Developing Hang Time, a Social iPhone Game…

Tarun and Mickey with Marigo Holdings discuss their Hang Time iPhone game

You can download the podcast here…
http://www.indiegamepod.com/podcasts/agdc-iphone-hang-time-interview-podcast.mp3

Or listen to it here…

[wp_youtube]g0D6GRMUr-E[/wp_youtube]

Show Notes:
Interviewer: I’m here at Austin Game Developers Conference and with me today are two iPhone game developers. How about you introduce yourself?

Tarun: I’m Tarun Nimmagadda.

Mickey: Mickey Ristroph.

Interviewer: What’s your game about?

Tarun: So, our game is called Hang Time. It’s an iPhone app that allows you to throw your iPhone up in the air and measure how long your iPhone was in free fall. I’ll let Mickey tell you the rest.

Mickey: So, it does that using the accelerometers that, of course, are in the phone so it can detect the orientation and that kind of thing, but it turns out you can use it for another purpose, which is telling whether the device is in free fall.

What we did is we have a timer that counts how long it’s in free fall. And there’s a high score system so it will sync with the website and you can see who is doing it the highest. The record right now is actually 67 seconds. Somebody went skydiving. Maybe, that should be counted as cheating, but, you know, he was in it to win it.

Interviewer: How did you guys come up with this idea? And it’s cool because it’s kind of a game but it’s not a traditional game. It’s a social type of game.

Mickey: Right, it is. You don’t have to be a gamer to play it. We came up with the idea because we basically made a list of what are all the unique things about an iPhone and what are the ways that you can use it.

Obviously, one of the pieces of hardware in there that’s a little bit unique is the accelerometer, but we kind of went through all the stuff. What are things that you can now do with this device that you couldn’t do on, say traditional, your laptop? What are the things that you can make on this that you can’t?

Plus we kind of think that, at least, especially early on, the iPhone really catered to people who enjoyed conspicuous consumption. There’s a lot of people who like really love their iPhone and love to flaunt it. They love to, almost, like be reckless with it, right? It’s conspicuous consumption in its truest form.

What a better way to show that than by carelessly hucking it around the room, so we love to do that. It really gets attention. When we’re walking places, sometimes we’ll get on opposite sides of the street or whatever and throw iPhones back and forth. It’s a lot of fun, actually. We haven’t broken one ourselves, but we have gotten a few emails from people who have so.

Interviewer: How long did it take to develop this game then?

Mickey: We built this pretty early on. We started it off the summer the SDK came out.

Interviewer: I think I heard about your app then. Did you get notoriety?

Mickey: So, what happened is it took us, the initial concept of just getting the raw values, was something that was just a day or so. We had a fair amount of learning, too, about the SDK to build all the social aspects of it, to build the server component, the high score system. We spent a fair amount of time making the score submission secure so you can’t hack it. And by the way, if anybody can I’ll do something nice for them. That’s a challenge.

So, we spent a lot of time into making a really robust system on that. We finished it in October of 2008, and we submitted it then. It actually wasn’t approved until – when was it?

Tarun: For eight months. It wasn’t approved until Apple… It was coincidentally approved on the exact same day that Apple announced the 3GS. So, needless to say, we couldn’t get any news out that day, but we put out a conspiracy theory anyway that Apple is now encouraging people to break their old iPhones with our app so that they can go out and get the 3GS.

Mickey: We saw some people on Twitter who were like telling their friends, “Hey, I know you wanted to get the 3GS. Well, here’s a good way to trash your old one. Go out with a bang, right?”

Interviewer: How has the response been then for the app when it finally came out?

Mickey: The people love it. The thing is we get so many emails. Actually, it’s kind of a love or hate thing. We get emails that are just like people who like see it and their email say, “I absolutely will not buy this app. This is the dumbest thing in the world. I can’t believe you would do this”. And then, we get emails from people who are like, “I love this. This is the coolest thing in the world. I broke my girlfriend’s phone on it. She’s really mad at me”, but it’s a real mixed response.

Interviewer: Do you guys have a free version, or is it all a paid version or how does that work?

Mickey: Actually, it’s paid but we made it free for a while. It’s actually paid now. We have plans to release kind of two separate versions. We want as many people on it as possible. We have this vision of a world where everyone chucks their phones around.

Tarun: A couple of interesting customers, one was a family. They bought it on the mother’s iPhone, and they started playing Hang Time. And they are now the highest aggregate amount of throws, and this is because she plays Hot Potato with her kids with an iPhone. She says it’s the most fun they have had all summer, finding out different ways to throw their iPhone up in the air.

Mickey: It’s kind of not fair before she has like six kids. She has like several kids, and they’re all basically just take turns. There’s a leader board for the highest individual throws and the highest totals.

Interviewer: Is that leader board refreshed weekly or daily?

Mickey: It’s live. It’s pretty much instant. If you download it now and set the record, it will show up on everyone’s phone.

Interviewer: Well, I was just wondering if you have something where every week it gets reset or something else to that.

Mickey: No, we don’t have that. We don’t have like a best of month thing.

Interviewer: Or best of day.

Mickey: We’re definitely looking to do that as well as regional scores so you can, at least, set the record for your small town.

Interviewer: What’s next in store then for the game?

Mickey: Well, there’s a couple different things. It turns out some of the stuff from the 3GS and with the 3.1 updated that just came out, there’s a couple of things that enable some really cool features that we think people are really going to like. I don’t know if we should talk about that.

Here’s the thing. For the first time you can now programmatically start and stop video recording, and this was one of the ideas that we had in from the very beginning. But back then you couldn’t even do video recording and you certainly couldn’t do it to the API.

So, one of the things we are going to do is, obviously, with user permission is automatically upload. When you are throwing the phone and it’s a good toss, record video the whole time, automatically upload that to YouTube. Hopefully, you can see yourself waving at your phone from 30 feet in the air [laughs].

Interviewer: Sweet.

Mickey: I think that’s going to be really cool.

Interviewer: How are you going to bypass this whole eight month approval process? Don’t you have to go through it again?

Mickey: That’s interesting. We’ll have to see. We’ve actually gotten on the phone with Apple a couple of times, and we think we’ve worked out a little bit of the… It’s a little bit of a martial art to navigate through the process, but we think we’ve figure out some tricks there. We’ll see though. Who knows?

Interviewer: Where can people then find out more about the game or download it or play it or what?

Mickey: Our company is called Marigo Holdings, and it’s MarigoHoldings.com. That’s m-a-r-i-g-o Holdings.com. There’s a link there and you can… Actually, that’s the company.

There is another site, iPhoneHangTime.com is where the leader boards are and that kind of thing. So, iPhoneHangTime.com is where you can see who is setting the record, who is going skydiving with it, that kind of thing.

Interviewer: Thank you.