His name is Wawa. He's a cute little creature who must save the king by getting back the Royal Jelly recently kidnapped by critters. Of course to do that involves a lot of jumping, spinning and pounding. Wawa has been living for the last couple of years inside Yann Fripp's head and he just escaped from there to the App Store in April. The hero of Wawa Land (www.wawaland.fr), Wawa stars in this 2D platform game which controls movement through a console-style touch interface. Fans of Super Mario will feel instantly at home as they bounce and flip through the beautifully rendered worlds. “A lot of research and planning came before the creation of Wawa Land,” Fripp said in an interview from his home in Lyon, France. “I've been making games for myself since I was 11 years old and I worked in the video game industry for three years. I was frustrated just making a little piece of something so I got up my courage to go it alone. For the last two years I've been working on Wawa Land by myself. Everything that's in the game came from my imagination.” Fripp didn't dive into game creation willy-nilly. He'd already done 12 apps, mostly utilities that sell well through the App Store. He combined the earnings from those, with teaching about app development at a local university and occasional stints as a DJ. That was enough to enable him to set up Play Fripp, a one man independent development company, and to set off on the adventure of creating Wawa Land. “Doing the utilities gave me practice in developing a concept from start to finish, but on a much smaller scale than Wawa Land,” explained Fripp. “Research and planning is required to create a utility app different than what's already available in the market. The actual coding needs just a few days at most. Then you get it into the App Store and wait and see what people think of it. If it doesn't do well, you haven't lost a lot.” Fripp's research into the games available for the iPhone led him to believe that his first plan of creating a puzzle game wasn't the best idea. Puzzle games seemed to either be hits or flops and that would be very risky for a lone developer. The platformer genre was a better option. “I found that there were super stylish 3D games that had no game in them. Then there were the old platformers from the 1980s that were big hits back then. Independent developers were making platformers that were challenging but ugly and nobody bought them. So I became inspired to make a beautiful platformer which relied on the traditional consol controls updated to the touch screen,” said Fripp. It was a huge gamble. In big studios, the planning and design concepts for a game are done in just a few weeks. The first prototypes are available in months. Fripp worked for months just to plan every detail of the game's design, to be sure it was very clear in his mind before he began production. Because he was working alone, Fripp struggled for four months to get a square representing Wawa to move properly in the game. Protoyping was out of the question. From start to finish, Fripp invested two years of his life in Wawa Land before the initial release. “Independent developers need to be very confident in the eventual success of their project,” remarked Fripp. “Technology is moving ahead the entire time and people's tastes are evolving too. It's impossible to know what other developers are working on since game development is happening all over the world now. If you're afraid, you'll never set out to create a game.” A short video at www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbqmJMZTXWY explains the game and its features. Last week the free Wawa Land Lite was released. Fripp described it as a “prequel” to Wawa Land that has exclusive content and a reward at the end of the game.
