Posted on by Cody

Casual games for Nom.com (now Mekalabo)

In 2012 I spent a year leading a team of developers building casual games for mobile. I contributed at all levels of this effort, building games, offering technical support, working with the developers to optimize gameplay, managing timelines, and ensuring all the platform integrations worked seamlessly.

When I started with Nom, it was primarily focused on Android, but once Flash was able to be ported to iOS, I spearheaded porting existing titles to the Apple Store. It was a little tricky, and very new at the time (These games were targeted to iPhone 3, 4, 4s, and 5 along with the iPad 2).

When I started at Nom, the companies focus was on developing a large user base. Having a large user base was at the time the key to getting a future round of funding. Unfortunately, that year was not great for game companies, and many didn’t survive. Nom ran amazingly lean, it had a decently long runway and had a very small burn rate. Once it became apparent that any future funding might not happen, we turned our efforts to making revenue through advertising. This meant going back through our entire catalog of  50+ games and adding in the advertising calls to appropriate places in the game-flow.

The advertising revenue worked out really well, but we implemented it just a little too late. I was told as we were winding down the company that if we had started 6 weeks earlier that we would have hit a cash-flow positive state by the time the existing funding ran out. By that time the founders had settled on a new idea and were already starting a kickstarter for it.

Nom sold their Nom.com domain name and all the games were moved over to mekalabo.com. There are a number of games that aren’t available any longer simply because apps need updating because of Operating System changes.

Have a look at the games I worked on from the links below.