A couple of Wichita software engineers hope to quit their day jobs for games. Not to play games, but to create them.
Gregg Bolinger and Hycel Taylor recently had their first game approved as an iPhone application.
“It got approved in eight days,” Bolinger says. “It was really fast.”
He says anyone can pay $99 and submit an “app” to the iPhone App Store, and a team of people who work for Apple review whether to make the application available to iPhone users.
“It’s an interesting process because I’ve heard of apps sitting in the review process for months,” Bolinger says.
Bolinger and Taylor’s game is called TrainBeaser. It’s a game of opposites, or sort of a brain teaser to test how well you know your right from your left.
There are several tiers of pricing for the game internationally. Apple gets 30 percent of the profit and Bolinger and Taylor share the rest.
It’s not like the guys can quit their day jobs just yet, though.
In about two weeks, they’ve sold 40 apps.
“We don’t know (the) 40 people who bought them, so it’s not like just all our friends,” Bolinger says.
But Bolinger expects sales to take off much faster once a free version of the game is approved.
The free versions of various applications have limited playability, but they allow people the chance to decide whether they want to make the purchases.
There are some issues with the free version’s marketing text, which is holding up the process, Bolinger says.
He and Taylor remain confident, though. They’ve formed a company called Wild Bamboo Rocket to create more apps.
Bolinger likens their business to bamboo, which takes a long time to establish a root base but then takes off.
They’ve spent five years building a foundation for Wild Bamboo.
“Now that we have,” Bolinger says, “we hope it just takes off.”