ABOUT SNODS

SNODS? Where did that name come from?

Why "SNODS"? When I got the domain a couple of years ago I had a vague idea floating around my head of a bunch of cute, but at the same time ferocious, little alien-esque critters that would be marketed to kids and then they would come online to grow and battle them. Sort of a webkinz meets bionicles.

But, when this game started taking shape and the 140 character limit was staring us in the face ... I decided the evil furry creatures would have to get a new name :p

So, when did the game start taking shape?

The question's inevitable, and so that's the main reason I thought I should just post it up so anyone curious would have their answer...

March, 2009: A Really Bad Idea

In March 2009 during lunch, Joe (my business partner and co-owner of itch) said, "We've gotta make a twitter game." I don't like to toot my own horn too much but I what I do have is a knack for recognizing good ideas even when they're not my own... so I quickly replied, "Nah. That'll never work."

Nevertheless, by that afternoon we mapped out the basic mechanics of the game. It started as a command line game using twitter as the command prompt. All commands for the game would be issued via twitter and the web would be used only for reporting and stats.

April, 2009: A Working Protoype

Coding for the command syntax only game was actually pretty easy and Joe knocked it out and had it working by April. Problem was, it just didn't feel that "fun" to us.

Early May, 2009: Take Two

In early May we began work on a more full-featured game that incorporates the typical browser-based features of many of our games on itch but keeping what we felt was the "hook" ... the twitter integration and the ability to issue your game commands as tweets.

Mid-May, 2009: Hold Everything

We have a lot of games for just the 2 of us to manage and sometime around the middle of May we decided we really needed to shelf our twitter game until we finished a couple of overdue improvements to some of our other games. The only thing left were graphics and UI but we weren't feeling pressure to get it released and thought we should tie up some other loose ends before releasing a new game.

May 29th, 2009: Son of a Bitch!

When we saw this post on techcrunch, "son of a bitch!" is the G-Rated version of what came spewing forth from Joe's mouth. Normally a vey subdued guy, Joe definitely sorta lost it for a good hour or so!

That weekend was a mixture of "now what?" and "#$@!"

May 31st, 2009: Sleep Can Wait

Sunday night at around 8PM we decided that we had to go for it. No, we weren't going to be first. Yes, there's quite a bit of overlap with Spymaster. But, we decided nothing but minimal sleep and coding until we launch.

9 days later and we're doing some final testing and here I am writing the "about us" page. I guess we'll know if it was worth it soon enough.

Depending on your perspective, these game overlaps might seem funny ... to us they were oh, so very painful:

1. In our game we used to have "spies" ... they are now "guards".
2. The homepage of spymaster has the tagline For your eyes only. Care to guess what the tagline of our missions screen used to be?

But it wasn't all bad. Seeing spymaster out there helped us in a few ways:

1. Motivation: No doubt about it, they lit a fire under our asses!
2. Upping the Ante: Our UI and graphics were pretty bad. Actually they were horrible. Most of the effort this week was improving our UI to try to keep pace with them.
3. Better Controls: We didn't have most of the detailed tweet options and throttling in place until we saw what they had done. Nice job.
4. And, oh yea. "Dashboard" is cooler than "Home". We stole that little nugget. :p

So, a message to the spymaster team, if you're ever in the DC area, let's grab some drinks - the first round's on us!