classnotes
Word Envy
Shaun Randall ’08 Shaun Randall ’08 is the envy of other Apple app creators with the success of his latest game— Word Envy. Randall, who graduated with a bachelor of business administration degree in accounting and information systems, earned his master’s in securities analysis and portfolio management from Creighton University. Randall—husband of Caroline Randall, SU director of admission—works for C&W Manhattan Associates doing primarily IT and accounting work, but his true passion is mobile app development. “I have recently been able to work from home several days a week and focus on mobile app development,” he said. “After much trial and error, I launched two initial games: ‘20,000 Word Hangman’ and ‘Word Envy.’” Before Randall began writing his first app, he wrote out a list of basic game concepts that he thought would be fairly easy to
develop. The first is a hangmanstyled word game and the second —Word Envy—is a falling block puzzle game. “I decided to combine the aspects of the two basic concepts into something I hoped would be new and original,” he said. “The result is Word Envy, a game where the player tries to form words by strategically placing groups of falling blocks.” Randall said the game required hundreds of hours of work, including teaching himself coding concepts and learning to use various graphical tools. The game went through two complete rewrites and various designs to get what he envisioned.
“The game has only been out a short time and it has seen almost a thousand downloads between the two versions,” Randall said. “A well-developed game can have much more success just based on word-of-mouth. The more people rate a game favorably, and the more people download it, the higher it moves up in the charts and the easier it is for someone to find and download. Now that I’ve seen the process and the success rates of my first two games, it allows me to set better goals for future games. My next concepts will be more interactive, with more advanced graphics, as I continue to learn new techniques.”
www.schreiner.edu Summer 2014 31