Today we bring you an indie interview with David Perry, the creator of GeoSnake!
Company: Didev Studios
App Store: GeoSnake $0.99
How long have you been developing for the iPhone/iPod touch? What did you do before you started developing for the iPhone/iPod touch?
Since around September 2008. Before that I mainly wrote homebrew games for the Sony PSP.
How long did it take you to develop GeoSnake and how many people were involved?
Two of us worked on this project for around 15 months part time. Andreas Inghe provided the textures, audio and levels and I did the coding and vector graphics.
How did you come up with the idea for GeoSnake?
It’s based on an old PSP homebrew title named SnakPSP. Also, it’s Snake – The original mobile game!
What inspired you for GeoSnake from initial concept to formalized game?
The development cycle for GeoSnake was quite long, but seeing it evolve over the months was inspiration enough.
What inspires you? And is it different for each game?
Generally I find the game inspires itself. Sometimes you’ll add a feature to a game that ignites your inspiration and keeps you going night after night into the small hours.
What have you found most difficult about being an indie developer?
App exposure. If people never see your app they will never buy it. We’ve been lucky that GeoSnake has been featured by Apple in New & Noteworthy and sales have increased 10 fold because of it.
Can you describe your development process?
We use a project management system named Trac to handle the overall state of the project. It lists tasks that each of us have completed and need to complete in order to hit certain milestones. I can’t recommend it enough!
What does the creative process look like during the initial stages?
Andreas generally steers the creative side and he’ll create several concept shots that advance throughout the creative process.
Did you do any pre-marketing before GeoSnake was released?
We created a small preview thread on the TouchArcade forums when we submitted it for review, aside from that nothing really.
What are you working on now?
We currently have four other games that are all at different stages of development, stay tuned!
Any plans for updates to GeoSnake?
Many. Although GeoSnake itself is a complete game we have some great ideas to make it even better. We’ve had the 1.1.0 update approved this week which adds more features and depth to the game.
What was your most frustrating task while developing GeoSnake?
Drawing the various shapes procedurally was a bit of a maths related nightmare – but I managed to get through it.
What have you found to be the most successful way to market GeoSnake?
Getting featured by Apple was the clear winner, however review sites and App Store gaming forums have been somewhat successful too.
How much does user feedback affect your planning of updates and also future projects?
It pretty much drove the first update. 3 new features were user suggested and came from gaming forums.
Do you write games for yourself or for others? And why?
Bit of both really. I write games that I enjoy playing and also add features that I think others will like. It’s nice to feel that you’re giving others hours of entertainment for a mere $1.
What process do you go through to overcome creative block?
I leave it to Andreas to fight with 😉
Since its release what you do differently looking back?
Nothing comes to mind really. We’d already released Bugz quite a while back and had learned from any mistakes made then.
What was the development atmosphere like? What kind of music did you listen to?
It was literally just me and my Mac. I mainly listen to heavy rock.
What was a must have during the development process of GeoSnake?
Caffeine!
What games influenced you in your decision to make GeoSnake?
As mentioned in the other question, SnakPSP was the basis but the original mobile snake game gave us the gameplay we were after. The look of some of the other ‘geo’ style games also influenced our general direction.
We were careful not to use pre-generated images like some of the other ‘geo’ games – the gameplay in GeoSnake is all generated procedurally on the device for that true vector look and feel.
How close was the end product to your initial conceptualization?
Visually it was just a highly polished variant of the original. Gameplay has evolved massively from the first concept.
Before the release of GeoSnake were there any huge last minute changes?
On the front end, no. However the engine had some major improvements to improve performance considerably.
How did you keep yourself motivated?
Sheer willpower!
How much did the art drive the game? The vision of what it was to look like how much of that was the driving force?
At the start that was pretty much the entire driving force – the look. However as the gameplay evolved it took a bit of a back seat and the gameplay became the main focus.
What tools of the trade are a must have for you when it comes to programming, art and music?
Andreas uses Photoshop for art and FL-Studio for the audio. For development I use Xcode, Shark to profile, Trac to manage the project and Versions for source code management.
If you were stuck on an island with a laptop and no internet access what apps would you have loaded?
I’m a big fan of ‘The Creeps!’, not having internet access removes the rest of the apps I use!
Is there anything else that you would like to say?
Thanks to indieappolis for taking the time out for this interview.
We want to thank David for his time and for GeoSnake!
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