What did you do when you were 14 years old? Well if you were like me, then you had a controller in your hand most of the time playing classic video games. Well one eighth-grader spent his childhood programming one. Robert Nay from Spanish Fork, Utah is the designer behind the physics based puzzle game “Bubble Ball”. Bubble Ball slid past Angry Birds in the Apple free app charts this week. It has been downloaded over 2 million times! The object of this game is to maneuver a simple ball past a flag by placing objects in its path. Also, you can mess with gravity to change the way the ball moves.
“I was pretty surprised by how well it was doing,” Nay told Mobilized. Kari Nay, Robert’s mom, helped draw some of the levels and submitted it to the App store. Robert said he has plenty of other game ideas in his head and he plans to act on them. Nay says he is going to add more levels to Bubble Ball and program some more games that would be paid. He tried many different programs but eventually ended up using Corona tools by Ansca Mobile. He said Corona was easy to use and let him write once and publish for both the Android and Apple market. See the trailer here Bubble Ball Trailer.
Angry Birds is still the top paid app in the Apple marketplace. But now Angry Birds actually has something to be angry about.
It is great to see that anyone can make it in this industry. It goes to show you that independent development is getting better than most games we pay for.