Podcast Interview: The Development of Smiles for the IPhone

Mike talks about developing the Smiles game for the IPhone

You can download the podcast here…
http://www.indiegamepod.com/podcasts/smiles-iphone-podcast.mp3

Or listen to it here…

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Show Notes:
Interviewer: I’m here at the indie Independent Games Festival in GDC and with me today is a special guest. How about you introduce yourself?

Mike: Hi there, I’m Mike Kasprzak of Sykhronics Entertainment, and I made a game for iPhone called Smiles.

Interviewer: What’s the game about?

Mike: It’s a collection of matching games which I know is usually quite taboo with some developers, but a bunch of matching games for iPhone that have a couple unique things in them.

Interviewer: Sure. What are those unique things?

Mike: Well, at the very base, the very core of the game I have a totally different swap mechanic which I know sounds kind of silly, but it’s actually a swap mechanic that kind of led to a number of interesting new variations of the whole matching game. How it works is we have a little side area, I like to call it a pocket, where you take your piece, you take it out of the pocket and place it on the board. Then, you take that one that was on the board and stick it in the pocket.

It sounds kind of simple, but, as I said, it opened up a number of interesting design possibilities. With this game I pretty much explored two of the biggest ones that I found that were interesting.

Interviewer: How did you decide to experiment in that way? I mean, what was the process of actually experimenting with the new design mechanic?

Mike: A lot of what I do is I do a lot of game prototyping. Like prior to this, I had done two other projects trying to find just the right game to start my iPhone endeavors with. I made one; it was just offhand. It was like, hey let’s try a matching game even though I’m not too big of a fan of them, just to see if I come up with something interesting.

When I started with this mechanic, I was – whoa, hold on a second. I discovered what this game mode I eventually ended up calling Zen, and I was completely surprised by it. It’s kind of almost a unique solitaire game which is kind of like a really hard thing to find.

We’ve got Solitaire. We’ve got Mah-Jongg. It was an original, very simple to play game, and that kind of snowballed the whole thing.

Interviewer: Did you test it out on other people first, or did you finish the game and then test it out? How was that process?

Mike: Yeah, I had a few people give it a play. My mother, who is probably a big inspiration for the game, I had her play it and, of course, your mom is always going to say she loves it but I started with that.

Then, I had a few friends; my brother and his girlfriend were playing it and a few other people. A few friends of mine. I just kind of went from there. I didn’t really do anything formal like putting any ads in papers to say, hey come play this game or anything. I did have people I knew play it.

Interviewer: When did you submit it to the Apple App Store?

Mike: I submitted it near the end of October, I believe it was. I think it went live in like three days.

Interviewer: How did that go?

Mike: Really smoothly. I’d done my homework. I knew what I had to do to submit it. If anything, I wasn’t really prepared for it. I expected to have a week of time to put together my video and what not. Instead, literally, like three days later, like oh my, now I have to get this video together and what not. Well, it was mostly myself that I was fighting against. The Apple part was surprisingly smooth.

Interviewer: How did you promote the game? You mentioned a video. Was there anything else you did, and how did the game do in terms of the top100 or something?

Mike: I never made it to the top 100. That’s still something we’re shooting for. Hopefully, the IGF helps me over that. Promotion-wise, I started with a video. OK, actually, I started with a website with a collection of screenshots. I was soliciting that, sending to the various iPhone websites trying to get some publicity there.

Interviewer: Sure.

Mike: I lucked out. At the time one of the bigger sites, Finger Gaming, picked it up right away, gave me a glowing review in a couple of days. I got five stars there which is fantastic. I was quite happy with that.

When I finally got the video out, I was pushing it on more and more sites. A lot of little sites did pick me up. It was around the time when things were getting really competitive. There were so many games coming out. The whole tidal wave was just coming in.

Well, I had a hard time with some of the larger sites, but I persisted. I was on several forums and what not, and eventually I’d been on pretty much all of the bigger sites.

Interviewer: Did you have a pay version and a free version? How did you release it?

Mike: I started with a pay version. I had that for about three months before I eventually did release the free version.

Interviewer: Why did you go free version and then pay version because it seems like iShoot hit it really big with kind of innovating on that?

Mike: The iShoot thing happened after I did this. I was like, hey maybe I should do a free version? If anything, I was the inspiration why I did it eventually. I planned to do it anyways. It just hadn’t happened yet. But I started with the full version and it was a bit of slow traction, but eventually it picked up. The free version won. The free version hit three days after I was announced the finalist, so I wish I could point to more, which one really made the difference.

Interviewer: How did the free version do when you released it?

Mike: I think for the most part I was out of most of the limelight at that point, so it still did OK. I was getting several hundred downloads on the free version off the bat, so that’s always an encouraging thing to see.

Interviewer: What are some of the nuances of the design space then for the iPhone? Is there anything that you are going to experiment with next? Are you going to keep doing iPhone games, or are you going to branch off into other games? What’s in store for your studio?

Mike: I will probably continue with iPhone, but maybe not necessarily exclusively. One of my projects right now is I am working on a PC version of the game.

Interviewer: Sure.

Mike: It’s adapting to a number of platforms, so I’m starting with the PCs, Mac, Linux, et cetera. Then, I’ll probably be going back to a prior project of mine. I released a game not too long ago. That was too long ago called PuffBOMB, and I’ll be looking to eventually… I did work on quite a fancy version of that. There’s a story behind that, that happened with that.. Needless to say, I have a lot of art assets with me that I’d like to turn into a iPhone product and then PC product in due time.

Interviewer: Do you work alone or do you try to work in a team? How does that go?

Mike: Right now, I’m working alone. Prior to that, my PuffBOMB game, we were talking about was actually a team. I hired a great content artist for that, and I had my brother working at the time. One thing led to another, and the project was more or less shelved for the time being.

To get my mind off of the game projects, I was starting prototyping again and eventually I ended up with the game, Smiles.

Interviewer: What do you prefer, do you prefer team development or one person development?

Mike: I come from a traditional game industry background. I’ve worked in the industry for 10 years, but I suppose almost three or four of those now are me working independently. I was between several projects. I was doing my own thing. I kind of like both, to be honest.

Right now, I’m definitely working independently myself because, obviously, that’s the cheapest way to work. In due time I’ll probably do some team stuff again, but for the time being I’ll try and keep it cheap.

Interviewer: Well, how do you box up other ideas with people as you’re designing this? And how is that process? It’s kind of important.

Mike: Yeah, that is kind of important. I have a very active forum in our IRC users so that’s the best I’ve got. But, you’re right. That’s one of the troubles. It’s one of the things I definitely dislike about working along on this stuff. You don’t have anyone to balance ideas off of. It is a problem.

Interviewer: Do you meet local indie game developers or something like that to help you because you mentioned IRC. Which IRC? Challenges or services.

Mike: I’m actually part of the group that organizes the Do and Dare, a 48 hour competition so I’m definitely there all the time. The tech source IRC channel, I’m there quite often. What’s the rest of the question? I forget.

Interviewer: Oh, no. I was just wondering aside from the IRC channels, do you meet some other local developers?

Mike: I wish I did. I eventually or occasionally meet up with some of the guys I used to work with but not at any decent frequency. Unfortunately, I’m literally the guy in the cave developing these games and when I develop something to show, I come out and say, “Hey, everyone. It’s me”.

Interviewer: Cool. Any last words then for other indie game developers out there and a site where they can find out more about these games?

Mike: Sure. You can check out all my games at sykhronics.com, s-y-k-h-r-o-n-i-c-s.com, and my advice is just keep at it, you know. If it’s something you love, you love making games, just keep at it. You’ll eventually find something like the IGF to get into which is quite nice.

Interviewer: OK, great. Thank you very much.