The record-breaking card game, Exploding Kittens, has smashed the App Store just a day after it was officially launched.
The game, which is already number one in the Paid Apps classification, have collected almost $8.8 millions from Kickstarter contributors. The team of developers has explained that the game needs to be played with people who are close by, who can connect their phones through bluetooth or Wi-Fi in order to make the interaction more interesting.
Exploding Kittens card game was developed by Elan Lee, current former Chief Design Officer for Xbox Entertainment Studios, who says in his online profile he gets “paid not to grow up”. When the Kickstarter project that sought to collect money to develop the game ended, nearly 219,000 contributors had financed it with $8.8 millions. As a result, the project broke the record that was previously established by the Coolest Cover from Veronica Mars.
“Exploding Kittens is a highly strategic kitty-powered version of Russian Roulette. Players take turns drawing cards until someone draws an exploding kitten and loses the game. The deck is made up of cards that let you avoid exploding by peeking at cards before you draw, forcing your opponent to draw multiple cards, or shuffling the deck,” wrote the creators in the official webpage. “So if you’re into card games or laser beams or weaponized enchiladas, please help us make this game a reality. We think you’ll love it as much as we do,” they added.
The App of the card game was developed by Substantial studio, which works with companies such as Google, Amazon, Universal, Starbucks, The WSJ and ESPN. The development presented a challenge, since the creators wanted to maintain the original scent of the table game, but they wanted to add new features that would appeal to new users and fans of the table game.
As a result, Substantial created an App based on the original card game but added new cards and pulled others. A different art specially designed to work at phones was developed by The Oatmeal’s Inman, also sound and voices were added to the characters.
Exploding Kittens cannot be played online and it does not works with Game Center, since its creators wanted to enhance the experience of playing it, by aiming at close interaction between users. That being said, players need to install the App, and they would be allowed to connect their phones through WiFi or Bluetooth.
However, this gaming method can present some kinks or bugs, since its development has just recently started, said the creators, according to Techcrunch. Other apps such as FireChat, and Jott, a chatting app, use bluetooth instead of WiFi or a mobile network to function.
“We focused on doing the best possible job of adapting the physical card game to the mobile platform by sticking to a face-to-face, party game style of gameplay that still felt natural on a smartphone. Players can expect any future developments to open the game to a broader user-base,” said Adam Pearson, to Techcrunch.
The Exploding Kittens App can be acquired on the App Store by $1.99, it also offers in-app purchases for special Avatar Packs. The creators have not yet announced plans for the development of a Android app, however, the iOS version is still in its beta stage.
Source: TechCrunch
What the articles on the Exploding Kittens app fail to mention is the amount of frustration that they didn’t make it more clear that the app was “offline” only. There are a lot of people that seem wouldn’t have bothered getting the app if they had known.
It would have been really cool as a secondary feature, an optional way to play with friends, but not as the only way to play. People expect connectivity from these types of apps.
Heck that is a plus in my book. Always looking for those “travel friendly” apps for my plane rides. Hope there is no “phone home” hobbling