The simple art style worked better, since they didn’t want to sink a lot of time into development. Because they were doing something quickly, Dye made the characters really simple and cute so they would be easy to animate. You could interact with them, like running your hands through the water of a koi pond.ĭye immediately started sketching the characters.

They thought they could use that same kind of action in the iPhone game.Ĭastelnuovo then threw out the idea of an island with little guys the size of your fingers that you could do different things with.

It was a training game - you could drag characters that looked like zeroes and ones around a screen and drop them onto platforms to make numbers. The pair had worked on a small game for Cisco about three years ago. But he stayed freelance and did not become an employee of Bolt Creative. Dye signed on as co-creator, to share equally in the game proceeds. They thought they could do an iPhone game quickly, and they didn’t want it to interfere with their other consulting work. How much could he program for the iPhone in 10 hours? Soon enough, he tried to see how much he could do in a weekend.Ĭastelnuovo had lunch with his friend Dye, who is also 38 years old and an experienced artist. He was still working 60 to 80 hours a week for World Golf Tour. In September 2008, Castelnuovo started toying with developing an app. But slowly, the siren song of the iPhone drew his attention. More recently, he helped World Golf Tour develop a novel golf game that let you swing a club and watch the results on a virtual golf course that was based on videos of real courses. In the dotcom era, he branched out as an Adobe Flash programming consultant. The 38-year-old Castelnuovo is a longtime veteran of the video game industry who built a lot of games for the Sega Genesis. And the two have figured out how to keep it generating revenue on a weekly basis, via updates to the game. They’ve made as much as $18,000 a day from it. In an interview, the company revealed secrets to its success than any app developer would want to know.Īt 99 cents a piece, the game has generated a steady income for Bolt Creative’s Dave Castelnuevo and freelance artist Allan Dye. It may not sound like much, but its cuteness and addictive game play have led to more than 1.2 million downloads.

Pocket god iphone