL.iNet Beryl AX (GL-MT3000) How I got smooth PC VR working with a mini WiFi router connected to my PC via ethernet - for £80. Background I’ve been wanting to try VR for ages and finally picked up a pre-owned Meta Quest 3 to have a go. While it’s genuinely fun as a standalone headset, my main objective was PC VR - I wanted to experience games like iRacing with proper immersion and…
I came across a brilliant writeup on Hacker News about creating a Kindle smart dashboard with automatically updating weather, bus schedules and calendar information. The concept immediately caught my attention - repurposing an old e-reader into a useful household display seemed like the perfect weekend project. Looking around my house, I realised I had two unused Kindles gathering dust in drawers.…
I’ve played many, many seasons of Retro Bowl. It’s one of those rare games that are so simple on the surface but fantastically executed. It’s developed by New Star Games, and if you’ve ever played New Star Soccer you’ll understand why I was immediately interested. NSS is one of the best mobile games ever made, so this team definitely has pedigree. It’s not hard…
As large scale online services, mobile games are often improved via analytics collected from users. Today I wanted to introduce several standard KPIs that can be helpful to people who are getting into the business of mobile games for work or simply for their own recreational game dev. I’ll be talking specifically about free to play (also known as F2P/freemium) games that are free to download…
Hello! My name is Andrew. My career has mainly been in product, largely focused on mobile games. I grew up in England, graduated from Imperial College London, then spent several years working in China before returning home to the UK. Things I enjoy: Games have been a big part of my life since I first got on our IBM 486 as a child. This interest has carried through to my career. China , where I…