Ken Johnson, the creator of Phase 10, reached out to Nexus Marketing for help designing and building a trivia app with a spinning wheel and a betting feature. Ken wanted players to be able to decide how confident they are in their answers and then spin a dial to choose how much they want to wager on each play.

Nexus discussed the project at length with Ken. We talked about the game’s functionality and asked questions to determine what features Ken wanted to include.

Next, we wrote a detailed specifications document. In bullet format, we described each page of the app, the features accessible on each page, and how those features work. We ran the specifications document by Ken, had another call to clear up some points, and then revised the document.

After Ken approved our app specifications, we made a list of all visual and audio assets the app would require.

We sent our image requirements to Oksana Verko, a freelance UI designer and digital artist based in Ukraine. Oksana had honed her talent for creating realistic digital paintings with a magical feel while working at slot machine studios.

Next, we shared our programming requirements with Leo, a Unity game creator based in Pakistan. Leo has a relentless obsession for playability, uniqueness, and juicy animations. Leo created a milestone-based plan that aligned with our budget.

Brett Wharton sourced sound effects, created additional illustrations, and served as project manager and art director. Together, our team finished the app over a 5-month period.

As we typically do with apps, we broke the production into several milestones:

• an upfront payment
• a payment after the illustrations were complete
• a payment after two major pages of the app were finished
• another payment when we released the “alpha” version of the app with all features built out but a few bugs remaining
• a final payment after all bugs were resolved and Google and Apple had approved the game for sale

These milestones allowed us to keep Ken involved in each stage of the process and to send regular payments out to our design team.

Years after launching, Stake Your Stash still generates monthly passive income for Ken.

After publishing the app, Ken decided to commission another game, Scratch Phrase, and we worked with Leo again to program the app in Unity. Scratch Phrase turned out to be much more popular! The game currently has 275 ratings on the iOS App Store, and it generates multiple hundreds each month in passive income.