Something amazing happened recently: we found our focus again.  We lost it for a little while after finishing My Pet Rock.  As a team, we came together to create the next generation of social games, but we discovered that Facebook was becoming more and more like the console market, with uber-publishers (Zynga, Disney/Playdom, EA/Playfish, etc.) spending millions to dominate the market.  It’s difficult for a bootstrapping team to compete in a marketplace where you have to buy your users.

So last October, with the Kindle Fire launch a month away, we decided to try our hand at mobile games, starting with Android.  We’ve released 3 titles since then on the Amazon and Google Play app stores. Our most successful title has been Zombie Chess, which launched December 28th, 2011.

Since then we have expanded our technology to allow us to build iOS, Android, and Web games simultaneously with a single code base.  We split the team, which was small for a Facebook company but large for a mobile company, into 4 sub-teams, each working on their own projects.  To stay focused, we created the following guidelines for all the teams to follow:

  • The game must work for Web and Mobile;
  • The game should take less than 2 months to complete; and
  • The teams must spend the same amount of time polishing and improving the game after it is “completed;”
  • The game should be polished until it is fun and interesting;
  • Each new game should be an improvement in quality over the previous games;
  • And there has to be an audience for that type of game!

This brings us up to today – we now have 3 games that are weeks away from launching (the 4th team has been working on client work – we are bootstrapping after all).  Over the next couple weeks, we’ll be sharing our thought process on all the games, but below is a sneak peak at Super Nut Jump – a game about one young squirrel’s dream to fly high – coming soon to web, iOS, and Android.