Gamedoctors on what's next for #1 hit ZombieSmash!

Despite being one of dozens of zombie castle defence games, and the debut title from two inexperienced German brothers, ZombieSmash! has been a big success on the App Store.

It's been the #1 paid game in nine countries, including the US where it was also the top grossing game.

Perhaps more surprising is that Matthias and Thomas Höchsmann, are by training academics with Ph.Ds in genetics research; hence the reason they called their company Gamedoctors.

We caught up with Matthias to find about why he wanted to make games and what's happening next.

Matthias Höchsmann: Ha! Well, as any superhero would tell you, saving the world gets old fast.

But, my brother Thomas and I have wanted to make games for as long as we can remember, regardless of our academic and professional pursuits. Like many people of our generation, we grew up playing video games, and we never quite grew out of the dream of one day making games.

We settled on the basic elements of ZombieSmash! well before the zombie rush hit the App Store, including the undead theme and the castle defence gameplay.

We chose the zombie theme because zombies have near-universal appeal: they can be funny, they can be scary, and they're great fun to kill. I think that's why a lot of developers have gone the zombie route.

Truth be told it's pretty easy to make zombies look awesome.

The SplatterEngine is our proprietary gore-generation technology. We spent some time thinking about the best ways to make our zombie deaths as visually satisfying as possible, and realised that wonderful, sputter cartoon gore would be a pretty central component to our game.

So we built the SplatterEngine system from the ground up for the purpose of dynamically rendering zombie blood and guts.

We'll probably reuse the technology base in other games. We were pretty amused with the results.

We're planning to continue supporting the game with free updates, and we're also planning on adding in-app purchases in the near future - new campaigns in radically changed settings, new zombies, new weapons, and more. We'll be announcing those details pretty soon.

We're thinking about the best way to approach the iPad.

We'll almost definitely release a version of ZombieSmash!, but we want to make sure it's a great product that takes advantage of what the platform offers. Also, we want to make sure what the platform offers customers before we jump into the deep end.

Let's see, what do we have in the pipeline... DoodleSmash!, PlantSmash!, FruitSmash! Okay, just kidding. We're not quite ready to talk about new titles.