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West Virginia game developers enjoying success with new app

CHARLESTON, W.Va. — A pair of Charleston entrepreneurs has created a Christmas game app which is starting to gain some attention. Adam Nelson and Kay Kinsey are the designers of “Whack- a -Claus.”

“‘Whack- a -Claus’ is a Christmas based take on ‘Whack a mole.'” Nelson said Tuesday on MetroNews Talkline. “The main goal is to whack Santa.”

Nelson said they have no problem with Santa, but it’s a Christmas theme and there are various other holiday themed figures in the game and Santa is the most recognizable one. However, if you think you’re going to speed through it, you’ll soon find out you’re wrong.

“It turned out to be quite a difficult game,” said Kinsey. “When we first released it, we got feedback saying it was ridiculously too hard, but since we’re the game creators we’ve played it so much we got the high score. We were pleased to learn somebody beat our high score.”

Nelson and Kinsey are IT technicians by trade. They designed and developed the app in their spare time. Partly to see if they could do it, but also to prove it can be done.

“A lot of people probably under estimate the difficulty, but our goal it to show it is possible,” Nelson said. “We wanted to show we’re two people living in this community and if someone wanted to put their mind to it, they could do the same thing.”

Kinsey said there were several all-nighters involved in the creation because of the trials Apple puts the app through before making it available to consumers.

“It takes about seven days to approve an app,” she said. “The go in and try to break your app, checking for bugs and glitches. A lot of apps don’t even get accepted.”

However, Whack- a -Claus is accepted and is available for download at the App Store. Kinsey and Nelson are donating half of their earnings from the sale of the app to charity. They also plan to create more games and may use the Whack- a -Claus platform to create other holiday-themed games.





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