Ball Smasher

My involvement in the company soon came to an end when irreconcilable differences between the founders made any future work impossible.

The fairy tale didn't last too long but it sure as hell was a lot of fun, financially rewarding and a great experience overall.

The folks at Lion Studios sure knew how to promote the game since it racked up over 4 million downloads in the course of only ~2.5 months.

At one point the app was #2 on the US App Store Free Games (just ahead of Fortnite!) chart which was pretty surreal to see.

Not only were downloads great but the app was a great success financially as well.

After the rather lackluster first 2 weeks, we got an inquiry from one of the big names on the App Store: Lion Studios. They specialize in partnering with indie developers who create good games but have no idea how to promote them.

They gave us an offer to buy the game from us, start promoting it heavily and give us a certain percentage of its lifetime revenue.

After some negotiations we took the offer, transferred the rights and the app took off...

Developing the first version of the game only took us a little more than a month. After some rounds of beta testing and bug fixing we were ready to pull the trigger and publish it on the App Store. 🎉

And then... not much happened in the first weeks. We were getting some downloads but they stayed waaay below our expectations. I must add here that none of us were marketing geniuses and we had very little idea on how to actually promote the app especially on a tight budget.

In 2018 three young college graduates came together in Austin, TX to found a mobile game development company.

We wanted to start with a game that we could build in a reasonable amount of time (1-2 months) since we were mostly broke and a needed a quick hit to stay afloat 😅.

After 1-2 weeks of brainstorming we settled on the idea of creating a casual "idle" game which were very popular on the App Store at the time. We ironed out the details and once the company was officially registered jumped straight into development.