Podcast Interview: Developing the mobile game Football Tycoon

The developers of the mobile game, Football Tycoon, talks about developing the game

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

Or listen to it here…

Show Notes:
Interviewer: I’m here at the IGF Mobile Competition at GDC and with me today are special guests. How about you introduce yourselves?

Brian: Brian McNicoll from Dynamo Games, Managing Director.

Suri: And Suri from Dynamo Games, Technical Director and Co-founder.

Interviewer: What’s this game about? What is it?

Brian: It’s a football game. It’s something we’ve been trying to do for years now.

Interviewer: When you say football, is that American football or soccer?

Brian: Yeah, it’s soccer – the only football that there is. It’s all to do with owning a clock and you’re not the manager, you are the tycoon, like a millionaire who owns it. So your object in the game is to become the registered football chairman and you do however many you want. There are many games to build your stadium up, to generate more revenue, sponsorship deals, player agents, players and managers of your club. As I said, it’s got many games: Casino, Race Course, Bet Makers and Night Club.

Interviewer: What’s the balancing system behind it? How hard was it to actually balance the simulation or the tycoon aspects?

Brian: The game engine is quite technical so you have to make as a challenge more. So, you start off pretty easily and you can buy any [?] you want just to achieve a few goals. And then to make it difficult the next challenge is perhaps [?] losing money and the fans are against you, and then the next challenge is really difficult. It’s like you are a rival club in the city or this huge club like Manchester you’ve been [?], so then you have to make your club bigger than the super club. So, all the balancing was to make sure in each one of these scenarios that it is really difficult to complete them as they go on and easier at the start.

Interviewer: Can you talk about play testing and how you play tested the game?

Brian: Sure. Suri organized the play testing, so he can you talk about that.

Suri: What we did was xx We did use professional testers, but that’s more to do with quality assurance so we made sure xx target audience play the game so it was a process right from the alpha level. You’d have to go play the game. There was quite a lot of iterations in the design.

It’s a tycoon game and you’ve got to make sense in the way you do it on the money side of things. It takes a lot of work, assuming the scenario of how you can play the game. There’s like millions of ways. You can play xx and then just trash it and get the money or another club. So, it’s really individual in how you xx. You can’t have a set plan on how you are going to test this because how you may play it might not be how somebody else plays it. There’s a lot of hard work, a lot of hard work. Involvement in this type of game.

Interviewer: Is there any reason you chose J2ME versus iPhone or some other one?

Brian: We are a successful J2ME xx We’ve been going there for approximately six years, and so we sold hundreds of thousands of copies across Europe, the UK and we’re looking at America at the moment. It’s the bread and butter, J2ME. It’s what we specialize in. We can do the porting. We’ve done that process many times xx

Interviewer: Are you adding any social elements to this game where people can compete against other people?

Brian: J2ME at the moment the social elements, it’s not like it’s there, not yet. iPhone, that’s a real exciting avenue for us. We will do an adaptation of our port. How would you guys say it? I surely hope so. Xx tell you what your high score is xx I guess that’s the right community is going to xx

Interviewer: What other sports games do you guys specialize in? Is it just football or is it other ones?

Suri: At the moment it’s just soccer, European. But speaking of a couple of people in America and sports, we went to New York. I went to a New York Knicks game and the Rangers as well. The ice hockey was brilliant, so we’re really keeping the Knicks in mind for sports.

Interviewer: What’s in store then for the studio? For the future, what’s in store for the studio? Are you going to focus on iPhone games, or are you going to focus on J2ME?

Brian: In the meantime, we are going to keep on doing Java and we’re going to do bits and pieces with iPhone. We’ve started already on androids and we’ve just been Nintendo approved, so we’re going to be doing some DS stuff shortly. We don’t want all our eggs in one basket. We don’t xx completely or iPhone xx no guarantee to make money

We want to make sure we’ve got plenty of involvement so that when one area really is where we want to go that’s where it ends up.

Interviewer: What would you say are the top learning lessons you’ve had while working on mobile development that you wished you would have known when you first started?

Brian: So many platforms to support for Java and Brew. It’s good for iPhone if there is only one platform, but the advice is it’s easy for anyone to jump in. Our expertise now is that we support all of these phones and there’s not many developers out there that do that any more. What else, Suri?

Suri: Porting, porting, porting.

Brian: Yeah.

Suri: That’s what we specialize in but it’s tricky because you’ve got to maintain your creative element when you do that. It’s so easy to get caught in the processes, but you’ve got to do good games. That’s what we’re about.

Interviewer: Thank you very much.

Brian: No problem.