Jack promises to keep you engaged with his funny moves! He is a loveable character that keeps running endlessly as he has just been out from a mental hospital and crazily runs on the city streets! The story line is accepted very well by the audience’s .This game that was created within two months time and released as an app on the IOS and Android Devices in the last week of May has been able to gather decent reviews by getting a nod for its graphics, color blend and game play.
It is a highly addictive game and carries aesthetic sense, feels Raghib Khan, the co founder and director of Phonato Studios. The studio was founded last year by Raghib and Faisal Abidi, builds gaming applications for IOS and Android devices. Till date, the apps of this studio have received over 2 million downloads.
A division of RNF technologies, Phonato, till date, has created around 15 apps including games Tic Tac Toe, Black – Jack, Roulette, Casino, Poker.
Crack Jack – The street runner is a single player game, targeted at mass auds, preferably casual gamers, and is composed with two controls which are used to make the character jump and slide across the obstacles that make way in between his running . To inform about the gameplay tricks, the game also has an in built tutorial that helps the player to grasp the nuances of the game play.
Speaking to AnimationXpress.com’s Zeenia Boatwala about this game, Raghib Khan, Co- Founder and Director of Phonato Studios, shares,“We wanted the main character to look funny and cartoonist. As jack is running, jumping and sliding on the street without a reason, the title of ‘crazy’ suits him well. We feel the character fits in perfectly keeping in mind the game theme and the endless run.”
Adds more, “The key here is the addiction to break his own score and this aspect makes sure that the user plays this game time and again. If we have to pitch this game to someone, we would say “I bet, you cannot run more than me in Crazy jack. Can you?”
For bringing out animation for this game, Adobe Flash has been used by the team and for instilling programming into the game; Java and C++ has been used for the Android platform whereas C along with C++ has been brought in for creating the game for iOS devices.
Highlighting more on the game, Raghib informs, “We have a strong QA team, which does pre-production testing and they worked quite well on this game. Other than this, we had an internal survey and feedback session, which helped us fine tune the game. The planning since the start has been to make sure that the game is addictive and whenever the game gets over, the user should get a feeling that he could have scored a little more.”
The team at Phonato wanted the character to match the theme and hence had to change the character several times during the development of the game.
Adds further, “We had a tough time, when it came to deciding on the obstacles that we should involve in the game. For us, the frequency of the obstacles was a major concern and we spent immense time in fine-tuning this aspect of the game.”
With Crack Jack- The street runner, the vision of the team is to use the game as marketing cum cross promotion tool for their varied paid apps, which generates revenues for the company.
Raghib asserts more, “We have focused less on monetizing this game as compared to some of our other applications. This game is presently advertisement free as we didn’t want to disturb the game play experience.”
On the closing note, Raghib speaks on the current Indian gaming trend by saying, “There is a shift from the conventional games which were played on PCs to casual games on mobile devices. With the invention of smart phones, users are spending more and more time on their mobile devices and IPad as compared to the desktop. We strongly feel that very soon, the mobile gaming will upstage the PC gaming in a big way.”
You can play Crack Jack ‘The Street Runner’ by following the links below:
Android :https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.phonato.android.crazyjack
iOS : https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/crazy-jack-the-street-runner/id638121525?mt=8