Daniel Mattox
25 years of it, starting with RPG Maker games and Geocities pages and never stopping. These days that means production apps with real users: native mobile builds, payment flows that take real money, and the servers underneath them, which I also run.
React and React Native, Node and Express, MongoDB, Redis, S3-compatible storage, Stripe, transactional email and SMS. I write the client, the API and the infrastructure config, because on my own projects there is nobody else to.
Native iOS and Android through TestFlight and store review, over-the-air bundle updates, push notifications, phone verification. Including the parts that only bite after release, which is where most of the actual work is.
My own servers, containers, reverse proxy, TLS, blue-green deploys with rollback, backups and cron. When you ask what happens in production, the answer comes from operating it rather than from reading about it.
See it running →I founded Hyperspace Media Group, the software company behind Plyr2, a dating app for gamers; Journey, booking and payments for service businesses; Moodiverse, a mood tracker on the App Store; STLibrarian, a media library for 3D printing; and Super Partner, route settlement for vending operators. All five are live commercial products, built and operated in-house.
See the studio →Manatees at Crystal River, alligators and cypress on the Hillsborough, downtown Tampa from the water. One guide, one guest at a time, on rivers I have paddled for years. The best part of most weeks.
DanTheMan Kayaking Tours →Bookings and deposits on that site run on Journey, the booking platform from Hyperspace Media Group. Journey →
Not the day job, and not a portfolio piece either. These are the ones that got finished, which for a side project is the whole difficulty.
A construction deck for Welcome To..., for phones. It replaces the 81 physical cards while you keep playing on the paper score sheets you already own: three piles, the real bell-curve distribution, and the same two-card offer the board game is planned around. Installs to the home screen and deals a hand with no signal at all.
A tap-based mobile game built in Unity, out on the App Store and through store review like anything else I ship. Small on purpose: the interesting part was never the mechanic, it was carrying a Unity build all the way to a public listing and keeping it there.
The current one, and the most fun of them. A hex strategy game whose opponents are behaviour trees, which means it can play itself: a headless harness runs whole matches between them, and it has been running them for weeks. Every balance number in the game came out of those matches instead of out of an argument with myself about them.
Bot-vs-bot simlive
LOS has played over 12,000 bot-versus-bot matches against itself: over 32 hours of simulated run time.
32.96 h measured over 12,447 matches, 706 automated runs across 26 days; latest Oct 8, 2026
est. roughly 7,438 hours of play a human never had to sit through
How this is counted →Verified reviews from freelance clients, quoted word for word, typos and all — plus everything sent since by clients invited to write one after the work.
An hour or two with somebody who has shipped this before, so the decision in front of you is the one that pays off for years. Pick a real open slot on my calendar, pay by card, and a Zoom link is in your inbox before you close the tab.
If a booked hour is not what you need, say what is. Custom builds, a second opinion, or something that does not fit a slot on a calendar.