Tony Konstant has always had his hands in games. He played football and sprinted and jumped for the track team at New Trier High School. He was recruited as a walk-on quarterback at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Va., but ended up joining the track team and threw javelin.

During his junior year, Konstant rejoined the football team, played tight end and helped the team go to the Gator Bowl. Outside of athletics, Konstant remembers spending time as a child designing intricate board games that he’d get his dad to play with him. He also plays Halo and other video games to unwind.

Now, a year after earning a degree in economics and moving back to the North Shore, Konstant is involved in the world of gaming in a different way. He’s putting his creative and computer skills to work and using a new medium for “bus stop games,” as he calls them—he’s making downloadable games for Apple’s iPhone.

Konstant decided that the only way to get involved in the iPhone games was to start from scratch, which required learning the programming tools. He didn’t go straight to the popular touch screen, application-ready phone, though. Konstant started with an Internet game.

From four months to two weeks
Air Traffic Mania, a game that simulates a chaotic airport, is Konstant’s first game. It is available to play at an online game site called Kongregate.com and is the result of four months of hard work.

“It was a long process and frustrating at times,” he said. He had to teach himself the tools of the trade, which include the Internet scripting language ActionScript 3 and the programming platform Flash.

Upon completing the game, Konstant secured a sponsorship from Kongregate.com. He was paid upfront for Air Traffic Mania to be on the site and gets revenue when players click ads near the game. But that click-through rate, as it’s called, is generally low, Konstant said.

Konstant’s next venture didn’t take nearly as much time. He had definitely advanced his game creation knowledge, but a change in platform also helped.

The iPhone has a developer’s kit, which Konstant worked with. That kit, he said, is much easier than navigating Flash and uses the programming language Objective-C. It only took him about six weeks to finish the game Tomato Monster Attack!, which is available on the iTunes application store under the games category.

The third game in Konstant’s portfolio was approved in early March, and it took even less time to complete—just about two weeks. Run Red, Run! is a reactionary game loosely based on the Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale.

“There’s added incentive by making the main character someone everyone knows and doesn’t want to see eaten by a wolf,” Konstant said.

This game is available as a free download on the iTunes application store.

Technical difficulties
Getting his games out hasn’t been painless. Konstant admitted he made a mistake with Tomato Monster Attack!—one that’s impacted the game’s success.

When submitting a game for review to eventually be featured on the iTunes store, a creator must submit a release date. Konstant arbitrarily chose a date on the calendar.

When his game was eventually approved and released on the store, that date had come and gone, so it was never featured as a new game. Now his strategy is to pick a date much further in the future.

Konstant isn’t a conventionally trained video game creator, which also presents a challenge. He’s gone through some hard weeks where he couldn’t figure out what exactly wasn’t working. For help, he turns to online forums where others doing the same thing post strategies for solving problems.

A third challenge is the nature of the iPhone’s platform, which requires being a tidy programmer.

You can’t have mistakes in the coding that cause the game to draw too many resources from the phone, Konstant explained. Games played online, however, can rely on a computer that’s powerful enough to handle when they’re draining the system.

Konstant said his coding is typically “30 percent game and 70 percent cleaning up after the game—making sure that it’s efficient and not stressing a system out.”

Creating a company and ideas
Konstant credits his girlfriend for coming up with his company name—Mousehog.

“It’s eight letters, and it’s easy to remember,” he said. Konstant said the name doesn’t really have a meaning, though.

As for coming up with game ideas, Konstant has to take stock of what’s out there. “You have to be original with idea,” he said, “but stuff gets repeated. Certain things are always going to be fun, and that doesn’t really matter.”

He mainly works from a desktop computer in his parents’ Winnetka home. But work easily can be taken on the road.

To polish his games, Konstant works with an artist and someone who does the sound. Some days, Konstant will spend up to 12 hours working, but he admits that he can’t just sit in front of the computer non-stop. So, he works out to break up the process.

In a world where seemingly millions of Flash games exist and new applications are added to the iTunes store daily, getting a game to stand out from the crowd is not east.

Konstant lets people know when his newest creations become available through a blog he writes on his Web site, mousehog.com. He encourages those who play his games to leave comments or write reviews at the iTunes store.

Konstant also is working toward finishing a collection of games so he can have some available at a range of prices—from free games to $1.99 to download.

The key to the iPhone
Konstant gets that his games are non-committal; they have to be.

“You have to accept the fact that people aren’t going to make a big commitment to your game,” he said. “And working on the iPhone, your games don’t need to be intense or in-depth.”

He likens games that work best on the iPhone to the game BrickBreaker. They are games you use to pass the time when you’re doing nothing or when you have two minutes to kill. The rounds are quick, too. One round of Run Red, Run! lasts a minute. And there’s nothing to save except a high score.

He describes his games as “lightweight” and realizes that after someone downloads a game, they might actually never play it again.

Going even further
At the end of March, Konstant and his friend and artist who worked on Air Traffic Mania and Run Red, Run!, Phil Carnehl, found out about a game design contest sponsored by Warner Bros. The contest is for a flash game that will represent the new cartoon Batman: The Brave and the Bold.

“Phil is a big cartoon fan, so he really wanted to enter,” Konstant said. “Plus, the total winnings for first place is $24,000, so I decided it was worth a go.” Konstant and Carnehl have reached the finals of the contest, and the next phase includes building the game that they pitched. Thier final product is due June 26.

A creative outlet
Despite the tough job market, Konstant wanted to do something productive with his time. That’s why he began creating games. He hopes this will open doors for him into the gaming world but knows it’s a tough industry to break into.

In late March, Konstant attended a game developer conference in San Francisco. There, he met a lot of people from different companies and was able to network.

For now, Konstant is excited about the future games he has up his sleeves and is enjoying being creative every day and the getting chance to put his name on something a lot of people end up seeing. And the opportunity to constantly solve problems is also appealing.

“When I hit a problem in the code and sit down for four hours and finally it works, that’s really a thrill,” Konstant said.

Find Konstant’s games on the iTunes applications store:
Run Red, Run! (Free)
Released March 11, 2009

Tomato Monster Attack! ($0.99)
Released Feb. 21, 2009

And find Air Traffic Mania here.

—Kimberly Reishus, Triblocal.com staff reporter