Arts and Technology (ATEC) students who recently submitted an iPad application to Apple’s “app store” have learned that the app has gone live, making it available for purchase and download.
The application, Famished Farm Animal Frenzy (FFAF), is a game in which each player is an animal and must eat the most melons to win. Inspired by the classic board game Hungry Hungry Hippos, FFAF uses the multi-touch feature of the iPad and can be played by up to four players at once.
Famished Farm Animal Frenzy was created by ATEC graduate students Jainan Sankalia, Jacob Naasz, Phill Johnson, Michael Andreen, and Bobby Frye – plus Chris Evans, a UT Dallas alumni with a master’s degree in computer science. Naasz came up with the idea for the game, and says what started as a weekend project ended up taking two months to develop. “We knew we had a product that was the best thing out there, and we needed to get it to market as soon as possible,” he says.
Game designer Sankalia adds that after completing the complicated submission process, they were thrilled to learn that FFAF was approved within one week. “Once it goes into review, it joins hundreds – no, thousands – of other app hopefuls. We settled on an introductory price of $0.99, but it will probably go up.”
Naasz and Sankalia comprise 5 Minute Games, Inc., a mobile applications development company they formed after winning the 2009 Computer Gaming Entrepreneurship Competition (CGEC), which rewards students for original game concepts that are associated with a strong business plan. Their winning project, Balance of Power, is also available for purchase on iTunes.
5 Minute Games’ goal is to make an impact on the mobile community by releasing high-quality, innovative applications.
And they plan on continuing to do so in the future. Naasz says that in their free time (they are still grad students, after all), they hope to add updates to FFAF by the end of the month.