To anyone who has ever wanted to see a penguin get pelted in the face, Jenny Xu has the game for you.
The 17-year-old Monta Vista High senior has recently released Penguin Dodge, a mobile app game that challenges users to propel a little penguin past danger.
“Ever since I was small I loved playing video games, and I always wanted to be an artist,” Jenny says.
The game was released Aug. 19 and is available both on the Apple iTunes Store and on Google Play for Android device users. It is free to download.
“I’m more concerned with people actually wanting to play my game, rather than me getting a couple cents a day from maybe one or two people who decide to pay for my game,” Jenny says.
Penguin Dodge will remind older video game players of Frogger and just about everyone of a common gym class game.
“I took the idea of dodgeball and tried to make a game out of that,” Jenny says.
The game sees penguins with rocket-propelled jet packs strapped to their backs navigate up an endless screen and past snowballs fired out of igloo-inspired cannons. The further up the screen you send the penguin, the more velocity players can expect from snowballs. Successful play can earn players new penguins to unlock but it comes with more difficult challenges, including different colored snowballs.
New players will find themselves pelted relentlessly by snowballs until they get the hang of controlling their penguin.
“It’s easy to die, but you want to keep playing,” she says.
To play, mobile game players tap the screen to move their penguin forward and then tilt their device to shift their penguins left or right. The Internet flash version uses the left, right, and upward diagonal keys to replicate a similar gaming experience.
Jenny, also a track and accomplished cross-country runner, has seen some of her teammates and school friends playing the game and sharing high scores.
“That made me feel really happy because I accomplished what I wanted to do,” she says.
Jenny spent the second half of this past summer vacation developing the game and working out the kinks, even using her family as play testers when glitches made unwelcome appearances.
“In the beginning I thought it was pretty simple to make it because it’s just a bunch of cannons going up and penguins going down, but it took a couple hundred hours to work on it,” she says. “If you start off really small…and as you learn more, you can make more complicated games. A lot of people see these big complicated games and think they have to make one just like it the first time, but it really takes time to work on it and get better.”
Jenny has released other games, including a Pokemon-inspired test for Android and Zippy Catch for Apple. She plans to keep working on her craft and possibly study computer science next year in college.
“I hope I can make successful enough games to do this in the future, but even if it is not enough to support me, I will always do this as a hobby because it’s what I like to do.”
For more information about Jenny Xu’s games and to download Penguin Dodge, visit jcsoft.com and jcsoft.com/penguindodge.
