Rikkir Inc. Breaks into the Addictive Mobile Game Genre
DIEPPE–Richard Wilson is tapping into how we learn with his set of addictive mobile brain games.
Feeling that the mobile games already in the app store were not effective enough when it came to gathering information about how the games were being played for learning research, Wilson co-founded Rikkir Inc. and set out to develop something better.
Before going public with his ideas, Wilson wanted to make sure that he was on the right track and had developed games that both looked good and achieved what he wanted them to.
After working for other people for nearly 15 years as a self-taught programmer, Wilson caught the entrepreneurial bug and along with developing new games for Rikkir is now studying software engineering and architecture.
“For the last few years I’ve been working for other people, building software and developing software for them and I just wasn’t feeling that reward,” Wilson says. “Most entrepreneurs feel like there’s a gap, there’s something missing there.”
Wilson chose to get into the game making world because of his love for addictive videogames. He says he felt he could build something that would bring more meaning to the game genre.
“I want to be more creative,” Wilson says. “I want to take what’s out there and put a unique spin on it to develop something that people are going to enjoy and respect and evolve the community of the game genre.”
The first win for Rikkir was a result of what Wilson calls their worst idea: a fast paced word search game called Alpha Quest. In 2015, Alpha Quest was a finalist at the Canadian Videogame Awards in the Best Indie Game category and has since been picked up by a publisher and featured in the Apple App Store.
Wilson says Rikkir is working towards developing games that will allow them to gather data about how people are actually learning by playing them, but right now they’re focused on getting addictive games out to the public.
“I want to build something people are going to have fun with. I look at the competition and all of their games right now really feel like work. You can tell that you’re doing something. It’s not extremely fun,” Wilson says.
The newest work by Rikkir is an endless runner style game called Tappy Toes. Wilson says they’re trying to get polished material out to the public so that investors are able to see what they can do.
After starting out small, Wilson is ready to take Rikkir to a larger market.
“We’re just trying to build addictive brain games to take it to a whole new evolution of a gaming genre,” Wilson says. “Our goal for the company is we want to get acquired by or at least our technology acquired by the big boys … They’re going to need it to take it to the next step because we’re definitely on their coattails. We want to show them what it is to produce a true brain game and be able to show that data in the proper way.”
Wilson is now looking for private investors and applying for government funding programs. He says he caught a lot of attention after doing his first pitch for NBIF in January. Since then he says he’s received overwhelming support and encouragement from the entrepreneurial community and hopes to pass support of his own to a younger generation of entrepreneurs.
“We’re well on our way. We know what we can build. It’s just two guys working on it and I contract out for three other positions just to the locals that I can within my budget. We’re doing pretty good for it because we have the big guys knocking on our door asking where the heck we came from.”