With our great idea in mind, we figured Kackle Studios would hit the market with a bang. We would take the mobile world while fist pumping. We started documenting our idea to ensure the whole team was on the same page. This documentation essentially became our design doc so we could all start planning ahead. As silly as this may sound, our design doc became a backbone to our game development. It resolved common disputes, planned our research and most importantly, it helped us recognize our limitations.

We visualized our game to have all these cool animation, characters with nifty effects, fancy flashy levels all wrapped nicely in a awesome storyline. However, our resources were limited, our art team was already working to the bone, and dreaming this big would probably give us a release date like Duke Nukem Forever, a game that took 15+ years to develop. It became pretty frustrating, and even demotivating. We wanted our game to work!

After regrouping and looking at our timeline, we knew we had to change our game concept to something simpler but neat. Something we could handle given our resources. This is how Ultimate Big 2 was formed.

As you can probably tell from our game catalogue, we chose to give our mobile flower to the Android market. Yes, we still get criticized by some of our friends/fans, but hear us out… we have our reasons! We didn’t just flip a coin or pick straws, we actually took a deeper look to make a proper decision. Don’t get us wrong, we were not going to neglect the famous and forever popular Apple’s OS, but after analyzing the market, the Android market posed as a great starting platform for the team.

Our team roughly formed in mid-2010 and smartphones were and still are a growing craze. Everybody was ranting about the next new most awesome phone and when you finally looked at the numbers, the craze was nothing but true. According to Gartner (http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1466313), smartphone sales grew by 96% in 2009 and were still climbing. Looking deeper into the numbers, the Android market was huge. Actually, the Android market was enormous. Gigantic. Gigantic times infinity. In 2010, Android had over 20 million units sold where as Apple only had 13.5 million units sold. Android also owned 25% of the market share of operating system where as the iOS system only accounted for about 17%.

Now when you take a look at the total number of apps in both the Android market and the Apple market, our justification becomes even clearer. In mid-2010, the Android market was barely clearing over 100,000 apps (http://www.androidguys.com/2010/07/10/android-market-hit-100000-apps-month/). In addition, when we took a look at the market, there weren’t THAT many quality games, but you’re just going to have take our word with that since we coulndn’t find any factual data on that. The Apple’s market was (and still is!) overloaded with over 250 000 apps. We figure with the current market share and the insane sale growth of Android, this market was probably the best opportunity for us to make any sort of impact in the mobile app world. Our app would actually stand a chance and MAYBE, just maybe have a chance to be noticed. It wouldn’t be swallowed in the sea of apps iof the Apple’s App store.

Of course, the idea was once we made an impact on the Android platform, we would hopefully use our momentum and transfer our app over to the Apple. Only time can tell what will happen!

The Kackle team has one major characteristic in common: the passion for creation. Some of us custom built bicycles to take down Whistler Mountain, while others built software to calculate the odds in roulette (yeah, we know the secret into winning at roulette – don’t play). Either way, we all enjoy the aspect of taking a step back and saying, “We built this.”

Oh yeah, one more major thing we all have in common: We love video games.