Watch out on the roads! If we weren’t driving we’d text you that our game is off to Apple

It’s an exciting day for all of us at Warning Label Games! Today we submitted our first game to the App Store for approval!!

While we wait with baited breath and fingers crossed, praying to the App Store Gods for a speedy, distraction-free approval of our game, we thought we’d share a few anecdotes from our experience in getting to this very important milestone!

1.    What’s in a name?

We had our concept down for many months – a game about distracted driving. We were about two thirds of the way though development when we realised that ‘Distracted Driving’ as a title did not really capture the humor, sarcasm, irony and action of the game we were in the midst of creating.   

Over the course of the next week or two, while development continued, we brainstormed like mad, debating the pros and cons of what felt like hundreds of possibilities.  With our marketing team on board we visualized and weighed the options – and then… out of nowhere it HIT us like, well… a distracted driver… the perfect title - Don’t Kill the Squirrel!

2.    Stop the Coders!

In a throwback to cheesy black and white movies, we actually yelled this out loud in unison! The coders, being in a different country at the time, obviously didn’t hear us and we sheepishly turned and picked up the phone.  Clearly with a name like Don’t Kill the Squirrel! we were going to need some… Squirrels!

3.    What the hell is a Squirrel?

This is not really a question we were expecting, but when you’re part of an, albeit small, multi-national team, you can’t always assume. Not familiar with seeing squirrels roaming the parks and climbing trees every day, the graphics developers for our game needed us to spend some extra attention explaining just what a cartoon squirrel actually should look like. Getting squirrels in our game that didn’t look like mutant kangaroos was actually more challenging than you might think – but we made it and we love them! Check out the graphic below to see the evolution of our Squirrels J.

4.   p.s. The squirrels have certainly helped us make a name for ourselves. At the recent Game Developers Conference, on meeting us for the first time, the folks from Games for Change remarked “Oh you’re those squirrel people who keep emailing us!”.

4. “Our NUTS have arrived”

Not something we necessarily thought we’d be saying when we first came up with the idea for a distracted driving game… But squirrels and nuts go together like… texting and crashing… And we couldn’t resist the campaign slogan Distracted Driving is NUTS! to help us raise awareness of the dangers of distracted driving.

Naturally we were going to need some merchandise to go along with the campaign and what better than some Nut-shaped stress balls (mind out of the gutter – they look like acorns) and yes, “our NUTS have arrived”. Join us on Facebook and we might even send you one.

5.    Splash Down!

In one of those “I can’t believe this is what’s stumping my start-up” moments we found out just days before submission that the development tool we had been using would charge us a very hefty fee if we wanted to have our own custom splash screen display while the game was loading. ARRRRGGGGHHH!!!! Did we resolve this one? You’ll have to wait to play the game and see. 

Speaking of which, if you want to be one of the first to know when the game is approved, head over to dontkillthesquirrel.com. Enter your email and help us spread the message ‘Distracted Driving is NUTS!’. You will also go into the draw to WIN an iPad 2.

Also don’t forget to check out the Don’t Kill the Squirrel trailer and follow us on Twitter and Facebook for all the latest news!