Video + Podcast Interview: Online Card Games for the IPhone…

Tom, founder of Double Vision games, talks about developing card games for the iPhone…
You can listen to it here…

or download it here…http://www.indiegamepod.com/podcasts/online-euchre-iphone-podcast.mp3

[wp_youtube]f1MPoyR1XcM[/wp_youtube]

Audio Show Notes:

Interviewer: I’m at the Game Developers Conference and with me today is a special guest. How about you introduce yourself?

Tom: Hi, my name is Tom Blind. I’m the founder and developer for Double Vision Games as well as co-founder and lead game designer for Back Clip Studios which is an up and coming iPhone development company.

Interviewer: Can you talk about how kind of games does Double Vision Games make, and what kind of games does Back Clip make?

Tom: Well, Double Vision Games was sort of an experimental thing. I just wanted to try and do some online card games to see how that would go over on the iPhone market just because it’s just such a rapidly growing gaming platform.

But Back Clip, we’re planning on doing all more original titles because that really seems to be where the real action is at these days. We have a list of ideas we’re going over right now, but I can’t really discuss too many of them.

Interviewer: Sure thing. Can you talk more about iPhone development, some of the challenges and how long it took for you to make… You did a card game?

Tom: Yeah, I did Online Euchre as well as Online Spades. Both of them are card games which are pretty popular in the U. S. here, and they can be played solo, against AI or against other people over all various networks that the iPhone supports.

iPhone development, in general; I’m really fascinated by it because it is really exceptionally easy compared to previous mobile platforms. I had never really gotten my hands dirty in any of the previous platforms, but the iPhone was just so quick to pick up the SDK and go to town with. They support open GLES and a number of other common APIs and such that porting things over from the PC and the Mac is very easy. That’s sort of why I jumped on that bandwagon real quick.

Interviewer: When did you release the games?

Tom: Let’s see. Euchre, we released back in December, mid-December. And Spades was actually released about a week ago.

Interviewer: How is the online play working? How is that going because that’s a little different? I know it’s an emerging trend now on the iPhone platform where people are actually doing these online things.

Tom: Yeah, I wanted to jump on the online thing early just because the iPhone has such a vast amount of connectivity, whether it be on Wi-Fi or just over the cellular networks. I really thought that’s where it’s going to excel in the future.

With Euchre that was sort of our experimental game with the online playability. It took a few iterations before we really ironed out the kinks and developed a strong online community with it, just sort of the things that are becoming more obvious now. But, being able to have people drop out of games and have AI take over for them so that it doesn’t frustrate the other players. That was sort of a big key aspect.

Interviewer: Can you talk about other kinks that you had to address to make sure that the online play was actually fun?

Tom: Well, let’s see. For the most part it came together pretty well. People were very into the idea of being able to play online. The problem with slow connections or people dropping out was sort of the big kinks that we spent most of our time dealing with.

Interviewer: What about avatars and just user identity or user profiles? Is that something that users want? I know there’s like Facebook Connect with the iPhone.

Tom: Yeah, you bring up a good point. Right now, we don’t have a whole lot of that in the game, but that’s really where we’re focusing on directing that at this point. Facebook is something I’m looking into as a possibility for developing a whole avatar profile system because it already seems to be well put together, and it’s a great way to also advertise your game because so many people use Facebook these days. It’s something we’re seriously looking into.

Interviewer: What are other ways you are promoting the game? Is it just through the App Store or are there other things?

Tom: The App Store is really 99 percent of the way to advertise. I mean, we’ve tried other advertising venues, just articles on websites and blogs and things like that, and just nothing is nearly as effective as being at the top of that new release list in the App Store.

We actually dealt with a serious problem with Spades because the App Store was going through some rapid changes, and there were some bugs in the release list that was keeping it from being updated. It actually had such dramatic effect on our first sales for Online Spades simply by not making the new release list. Fortunately, we’ve recovered since then, made it to the top of that list and it’s been much better since then.

Interviewer: How do you keep up on – because I know there’s games released every day. How are you differentiating yourself and how are you staying in the top 100 or whatever you need to be to actually make money?

Tom: It’s a tough business. There’s so much competition these days. Euchre doesn’t do as well now because so many competitors came into the market that none of us – we’re all splitting the sales of the Euchre players at this point, and it made it a much tougher market.

So, I would say originality is really key in keeping yourself up there and pushing frequent updates because users like to see that you are actively working on improving the game. I would say those are the two big key elements.

Interviewer: If you release an update, do you have to resubmit to Apple and it has to get approved again because I know there’s this talk about how long it takes to get approved?

Tom: Yeah, it’s an ever increasing problem. When I first started releasing updates, they’d take an average four days to get through. Now, they are averaging about eight days to get through, and I don’t really blame Apple for this. They’re just swamped in submissions for this stuff.

Interviewer: Sure.

Tom: It’s a tough problem, but I feel like Apple is working towards making that a better situation. But, it’s going to take some time.

Interviewer: Can you talk about the business model? Do you have like a free version and then people buy a pay version, or is it all paid or how is that?

Tom: We’re all paid right now. Some games benefit more from the free version than others. Our games, it would be very difficult to provide a free version that would have enough functionality to make it fun but not without giving away the full thing. Do you know what I mean?

So, for our games we didn’t feel that was really the best way to go although a lot of other games have done very well with the free to paid model, such as iShoot, the example that everyone knows.

Interviewer: Yeah, exactly, iShoot. What about the Virtual Goods model? Is that something that you are looking at now that iPhone has released that opportunity?

Tom: Absolutely. One of the key features of both our games right now is theme systems. There’s downloadable themes and we’re submitting new ones all the time that you can download. We’re considering moving over to a business model where we can decrease the initial price of the game down to a very low amount, and then start selling some of the fancier themes using the new system that Apple is putting in place.

Interviewer: What about online MMOs that are popping up on iPhones, kind of like text-based, literally text-based MMOs. They use online connectivity. Is that something you guys are looking into because it does allow you to be original in terms of content, and at the same time leverage the kind of online activity that’s kind of emerging now?

Tom: It’s certainly something that we’ve discussed a few times over as a possibility. The connectivity is still – there’s a lot of issues there with it being slow over the cellular networks and stuff.

Right now, the easiest thing to do for online connected games is turn-based games where having a Real Time connection isn’t mandatory, and MMOs tend to demand more Real Time action from the networking.

Interviewer: OK.

Tom: It’s a bit of a challenge right now, but I think it’s doable. I’m sure a lot of people are looking at it.

Interviewer: Great. Any last words then for potential iPhone developers?

Tom: It’s a tough market. You’ve got to be willing to stick it out and try some things before you are ever going to see any success, but there’s definitely a lot of opportunity there. It is the place to be right now.

Interviewer: And you’re working with a partner? Does that help, or does that slow things down?

Tom: Oh no, absolutely helpful. I could not have done this alone. I am actually working with a couple of friends of mine who have been helping me with all the art and everything and helping with quality assurance testing which is vitally important. There is no way I could have done this alone, definitely.

Interviewer: Great. Thank you very much.

Tom: No problem.
Video Show Notes:

Speaker: Here we have Online Spades, a brand new app by Double Vision Games for the iPhone and iPod Touch. One of our main features here is our actual downloadable themes. I may have most of them downloaded already, but let’s just find out real quick.

Actually, you know, the connectivity in here is terrible. I’ll just go ahead and show you some of the ones I already have on here. We have a few artists who do all these themes for us, and we can add these on the fly at any point. As you can see, a little server issues.

Interviewer: Sure.

Speaker: I’m going to go ahead and start with the traditional theme here. I’ll load that up.We’re going to go ahead into a single player game because my connectivity is not so hot. The online version will look very much the same with the exception that you’ll be playing real people instead of AI people.

Here we go ahead and start bidding. I have the option where it will actually suggest a bid for us, but that’s a single player only option. It keeps online players from having too easy of a time. So we, instead of doing the double tap which is what many of the card games do, we actually do a touch-to-drag system where you just go ahead and drag the card in.

Interviewer: OK.

Speaker: And that seems to work pretty well. People tend to like it. One of the big, tricky parts about these types of games on the iPhone if you’ve got big fingers this stuff can be very difficult to do. But, fortunately, I don’t. I keep spreading the cards out giving them as much room as possible. I’m actually a terrible Spades player, I should point out. I’m much better at other card games.

Interviewer: Sure.

Speaker: Let me go ahead and we’ll check out some of the other themes here. One of my favorites is the new theme, the bar theme. This is why we have a 12+ rating in the Apps Store, and I can even switch up to different backgrounds. Right now, we’ll just check out the default which is a nice, wooden table.

I can go ahead and switch that to my favorite one, which is pool table. There is a variety of different customizations that you can do here. You can do them at any time. Download them at any time.

Interviewer: OK. Cool.

Speaker: Once we get through the whole round here, it’ll only take a moment; I’ll see if I can actually make my bid. It looks like we did.

Then, we get to the score board. It tallies up all our scores, and once you get 500, at this point you would win.

Interviewer: Sounds good.