Designing Mobile Games for the iPhone and Blackberry

Joshua with WarpTheForm talks about developing iPhone and Blackberry games

You can download the podcast here…
http://www.indiegamepod.com/podcasts/agdc-warp-the-form-interview-podcast.mp3

Or listen to it here…

Show Notes:
Interviewer: I’m at the Austin Game Developers Conference and with me today are some special guests. How about you introduce yourself?

Joshua: Joshua Neff with WarpTheForm. I’m an Artist.

Scott: And I’m Scott Bromander with WarpTheForm, and I’m the Producer.

Michael: Michael Falkner, WarpTheForm, Associate Producer.

Kyle: Kyle Anderson, Programmer.

Interviewer: So, you guys seem to have done a fair amount of mobile games, specifically for Blackberry. So, that’s something that most people haven’t heard about. How is Blackberry development, and how did that go? What did you guys specifically develop?

Scott: Actually, we just started testing the waters with both Blackberry and iPhone. Unfortunately, our Blackberry developer, programmer is not here. He’s kind of spearheading that whole effort.

Interviewer: Sure.

Scott: I’ll let Josh kind of talk about what we released and I guess we can kind of talk about what we’re doing in the future.

Joshua: Right now, we have released two different applications. One is Insult Generator, and the other one is just a Pickup Line Generator, and we use those to kind of test the waters to see how the paperwork was going to be, how easy it is to be out. Those currently are in Apple limbo. I don’t know when they are going to come on the iPhone, hopefully, really soon here.

Interviewer: Did you port them over to the Blackberry, too, then?

Joshua: We started them on the iPhone, and then we had our programmer go in to checking out how easy it would be on the Blackberry. And he basically came back the next week and said, “Look, it’s done”. So, it’s two completely separate things. I don’t know if I’d use porting, but, you know.

Interviewer: How do you guys feel then about Blackberrys? Is it really going to be iPhone? Do you guys see any potential in Blackberry? You know, it’s not something that’s talked about as much as iPhone, but then again, that could be the opportunity since no one is thinking about it.

Scott: I still think it’s a critical market to tap. Obviously, iPhone has a huge saturation in terms like mobile phone, in terms of apps made and whatnot, but I do believe that there is a need for both. It’s what you said before, Android and Blackberry and specifically the new Storms are becoming huge and Storm 2 is coming out soon. We definitely want to test the waters and see how easy it was going to port from an iPhone to a Blackberry Storm or some other thing. I think the Google phones are coming out.

It would be dumb of us not to get involved in those markets, too, especially with an easy port. As we really started working with it, we kind of started getting our game future releases, too, you know, how can we get them onto both as opposed to just making the game for the iPhone, for example.

Interviewer: You guys used Unity for your iPhone games. So, how are you going to then have a system so that you can get it onto so many other games, or so many other platforms? Unity does make it a lot easier, though.

Joshua: We started using Unity for a PC project that’s pretty much undisclosed and all that business.

Interviewer: Sure.

Joshua: And then, went from there to the iPhone version of it really, really easily. I think everybody here had used other engines and things that were just a huge pain, whereas we can drag and drop everything in then.

Scott: It’s great to work with Unity. It’s really easy to go from PC over to iPhone. Obviously, we give Kyle many sleepless nights, but he enjoys it.

Interviewer: Do you have any other upcoming games for the iPhone that you can discuss?

Scott: Absolutely. We’ve actually got two different projects that we can talk about. The first one is Gizmosis which is supposed to be released sometime in the fall here, so within the next month or two, I’d say. And, basically, it’s a new kind of puzzle game.

Basically, we’re trying to do something that people haven’t seen before in a puzzle, so obviously you can check our website warptheform.com for updates on that, but basically we’re pretty quick with sample videos, sample music transfer. We’ve got all sorts of music, two guys doing awesome, awesome work for us. I can say that the game play’s unique. It hasn’t been seen yet, and it’s pretty tough to do with puzzle games.

Interviewer: Where do you guys see the iPhone development going versus Blackberry versus… Is it saturated? Is there a ton of opportunity? Is it all about augmented reality gaming now?

Joshua: This is tough because iPhone is pretty saturated. Nobody is going to argue with that. The issue there, you see, is there’s a pretty big lack of quality and there’s some interesting, I think, politics with developers trying to undercut price and all that, so I think it’s going to be a bit of a mess for a little bit.

The Blackberry is a different story. There’s not a lot of people developing for it, and then when you look internationally there are some languages that the iPhone doesn’t support. So, there is kind of an interesting thing on the global perspective. I don’t know. It’s going to be up in the air, really, over the next few years, I think, to see where it’s really going to go.

Scott: Obviously, the rage is iPhone, but we definitely have done our research and figured out that Blackberry is going to be here to stay if the right developers get on board with it. So, that’s what we’re looking to do.

Michael: In the market basically, it’s going on Storm andStorm 2. It’s going to create much bigger hype.

Interviewer: Blackberry is coming out with its own App Store, too, right?

Joshua: It’s out. It’s out and, I guess, a new revision is going to be put out soon on that to kind of clean it up. Again, it’s just in the baby phase of really putting applications out there to the public.

Interviewer: Nice.

Michael: One nice thing about the Blackberry is that you don’t need to go directly through their App Store. You can look at other stores. Crackberry.com offers their own store, and so you’re not tied down just to the iTune Store like you are with the iPod.

Interviewer: Where can people find out about your games again?

Scott: Www.warptheform.com.

Thank you very much.