NonStop Games: Social HTML5 Games with a Twist

Guest writer Vlad Micu has been a freelance game industry journalist for over five years while running his company VGVisionary. He is also the managing director of WindowsPhoneFans.com. Currently residing in Bangkok, Thailand, he is pursuing his dream of making video games as the game producer of arkavis, an up and coming casual game studio.

In an old Singaporean office crammed with start-ups lies the humble shared space of the up-and-coming HTML5 social games start-up NonStop Games (nonstop-games.com), formerly known as Dollar Isle creator GamesMadeMe. Founded on the friendship and shared ambitions of the former Wooga head Henric Suuronen and ex-Nokia business development manager Juha Paananen, the studio is redefining how HTML5 is used to develop cross-platform, fun, and community-based social gaming experiences.

They’re currently working on their newest title Paint Stars (see screenshots below), whose community recently marked the production of over 500.000 drawings. I sat down with the duo to talk about creating the Instagram for painting, avoiding app store dependence, and using games as a web-link to make sharing your creations the easiest thing ever.

Friendship, CTO power, and start-up foundations

Friends since high school and gamers for life with a similar educational background, Suuronen and Paananen couldn’t wait to start a company together. The spark that initiated their first ideas for founding NonStop Games came with the rising popularity of browser-based games back in 2010. Paananen explains:

There came a time when browser-based games were slowly taking over client-based ones. We felt the same thing was soon going to happen in mobile phones and tablets.

NonStop Games’s main goal is to make its HTML5 software so fast that it almost feels like a native app. Suuronen notes:

That is the main sore spot in HTML5. You pushed the button, but it takes time to load and you don’t know what is happening at that time. That’s not very app-like. This is where we put a lot of effort, so you push a button and a color change tells you it was pressed. If it’s loading, there is always a load-bar. All these small things that make it feel responsive.

Instagram for painting