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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Local developers launch trivia app

Game has been years in the making for Spokane Valley pair

Making video games is the realization of a longtime dream for Spokane Valley resident Jason Stock.

“There was this new mobile thing, that you could do it yourself,” Stock, 36, said last week from the offices of Firecracker Software, which he founded with friend Ben Ritter and others in 2011. “I’m like, maybe I could do this again. You know? Live that old college dream, now that I’m a little bit older.”

Firecracker has made its name in the mobile market selling applications that assist players with word and puzzle games. Their so-called “cheat app” for the wildly popular “Words with Friends” game has been rated more than 30,000 times on the Google Play store. Next week, Stock and Ritter will unleash the full version of “Blast Trivia,” a completely original work that seeks to blend the best of the popular quiz game show “Jeopardy!” with the trivia app du jour, “Trivia Crack.” A bare-bones version was released in the early days of the company in summer 2011.

“The cheap apps, they’re fun computer-science-type projects,” said Ritter, who designed the game’s retro space-age look and sound. He said the experience of creating a whole new game is different, but not necessarily more rewarding than the praise they’ve received for their other apps.

A full version of “Blast Trivia,” with more than 1,500 new questions, will be released in the Google store on Wednesday. In the game’s original mode, the player is given a choice of categories similar to “Jeopardy!” with increasing levels of difficulty and point rewards. A question appears, with four possible choices available. The player has a limited amount of time, which can be increased with power-ups that match the game’s interstellar feel, to answer that question before “taking damage” to their spacecraft – which means losing points.

Unlike “Trivia Crack,” “Blast Trivia” has a single player mode with leaderboards to add to the multiplayer experience. After playing long enough, a user can also unlock “marathon mode” in which they must answer questions of increasing difficulty with a decreasing timer. Three wrong answers and it’s game over.

Ritter and Stock said that during in-house beta tests at their offices near the Mirabeau Park Hotel and Convention Center, the marathon mode, new to the re-release of the game, had the best reception.

“One lady loved the marathon mode. She would not leave,” Stock said, laughing. “She was here for 2  1/2 hours. It was awesome.”

Rigorous testing has led to constant changes in the game, including switching its soundtrack, improving the display and offering more ways to play. The game was running smoothly last week on a Google-connected high-definition television, played with a remote. It will also be available on smartphones and tablets.

Most of the changes were made during back-and-forth among Ritter, Stock and other members of Firecracker’s small crew. Ritter said one of the major draws of developing for mobile platforms, as opposed to the blockbuster consoles put out by Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony, is that small, independent teams can strike gold with an innovative idea.

“The best thing phones have done is they’ve made garage projects a thing again,” said Ritter.

But Stock worries that small-market vibe may not be sticking around long, with mobile developers like Machine Zone paying $40 million for a Super Bowl ad pitching its free-to-play title “Game of War” starring supermodel Kate Upton.

“Now we’ve got to compete with those guys,” Stock said. “I hope the app dream isn’t going to slip away from small companies.”

Stock, who left a job at a software company to start his own gaming outfit on the second floor of a business park, said he enjoys the creative process of the small team – and hearing his 6-year-old daughter boast about what her daddy does for a living. The namesake of Firecracker Software (“She’s my little firecracker,” Stock said, laughing) recently rode past her dad’s office on her way home from a birthday party.

“The parents were like, ‘What’s your daddy do?’ ” Stock said. “She said, ‘Oh, he plays games all day.’ ”

Ritter and Stock, gamers from the days of modems and DOS commands, wouldn’t have it any other way. Ritter said the plans for the company are modest, but that’s how to be successful in the cutthroat mobile game market with ties way beyond the small outfit in Spokane Valley.

“Do something within your scope, make sure that it’s good, and hopefully people like it,” he said.