Beautifully crafted apps and games

For as long as I can remember, my head has been packed with ideas. Some have been good, most have been fleeting, and a few get stuck: for days, weeks, months, years, and one or two for decades.

I started Swipeglass to turn the ones that stick into software.

To give an example, I've been fascinated with the sport of rugby since I was a kid, which was a strange thing growing up in Mexico in the 90s, where it barely existed.

Those days were also great for sports video games. Tecmo Super Bowl on the SNES was my favorite, by far. I loved it because it was super simple, yet incredibly deep in terms of gameplay. I always wanted a game like it for rugby, but there wasn't one.

Three decades later, there still isn't one that checks those boxes.

This is precisely why our first app is a game: Pixel Rugby.

You don't need to know a thing about rugby to play, but real fans will feel at home. Chase a distance on a single run, or go under the hood, where it's surprisingly deep: a career mode and world rankings you can keep building for months, like a save file you never want to overwrite.

Playing it is as easy as scrolling Instagram, except this is a fun break for your brain, not a doomscroll that leaves you worse off. It feels like a game from our childhood, without the console or the multi-gigabyte download. It's portrait-mode first (how we naturally hold our phones) and built for one hand and one thumb.

It's my homage to the games I grew up playing, and it's made for every age: a kid on the couch, an adult killing time on a lunch break, in line at the DMV, or in the school pick-up line. It's snackable: pick it up, play for a few minutes, and put it down feeling a little lighter.

What I didn't expect is how much my own kids would take to it. Not just the 8-bit look, but how simple it is to play. Those blocky graphics are brand new to them, and so is a game that doesn't need explaining. Nostalgia for me, novelty for them. Watching that has been the best part of building it.

Pixel Rugby is the first. More games and apps are on the way.

Thanks for being here early.