What do web and mobile engineers and consultants do for fun? Design mobile games, of course.
The latest local game addiction comes from
Bust Out Solutions, a firm that engineers websites and mobile apps for clients like
Best Buy,
Minnesota Public Radio,
The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, and
Pedal Brain.
Employees at the firm have long wanted to build a product for themselves, but were always too busy with client work, according to founder and developer Jeff Lin.
Despite the client deluge, a small team eventually got together and created
Brahmageddon, a whack-a-mole type of mobile game that uses characters from the great classical epics of India, the Ramayana and Mahabharata, Players have to defeat cannibal demons by smacking the on the head as they pop up.
“We had a number of concepts, and this one just seemed silly and unique,” says Lin. “It’s on the simpler side of game design, because we just wanted to see what we could do.”
Although Bust Out engineers designed the game as a nice stress reliever, without intentions of selling it, Lin ended up chatting with a major game distributor who gave him some encouragement about future game development. The game has even provided a return on investment, by selling over 100 copies through Apple’s App Store.
“The project was a success in that we proved we can design games and launch them, and still have fun doing it,” he says. “This has given us all kinds of ideas about where we could go from here.”
Source: Jeff Lin, Bust Out Solutions
Writer: Elizabeth Millard