David Reichelt
Creator of Color Switch, game designer
Where to hear and read about David Reichelt2 episodes and tests
App MastersGames with Entrepreneurs #1 - David Reichelt, Creator of Color Switch
App MastersColor Switch Creator on Game Design with David ReicheltDavid Reichelt is a game designer and high school dropout who cannot code, yet made Color Switch, a hit with about 160 million downloads in an early count. The thing most worth learning from him is to ship many fast attempts, and to build each new idea by recombining proven products.
There is nothing in the world that comes from nothing. It always comes from something else.
Games with Entrepreneurs #1 - David Reichelt, Creator of Color Switch
David Reichelt: the story and the lessons
1David Reichelt's path to Color Switch
Reichelt started with almost no education and a rough home. He dropped out in junior year with a 0.8 GPA, after one day. His happiest childhood memory is playing Lode Runner on an Apple II at his mother's friend Pat's house in Simi Valley around 1984 or 1985.
At home his dad was yelling or negative, so Pat's house was a 'green zone'. He is still friends with the family.
He served as an army medic and survived several close blasts. He went to Iraq in 2005 as an army medic. He counts four or five near-death experiences, including a blast that hit his vehicle's back window on his side and rockets landing 20 feet in front of his Humvee.
He took no lasting trauma, believes he was spared for a purpose, and says the experience makes business risk feel small.
He taught himself guitar, film, magic and public speaking along the way. Card magic made him the 'magic medic' and led to five years at the Magic Castle. Toastmasters since 2011 removed his nerves for PR shows and podcasts. Filmmaking began 15 or 16 years ago.
He never planned for these skills to matter. They later fed Color Switch's surprise mechanic, the trailer that won a publisher, and his course.
It took 13 years of trial and error before he landed on games. He chose games for time freedom, to be with friends and family. By his account he started working in games in 2013, funding design time with part-time jobs.
At 33 he felt he had chased pipe dreams and could not crack the code. Depression and doubt faded once he embraced mistakes and kept studying.
Reichelt was in debt and parking cars when Color Switch hit number one. He was about $80,000 in debt, working as a valet and limo driver. Color Switch launched in December 2015 and was the top overall app on Apple for about a month, ahead of Facebook.
He worked a last valet shift with the team before giving notice. He says you should never feel above people. He got out of debt with no help, only the methods he teaches.
2How Reichelt designed Color Switch
He blended five inspirations instead of cloning one game. He took four colors from Simon and Uno, color changing from Pac-Man and Uno, the Gmail loading ball, and one-tap play with an opening from Flight.
He saw a rotating four-color circle with a color-changing ball passing through it. His rule: 'Inspiration from one idea is cloning.'
He turned a small power-up moment into the whole game. Pac-Man and Uno both use color switching only as a minor moment. He made that moment the main experience of Color Switch.
'Let's take that small moment and let's make it the main moment in Color Switch.'
He narrowed the problem before generating any ideas. 'Make a great game' was too broad, and 'a casual mobile game' still was not specific. He settled on a game where you tap the screen and something goes up.
He also wanted a game that could last for years, so he asked what theme everyone meets daily and chose shapes and colors.
He built surprise and flow into the core loop. The color change surprises the player after every obstacle. He drew on his magician background to see how strongly surprise affects people.
For flow, he keeps players between frustration and boredom with waves of tension and release at rising intensity.
He built the game himself for about $3,000 with no code. The money went almost entirely to Buildbox software, where he drags things around instead of writing advanced code. He sketched the graphics in 20 minutes and made a demo in 10 more.
He knew he had something because he had never seen a game like it.
He studies good and bad games to name the design concepts. He plays mobile games constantly, often to analyze rather than enjoy them, asking why good ones work and bad ones do not.
Knowing many design concepts lets him ask where a game could use more surprise.
3Reichelt's idea-generation toolkit
He treats every new idea as a recombination of older ones. Pac-Man and Uno are multi-billion dollar products that share a seed. He says popular products are usually small iterations of something older, and a band could not make a truly original rock album with no reference.
His academy techniques strip an idea to its DNA, then change that DNA, like planting an apple seed.
He uses slice and dice and SCAMPER to break things into attributes. He states the problem in one sentence, lists attributes, then changes one at a time. He sliced Flight into one tap, minimalistic, flat graphics and a rotating object with one opening.
He bought the $12 book ThinkerToys in 2011 and applied it for 7 years, using it for his game ideas from 2013. He says to pick the techniques that suit you rather than use the whole book.
He reverses assumptions to escape fixed thinking. The False Faces technique lists every assumption about a problem and reverses each one. Reversing 'people drive cars' gives 'cars drive people', the automated car.
He says treating a topic as settled closes your thinking.
He looks at everyday objects as ideas, not as what they are. He coined 'passive versus active intake' for the habit. He always saw the Gmail loading icon as a game idea, and it became the color-changing ball.
'That's not a icon, that's a video game idea.' His own example: a cup plus a microphone becomes a secret listening cup.
He gives his mind one specific target, then acts. He chose games over astronomy or surgery and calls the mind a supercomputer that creates what you tell it to. He says ideas are worth nothing without action.
He keeps a routine-free life, tries something different daily, and spent about $3,000 on books in a year.
4Why Reichelt ships dozens of failed games
Color Switch was his 41st game, after about 40 in six months. He made the 40 before it in about 6 months. About 100 more projects never left his computer. His first game took 6 months, and he says the 40 in 6 months taught him far more.
'You have to go through a field of horribly designed games to get to your good game.' His company name, Dinobyte Apps, came from that first dinosaur game.
He began as a cloner and reskinner with no company. Early on he launched from his apartment with no company, copying and reskinning games before he learned to combine ideas.
He says you have to be bad before you can be good at anything.
He sets no deadline or failure count for quitting. His loop is learn, apply, fail, then carry the lesson into the next try. He rejects limits like 'five more failures' or 'by this time next year'.
'If I had stopped at 35 failed games, I wouldn't be here today.'
He expects more mistakes after a hit, not fewer. He cites Michael Jordan missing 9,000 shots and 26 game-winning attempts. He says a hit brings new kinds of mistakes.
He lets anyone who says you can't do something fuel his actions.
5How Reichelt leads a team without technical skills
He supplies the vision and hires technicians for the rest. He cannot code and says focusing on high technical skills is not in a founder's best interest, since you can hire for them. Creative skills can be applied the same day.
He compares his role to a man in a submarine's engine room, flipping switches so the ship doesn't sink. He says if he does anything highly technical, 'we're all in trouble'.
He briefs artists and programmers with sketches filmed on his phone. He points an iPhone down from a tripod at paper or a whiteboard and talks through a stick-figure sketch. Team members get his notes instantly.
Typed notes bring back questions like 'What do you mean exactly?'
He fixes incentives and puts people where they can excel. Early on he got people to work but gave poor incentives, so the work was weak. He found that someone in a job they are not good at or excited about means trouble.
'You have to also place people where they're going to flourish.'
He owns every result when something stalls. When something is not happening, he treats it as the leader's fault. He says nobody else could make his course happen because it exists only in his head.
'If things go wrong in my company or if they go right it all stops at me.' He gave the same advice to an interviewer whose hire was two months into a three-month trial.
He sets aggressive deadlines and accepts partial finishes. His course needed about 90 to 100 videos filmed in four days and edited in a month. At the test launch deadline, 40 of 75 videos were done.
The rest only needed polish. He cites Think and Grow Rich on aiming for the stars and hitting the moon.
He runs many projects because one thing bores him. He is building the academy and more Color Switch products, with dozens of product ideas waiting, not all games. The academy and Color Switch 2 are meant to fund the rest.
He holds morning meetings with his teams and says his day is a thousand things, such as making sure people understand a change.
6Publishers, marketing and losing Color Switch
A 30-second trailer won him a publisher. He had cut trailers for fun while studying film editing. He sent a short, intense trailer to a publisher he knew from the forums, who replied they could take it to number one.
His advice is a short, exciting video, not a three-minute one. He hands marketing to a publisher and sticks to design.
He says marketing cannot save a weak game. He knows a game with the same marketing that got a couple million downloads, and another where only about 20% of players keep it. He credits Color Switch's takeoff to its design and unique inspirations.
'The marketing will get your game up there, but it's up to the game to either go up or go down.'
He tells builders to settle the revenue share before signing. He says developer shares run from 20% to 70%, depending on the publisher, what they do and the developer's past results. His own terms are under an NDA.
He plans to eventually become his own publisher to scale.
He lost a game of about a quarter billion downloads to a publisher. The game sat on the publisher's account, and when he left the agreement they would not transfer it. It came off the App Store, and he knows of no precedent for a huge app being pulled.
His takeaway is to check account ownership and transfer terms before signing.
He relaunched it himself and it climbed with no marketing. He bet fans would return, like Pac-Man reappearing after 20 years. The relaunch went straight up the charts with no marketing and is still doing decently.
Paid user acquisition was planned to start in a month or two. He says the setback pushed him to build the sequel and the academy as he did.
7Reichelt's mindset and what he teaches
He refuses a victim mindset and takes responsibility. He argues a victim mindset means you never take on a challenge, because it feels outside your control. He calls the claim that society is stacked against you a lie.
He wants to be the center of his own hero's journey. He says he is 'no saint', and what matters is whether you learn from mistakes and change.
He calls other people's success luck an excuse. People say a successful person had a special situation. He says excuses made for others keep you from ever having your own breakthrough.
His own start was a weak position, built by constant learning.
He drops his ego after a hit and stays a student. He assumes he knows 0.1% of what there is to know, and reads widely from chemistry to taxidermy. He says a big ego after success stops learning.
'You should always assume that you don't know 99.9% of what there is to know in your business or in life.'
He works out why a hit happened so he can repeat it. He asks whether a success came from chance or a specific method. Because he knows how he got the Color Switch result, he expects the sequel to beat the first game.
He says success fuels your actions.
He says to build a business around someone else's problem. He argues the number one reason for a business is solving a problem for someone else. If you solve it better than competitors, he says, you make the most money anyway.
His own reason for games was time freedom, not money.
He built Color Switch Academy to repay help from strangers. The first two modules teach mindset and problem-solving before any game building. It includes a weekly Facebook group and monthly contests with cash prizes.
A prospect said she had never thought of making games and now wanted to make all of them. He says he has cracked only level one.
Games with Entrepreneurs #1 - David Reichelt, Creator of Color Switch
A game creator explains how he got to a hit game by shipping dozens of quick, failed games, then deriving the core mechanic from two proven products. He also covers managing a team without technical skills and how he relaunched a quarter-billion-download game after losing it from the App Store.
Reichelt started with almost no education and a rough home. He dropped out in junior year with a 0.8 GPA, after one day. His happiest childhood memory is playing Lode Runner on an Apple II at his mother's friend Pat's house in Simi Valley around 1984 or 1985.
At home his dad was yelling or negative, so Pat's house was a 'green zone'. He is still friends with the family.
He served as an army medic and survived several close blasts. He went to Iraq in 2005 as an army medic. He counts four or five near-death experiences, including a blast that hit his vehicle's back window on his side and rockets landing 20 feet in front of his Humvee.
He took no lasting trauma, believes he was spared for a purpose, and says the experience makes business risk feel small.
He taught himself guitar, film, magic and public speaking along the way. Card magic made him the 'magic medic' and led to five years at the Magic Castle. Toastmasters since 2011 removed his nerves for PR shows and podcasts. Filmmaking began 15 or 16 years ago.
He never planned for these skills to matter. They later fed Color Switch's surprise mechanic, the trailer that won a publisher, and his course.
It took 13 years of trial and error before he landed on games. He chose games for time freedom, to be with friends and family. By his account he started working in games in 2013, funding design time with part-time jobs.
At 33 he felt he had chased pipe dreams and could not crack the code. Depression and doubt faded once he embraced mistakes and kept studying.
He blended five inspirations instead of cloning one game. He took four colors from Simon and Uno, color changing from Pac-Man and Uno, the Gmail loading ball, and one-tap play with an opening from Flight.
He saw a rotating four-color circle with a color-changing ball passing through it. His rule: 'Inspiration from one idea is cloning.'
He turned a small power-up moment into the whole game. Pac-Man and Uno both use color switching only as a minor moment. He made that moment the main experience of Color Switch.
'Let's take that small moment and let's make it the main moment in Color Switch.'
He treats every new idea as a recombination of older ones. Pac-Man and Uno are multi-billion dollar products that share a seed. He says popular products are usually small iterations of something older, and a band could not make a truly original rock album with no reference.
His academy techniques strip an idea to its DNA, then change that DNA, like planting an apple seed.
He looks at everyday objects as ideas, not as what they are. He coined 'passive versus active intake' for the habit. He always saw the Gmail loading icon as a game idea, and it became the color-changing ball.
'That's not a icon, that's a video game idea.' His own example: a cup plus a microphone becomes a secret listening cup.
Color Switch was his 41st game, after about 40 in six months. He made the 40 before it in about 6 months. About 100 more projects never left his computer. His first game took 6 months, and he says the 40 in 6 months taught him far more.
'You have to go through a field of horribly designed games to get to your good game.' His company name, Dinobyte Apps, came from that first dinosaur game.
He began as a cloner and reskinner with no company. Early on he launched from his apartment with no company, copying and reskinning games before he learned to combine ideas.
He says you have to be bad before you can be good at anything.
He expects more mistakes after a hit, not fewer. He cites Michael Jordan missing 9,000 shots and 26 game-winning attempts. He says a hit brings new kinds of mistakes.
He lets anyone who says you can't do something fuel his actions.
He supplies the vision and hires technicians for the rest. He cannot code and says focusing on high technical skills is not in a founder's best interest, since you can hire for them. Creative skills can be applied the same day.
He compares his role to a man in a submarine's engine room, flipping switches so the ship doesn't sink. He says if he does anything highly technical, 'we're all in trouble'.
He briefs artists and programmers with sketches filmed on his phone. He points an iPhone down from a tripod at paper or a whiteboard and talks through a stick-figure sketch. Team members get his notes instantly.
Typed notes bring back questions like 'What do you mean exactly?'
He fixes incentives and puts people where they can excel. Early on he got people to work but gave poor incentives, so the work was weak. He found that someone in a job they are not good at or excited about means trouble.
'You have to also place people where they're going to flourish.'
He owns every result when something stalls. When something is not happening, he treats it as the leader's fault. He says nobody else could make his course happen because it exists only in his head.
'If things go wrong in my company or if they go right it all stops at me.' He gave the same advice to an interviewer whose hire was two months into a three-month trial.
He sets aggressive deadlines and accepts partial finishes. His course needed about 90 to 100 videos filmed in four days and edited in a month. At the test launch deadline, 40 of 75 videos were done.
The rest only needed polish. He cites Think and Grow Rich on aiming for the stars and hitting the moon.
He runs many projects because one thing bores him. He is building the academy and more Color Switch products, with dozens of product ideas waiting, not all games. The academy and Color Switch 2 are meant to fund the rest.
He holds morning meetings with his teams and says his day is a thousand things, such as making sure people understand a change.
He lost a game of about a quarter billion downloads to a publisher. The game sat on the publisher's account, and when he left the agreement they would not transfer it. It came off the App Store, and he knows of no precedent for a huge app being pulled.
His takeaway is to check account ownership and transfer terms before signing.
He relaunched it himself and it climbed with no marketing. He bet fans would return, like Pac-Man reappearing after 20 years. The relaunch went straight up the charts with no marketing and is still doing decently.
Paid user acquisition was planned to start in a month or two. He says the setback pushed him to build the sequel and the academy as he did.
He refuses a victim mindset and takes responsibility. He argues a victim mindset means you never take on a challenge, because it feels outside your control. He calls the claim that society is stacked against you a lie.
He wants to be the center of his own hero's journey. He says he is 'no saint', and what matters is whether you learn from mistakes and change.
He drops his ego after a hit and stays a student. He assumes he knows 0.1% of what there is to know, and reads widely from chemistry to taxidermy. He says a big ego after success stops learning.
'You should always assume that you don't know 99.9% of what there is to know in your business or in life.'
He works out why a hit happened so he can repeat it. He asks whether a success came from chance or a specific method. Because he knows how he got the Color Switch result, he expects the sequel to beat the first game.
He says success fuels your actions.
He says to build a business around someone else's problem. He argues the number one reason for a business is solving a problem for someone else. If you solve it better than competitors, he says, you make the most money anyway.
His own reason for games was time freedom, not money.
He built Color Switch Academy to repay help from strangers. The first two modules teach mindset and problem-solving before any game building. It includes a weekly Facebook group and monthly contests with cash prizes.
A prospect said she had never thought of making games and now wanted to make all of them. He says he has cracked only level one.
Color Switch Creator on Game Design with David Reichelt
A game designer explains the creative process and mindset behind Color Switch, which he built for about $3,000 after 40 failed games. The game reached about 160 million downloads and spent a month at number one on the App Store, beating Facebook.
Reichelt started with almost no education and a rough home. He dropped out in junior year with a 0.8 GPA, after one day. His happiest childhood memory is playing Lode Runner on an Apple II at his mother's friend Pat's house in Simi Valley around 1984 or 1985.
At home his dad was yelling or negative, so Pat's house was a 'green zone'. He is still friends with the family.
He served as an army medic and survived several close blasts. He went to Iraq in 2005 as an army medic. He counts four or five near-death experiences, including a blast that hit his vehicle's back window on his side and rockets landing 20 feet in front of his Humvee.
He took no lasting trauma, believes he was spared for a purpose, and says the experience makes business risk feel small.
He taught himself guitar, film, magic and public speaking along the way. Card magic made him the 'magic medic' and led to five years at the Magic Castle. Toastmasters since 2011 removed his nerves for PR shows and podcasts. Filmmaking began 15 or 16 years ago.
He never planned for these skills to matter. They later fed Color Switch's surprise mechanic, the trailer that won a publisher, and his course.
It took 13 years of trial and error before he landed on games. He chose games for time freedom, to be with friends and family. By his account he started working in games in 2013, funding design time with part-time jobs.
At 33 he felt he had chased pipe dreams and could not crack the code. Depression and doubt faded once he embraced mistakes and kept studying.
Reichelt was in debt and parking cars when Color Switch hit number one. He was about $80,000 in debt, working as a valet and limo driver. Color Switch launched in December 2015 and was the top overall app on Apple for about a month, ahead of Facebook.
He worked a last valet shift with the team before giving notice. He says you should never feel above people. He got out of debt with no help, only the methods he teaches.
He blended five inspirations instead of cloning one game. He took four colors from Simon and Uno, color changing from Pac-Man and Uno, the Gmail loading ball, and one-tap play with an opening from Flight.
He saw a rotating four-color circle with a color-changing ball passing through it. His rule: 'Inspiration from one idea is cloning.'
He narrowed the problem before generating any ideas. 'Make a great game' was too broad, and 'a casual mobile game' still was not specific. He settled on a game where you tap the screen and something goes up.
He also wanted a game that could last for years, so he asked what theme everyone meets daily and chose shapes and colors.
He built surprise and flow into the core loop. The color change surprises the player after every obstacle. He drew on his magician background to see how strongly surprise affects people.
For flow, he keeps players between frustration and boredom with waves of tension and release at rising intensity.
He built the game himself for about $3,000 with no code. The money went almost entirely to Buildbox software, where he drags things around instead of writing advanced code. He sketched the graphics in 20 minutes and made a demo in 10 more.
He knew he had something because he had never seen a game like it.
He studies good and bad games to name the design concepts. He plays mobile games constantly, often to analyze rather than enjoy them, asking why good ones work and bad ones do not.
Knowing many design concepts lets him ask where a game could use more surprise.
He uses slice and dice and SCAMPER to break things into attributes. He states the problem in one sentence, lists attributes, then changes one at a time. He sliced Flight into one tap, minimalistic, flat graphics and a rotating object with one opening.
He bought the $12 book ThinkerToys in 2011 and applied it for 7 years, using it for his game ideas from 2013. He says to pick the techniques that suit you rather than use the whole book.
He reverses assumptions to escape fixed thinking. The False Faces technique lists every assumption about a problem and reverses each one. Reversing 'people drive cars' gives 'cars drive people', the automated car.
He says treating a topic as settled closes your thinking.
He looks at everyday objects as ideas, not as what they are. He coined 'passive versus active intake' for the habit. He always saw the Gmail loading icon as a game idea, and it became the color-changing ball.
'That's not a icon, that's a video game idea.' His own example: a cup plus a microphone becomes a secret listening cup.
He gives his mind one specific target, then acts. He chose games over astronomy or surgery and calls the mind a supercomputer that creates what you tell it to. He says ideas are worth nothing without action.
He keeps a routine-free life, tries something different daily, and spent about $3,000 on books in a year.
Color Switch was his 41st game, after about 40 in six months. He made the 40 before it in about 6 months. About 100 more projects never left his computer. His first game took 6 months, and he says the 40 in 6 months taught him far more.
'You have to go through a field of horribly designed games to get to your good game.' His company name, Dinobyte Apps, came from that first dinosaur game.
He began as a cloner and reskinner with no company. Early on he launched from his apartment with no company, copying and reskinning games before he learned to combine ideas.
He says you have to be bad before you can be good at anything.
He sets no deadline or failure count for quitting. His loop is learn, apply, fail, then carry the lesson into the next try. He rejects limits like 'five more failures' or 'by this time next year'.
'If I had stopped at 35 failed games, I wouldn't be here today.'
A 30-second trailer won him a publisher. He had cut trailers for fun while studying film editing. He sent a short, intense trailer to a publisher he knew from the forums, who replied they could take it to number one.
His advice is a short, exciting video, not a three-minute one. He hands marketing to a publisher and sticks to design.
He says marketing cannot save a weak game. He knows a game with the same marketing that got a couple million downloads, and another where only about 20% of players keep it. He credits Color Switch's takeoff to its design and unique inspirations.
'The marketing will get your game up there, but it's up to the game to either go up or go down.'
He tells builders to settle the revenue share before signing. He says developer shares run from 20% to 70%, depending on the publisher, what they do and the developer's past results. His own terms are under an NDA.
He plans to eventually become his own publisher to scale.
He calls other people's success luck an excuse. People say a successful person had a special situation. He says excuses made for others keep you from ever having your own breakthrough.
His own start was a weak position, built by constant learning.
He drops his ego after a hit and stays a student. He assumes he knows 0.1% of what there is to know, and reads widely from chemistry to taxidermy. He says a big ego after success stops learning.
'You should always assume that you don't know 99.9% of what there is to know in your business or in life.'