Alumni brothers create apps, games

Home News Alumni brothers create apps, games
Cory Flint '14 and Toby Flint '13 pose with their Up & Away game.
Cory Flint '14 and Toby Flint '13 pose with their Up & Away game.
Cory Flint ’14 and Toby Flint ’13 pose with their Up & Away game. (Photo Courtesy of Brothers Flint)

When most Hillsdale students were playing mobile games created by other people, brothers Toby `13 and Cory Flint `14 were creating their first iPhone game.

Now the duo of Hillsdale alumni, known professionally as the Brothers Flint, design and develop mobile apps full time. In their brief time in the industry they released a second mobile game, and more recently, Google used an app they developed during one of its conferences.

On Oct. 24 the brothers released Up & Away on iOS (view in App Store) and Android (view in Play Store). Up & Away is a physics-based game in which a player guides a character floating upward with balloons through a sky filled with dangerous swinging obstacles.

“We got to 1,000 downloads in the first week,” Cory Flint said. “We’re approaching 2,000, so we’re on track for that, and we’re hoping to hit that this upcoming week.”

Although the brothers haven’t spent any money marketing the game, it has received notice from a number of gaming websites, including the prominent iOS gaming website TouchArcade.com.

“Up & Away is a really addicting app­­ — I play it whenever I get the chance,” sophomore Philip DeVoe said.

Up & Away was developed during a five-month period, beginning at the end of summer 2013. Like their first mobile game, Satellite Defense (view in App Store), the brothers developed the game on the side, while maintaining jobs as full-time mobile app developers.

The brothers developed the game from the ground up, creating all their own game elements or using resources they found online. Cory Flint created all the visual elements in the game, as well as some of the sound effects and the game’s musical score. Toby Flint did all the coding, working through the complexities of the game’s physics engine to make sure players would be challenged, but never want to “throw down [their] phone” in frustration.

“We hadn’t done a game in so long and the goal was to see how far have we come,” Toby Flint said.

Up & Away app.  (Evan Carter/Collegian)
Up & Away app. (Screenshot Courtesy of Brothers Flint)

It is still only a part-time venture for the Flint brothers.
“Right now we’re mobile app development, and gaming on the side,” Toby Flint said.

In the past they have designed mobile apps for Information Analytics in Lincoln, Nebraska, the Aliaga Foundation, and most notably TINT.

The Flint Brothers have worked with TINT since it was a startup company. During their time working together, TINT has grown and evolved into a brand trusted by over 45,000 companies worldwide.

“Working with the Flint brothers has been such a great experience as they are communicative, timely, and professional,” said Tim Sae Koo, CEO of TINT. “We are a growing startup, and sometimes do not have enough resources to build out mobile app solutions our customers like Google, NASDAQ, and Krispy Kreme.”

TINT provides services that allow companies to collect all of their social media feeds in one place and moderate what content gets shown to the public. Last week at their latest cloud platform presentation, Google used the app developed by the Flint brothers for TINT.

The Flint Brothers not only maintain and update the current iOS app, but TINT has now asked them to recreate the app on Android.

The brothers are currently working on another mobile game, and while they were reluctant to give many details, they did let on that the game is heavily influenced by the adventures of Don Quixote. The game the Flint brothers are currently developing is one of five ideas they have for future games.

“That project that took us five months (Up & Away), which now if we were to do a similar scope project, we could easily cut that down to 2 ½ months,” Toby Flint said. “The idea is that we can make the same scale games in much less amount of time, and then that makes larger games, more complex games, possible.”

In the future, the brothers hope to make enough money from mobile game development to pursue it full time. Though they are content to develop games with just the two of them, Cory mentioned that they had discussed hiring more developers if they grew successful enough.

“In the near term we’ve definitely talked about keeping it just a two-man operation because it’s a lot of fun for us to use our skills as opposed to managing,” Cory Flint said. “After we do our two-man duo thing, we actually have talked about developing a brick and mortar studio and hiring on a couple guys to help us in both the art and code.”