"Prune" is the hottest game in Apple's App Store right now. And it's unlike any game you've ever played.
Your objective is to help shape your tree as it grows closer to the sun, pruning away branches with simple swipes to avoid obstacles. It's a simple premise, but with gorgeous visuals and a zen soundtrack, it's an extremely addictive experience.
Right now, "Prune" is being featured as one of the "Best New Games" in the iOS App Store, and the $3.99 game has been in the Top 10 paid apps on the store since it launched last week.
Prune was created by Joel McDonald, a 31-year-old developer based in Madison, Wisconsin. In an interview with Tech Insider, McDonald said he was inspired by a tweet (embedded below), which described how people could generate realistic-looking trees in the multiplatform game engine called Unity. But he said it "clicked when I saw a half-fallen tree in a field, its branches splayed out in all directions."
"At the time, I had been an indie game developer for about six months and had been prototyping a bunch of ideas," McDonald said. "I had a few promising leads but I was looking for a nice, short project that could help me get my feet wet. I thought 'Prune' was the perfect project for me to complete in a month or two and release on the App Store to test out the waters."
—Aaron San Filippo (@AeornFlippout) April 1, 2014
"Prune" took longer than a couple of months. In total, McDonald spent 15 months to finish the project. He said he actually "rebooted the game" roughly six months into development — it had more levels in it than the current version — but he said he just wasn't happy with it.
"'Prune' was still missing its soul at that point," he said.
About 10 months into development, McDonald tapped Kyle Preston, a composer and sound designer, to do the music and sounds for "Prune." And he personally refocused his efforts to create a game that was simple and more minimalist.
"One of my main goals when designing 'Prune' was to respect the player's intelligence and to respect their time, whether that player is 4 or 74," McDonald said. "So much of the mobile game market just does not do this incredibly simple thing of respecting their players as actual human beings whose time is precious."
People seem to be responding positively to McDonald's efforts. In just five days on the App Store, "Prune" is an Editor's Choice on the App Store with a majority of user ratings being five stars.
Before "Prune" came along, McDonald used to build shooter games like "Call of Duty" and "Wolfenstein" — he worked at Raven Software, the developer of those popular games, for seven years — but "Prune" has taken him in a much different direction, which he certainly seems to enjoy.
"I realized games can be for anybody and that they can convey a much larger palette of emotions and experiences that I wanted to explore," McDonald said. "'Prune' was me heading out in this new direction and seeing where it would take me."
