- Backstory -

Back in 2010, Phil Williams, a graphic flash/designer developer at Hitcents started on an idea he called “draw a stickman”. The idea was an interactive story, where you drew a stickman and he came to life. You would then have to draw other items to help your stickman through his adventures.

Phil worked on and off on his idea for about one day a week, and after a year of work drawastickman was born. Almost immediately the website went viral, and we had over a million page views in 24hrs. The site went on to win numerous awards including 3 Webby Awards.

With this success, we quickly made an HTML/JavaScript-based application for iOS to distribute our game to more users. A week or two after the initial release, our app peaked at #3 in the US ipad vpn store and reached over 4 million downloads. We continued on with the project, making a second episode for the website along with a second app using the same technologies. 

From all this success, we were ready to move on to a new game, but we weren’t thrilled with the performance we were getting on some devices. We also had the limitation of Android’s web browser not supporting some of the features used in Draw a Stickman. We already had some experience with MonoTouch and Mono for Android, so we quickly made the decision to write a native app and use C# to make that happen.

Moving to C#, we quickly chose XNA and MonoGame as our core frameworks for building the game. We enjoyed the XNA set of APIs, and realized that we could share a very large portion of code across platforms with MonoGame. We built the core of our own cross platform game engine in a month or so and added more and more features to our engine as the new game, Draw a Stickman: EPIC, became a reality.

- Our Success so Far - 

In under 60 days from its release Draw a Stickman: EPIC hit over a million downloads across all platforms. We topped the charts at #1 in UK, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand for iOS in the free iPad section. We were featured as one of the top 15 apps on Windows 8 by PC World. On Windows 8 we peaked at #1 in the paid Games section, beating out Angry Birds Star Wars at #2. We hit the top 10 new paid on Google Play, and reached the #1 spot in the Amazon marketplace as well. We have also had numerous contacts from device manufacturers for both Android and Windows that will provide new business for our app.

Using MonoGame, we have 95% of our code shared between all platforms. Currently our game is available for iOS, Android, Windows 8, and Amazon Kindle. Right now we are working on ports to Windows Phone and Mac, localizing our game for 12 languages, and adding more content as in-app purchases. We are hoping this will bring our game to more users and increase its longevity.