Yobonja was founded in 2009 by two friends, myself (Tobiah) and Angelo. We met in college, and both of us were heavily involved in our school’s Game Development Club.

During a “Game in a Month” challenge, Angelo and I made an MMO in Facebook. We both liked the game, and decided to continue developing it and after I graduated make our own independent game company together. We both liked the idea of wearing multiple hats, using all our skills to create projects we like, we want to play, and with nobody else telling us what to do.

Shortly after founding the company, we started making games for mobile, where we have been focused ever since. More recently, we’ve added a third person, Yekta, to the company.

As a company, we don’t just focus on one type of game, and have experimented with many different types. In the beginning of 2011, our physics-based puzzle game, Blast Monkeys, came out to great success, and we’ve been focusing on improving and expanding it since then. We like to make games that everybody can enjoy, no matter what “gamer” experience. We’ve gotten messages from a wide variety of people young and old about how much they (or their children) love the game.

We had been looking at a lot of different game platforms and API’s and experimenting with them. One of those experiments was a “game jam” where we created games with Corona. We liked it a lot and, soon after, one of those game jam games (Blast Monkeys) was finished and we released it to iOS and Android.

We’ve released a couple games with Corona now, and many more experiments and side-projects sitting on our hard drives.

Corona has sped up our workflow tremendously. Things that might have taken days or weeks now take only a few hours to iterate. Lua is a great language, fast and easy to use. The fact we can change one line of code and imminently see the change in the simulator enabled us to iterate on our games much faster than any other platform we’ve used.

We also had not had the time to create both an iOS and Android versions of our games until Corona, which let us develop for both at once, increasing our potential player base.

Definitely! In fact, we already have. We recommend to every developer we meet to at least play around with it.