Mobility & Entrepreneurship

This time it is “La Estrella de Nicaragua” one of the leading newspapers in Nicaragua. The article is in spanish and pretty much says just what you all know. Where am from, what ANSCA means, how Walter and I started Ansca and talks about the success of Bubble Ball,(you know, the 14 year old kid) Robert Nays’s successful app written in our Corona SDK.

Here is the link to the newspaper La Estrella de Nicaragua, and a link to the actual article without having to navigate the paper pages, here.

Carlos

Tried to do my best to translate.

“Dweeb Carlos Icaza, Nicaraguan-nerd triumphs in the US in the world of cyber technology.

With the title “The impact of Corona SDK from Ansca Mobile”, el Diario Las Americas wrote about the monumental success of Carlos Icaza Arguello, a Nicaraguan professional in an article written by Nicaraguan reporter Sergio Boffelli.

Carlos Icaza is the co-founder of Ansca Mobile, creators of the Corona SDK. “Corona SDK has allowed 14 year hold Robert Nay from Spanish Fork Utah to create his successful game Bubble Ball a free app for the iTunes app store says Boffelli.

The success of Robert’s game has been featured all over the US, Europe, China and Chile, due in part to Robert’s game displacing Angry Birds from the top stop which was created by a group of 17 programmres.

Carlos Icaza says “Bubble Ball has been downloaded more than 8 million times, which I consider a phenomenon because it put Ansca on the map and now VC firms are coming to us thus proving what we set out to do a long time ago, we made Corona so easy, that even a 14 year old can write apps using our framework”.

In August of 1979, Carlos Icaza, then 13 years old arrived in Miami with his parents Carlos Icaza and Tere Arguello de Icaza and his sister Karla. The entire family, as with thousand of others, exiled from Nicaragua during the civil war due to the unrest brought about by the Sandinista Revolution.  Carlos would have never imagined that his future would impact the world of technology in the US and worldwide.

He left behind friends, his home town of Leon, Nicaragua, and his family’s cotton farm, adding to the exodus of more than 1 million Nicaraguans whose talent and productive capacity displaced the country from the civil unrest and usurped government into the chaos of poverty making Nicaragua the second most poorest country in Central/South America.

At 15 years of age, now in exile, Carlos Icaza started programming classes and graduated from Christopher Columbus High Shool in 1984 in Miami, and as soon as he started college courses in Computer Science he was hired as a professional programmer.

As he grew, Carlos immersed himself in the world of programing and in 1997 joined Adobe as a software engineer and in 2004 Macromedia recruited him as Engineering Manager for their nascent mobile division.

A year later, when Adobe acquired Macromedia, Icaza had released FlashLite, Flash Mobile Authoring and Flash Cast. Flash Lite is now available in over a billion phones worldwide.

With his technological capacity and his desire to be an entrepreneur and work with more freedom he quit Adobe in 2007 and with his co-founder Walter Luh, who met while at Adobe, started Ansca Mobile in Palo Alto.

Where does the name Ansca comes from? It’s a family history, and the cotton farm where he grew up left an indelible experience on a very young Carlos Icaza, and the meaning of Ansca is “Algodoneros Nicaraguenses Sociedad Coooperativa Agricola” [Agricultural Cooperative of Nicaraguan Cotton Growers] and even though Ansca Mobile is a company dedicated to technology, Carlos has fond memories of Ansca that he has carried since his child hood.

Walter, his co-founder was also at Adobe and was lead architect of Flash Lite, has over 10 years of programming experience and aside from Flash Lite worked on Adobe Illustrator and Apple’s Final Cut Pro.”

The rest is the Bubble Ball success and how easy Corona is to use.

One of the most exciting parts of being at Ansca, is that I get to see a lot of your great games all the way from inception to being released on the App Store and/orAndroid Market.

A lot of you send me your games to figure out a problem here and there, or ask me questions about how to do XYZ or this-and-that. Some of you send me assets without blinking; other of you are reluctant to send me your assets because your game is the next Angry Birds and you don’t want anyone to see your creation. Some of you are reluctant to send me the code because the “code” is not pretty. Trust me, I’ve heard and seen just about every type of game, code design, and killer app — I’ve been working knee-deep in the mobile space since 2004, when it was “pre-historic.” I’ve seen the whole gamut!

So, I see a lot of games and apps. Of course, I see a lot of Corona-made apps, but I also get to see a lot of non-Corona apps — and I get the same question asked over and over again.

What makes a game successful?

And with apologies to Cookie Monster, here we go…

While there is no magic elixir as to what makes a game a success. I have seen a series of elements that most successful games have and in Cookie Monster lingo, here is the Letter E for the key elements to a successful game

1. The game must be engaging.
2. The game must be entertaining.
3. The game must be enjoyable.
4. The game must be elastic.
5. The game must be expandable.
6. You must game must expose the user to other players.
7. A game starts in an endemic area.
8. A game, once it reaches mass appeal, it becomes an epidemic. It is viral and at this point unstoppable.

While it is difficult to articulate everything in one blogpost, I will do my best to see if I can make sense for each of the elments I mentioned above for a successful game.

A game must be engaging!  Think of having an engaging conversation — the conversation can be enjoyable or entertaining. Not all conversations are enjoyable, nor all conversations are entertaining. But if it has one or the other, you at least have three items from the list:engaging, entertaining, and enjoyable.  Now, think of a movie that is entertaining — not all the movies that you consider to be  entertainment may be enjoyable, but they could be engaging. The movie can have a plausible story that makes it entertaining, but may not be engaging. But certainly a movie that is enjoyable can be quite entertaining and engaging at the same time. Think of it this way: Entertaining = mass appeal. Simple.!

Now onto the rest! A game must also be expandable, something that you can keep growing. In the case of the Angry Birds franchise, there is Angry Birds Seasons, Angry Birds St. Patrick’s, Angry Birds Valentine’s Day… Again, using a movie metaphor, think of a movie sequel. Although not always as good as the original, you can still continue the franchise.

Lastly, the game must be elastic. You have to take the gameplay to the breaking point. For me, this is the one of the top elements here (the key ingredient!). One has to pick up a game and be able to grasp it in matter of seconds. You must “fool” the player into thinking that it is easy, and have them go to the next level, continuing as the game gets progressively harder. That’s the elasticity of a game: stretch it is as far as you can while letting the player think that it’s still as easy as the first level.

If the game is elastic, it is also entertaining, enjoyable, and/or engaging. At this point, the player will want to share the game with other game players — then, you have successfully created a endemic game and the goal is to make it an epidemic!

And how do you expose your game to the masses? Create a Facebook Fan Page and a Twitter account for your company or game, create a video demo of your game. If you can afford it, try to get someone to write a press release for you and get the word out. Partner with a company that can get you the exposure. 

And remember: all apps and games — no matter how successful — are ephemeral. Don’t fall into the mental trap that your game will be on top of the charts for months on end, or a year or two. Today, we live in an ADD world and today’s headline is tomorrow’s old news. Your job is to always keep your game fresh, introduce new levels, build trust with your players, award them with coupon codes, etc. Making a game is not just about making pretty pixels move around the screen, it is a business. And part of that business is also the ability to market (evangelicize!) your game.

A little disclaimer: the stock inclusion of all the elements I mention is no elixir. It doesn’t guarantee your game to become a 40 million download juggernaut. Nevertheless, having some of these key elements in your game will make your game that much more enjoyable, entertaining, and/or engaging to play — and if you get to that, you will automatically get more exposure.

After that, you could become endemic, and turn out to be the next big gaming “epidemic!”