"Your choice of Gideros Studio can't be wrong"
This week we interviewed with Phong, co-founder of a Vietnamese game company Guava7. Below read our hard questions and his most honest answers.
Please tell us about yourself, your company and how you got into mobile application development
My name's Thai Thanh Phong (call me Phong for short, note: Vietnamese naming order is "Family Name - Middle Name - Name" :) My career in game development started about 7 years ago when I joined Gameloft's Vietnam studio as a J2ME porting programmer. During the time there, I was working at different positions such as porting programmer, creation programmer, trainer, team lead, technical manager. I feel really lucky to be in such a good enviroment where I learnt a lot from all the great peope there about professional game creation process. I quit Gameloft on August 2011, travelling, recharging, and preparing for my next adventure. So Guava7 was founded on early of January 2012, with me and 2 old colleagues: Duy and Vinh. Our mission (and passion) is to create fun games for the casual players as well as for kids. I'm in charge of the company's administrations, business, as well as playing the game producer role (well, sometimes I code a little bit :). Duy is the tech lead, and is the code ninja for all our games. Vinh stays on the board but doesn't join as employee.
Besides us co-founders, we have talented employees: Ngoc - game designer, Hien - artist, and Quan - programmer, a final-year computer engineering student of Polytechnic University.
You developed 2 interesting games using Gideros Studio, and more is coming soon. Could you please tell us more about these games?
I happened to know about Gideros Mobile while Googling for some suitable engine/framework with 3 main criteria:
Easy and quick to learn, yet powerful enough with built-in functionalities or via extentions
Least effort (thus time) to have a feature implemented so that we can see the result as soon as possible (making a good game needs a lot of tuning/iterations, and it's costly)
Cross-platform, at least for iOS and Android
It turned out that Gideros Mobile would be a very good choice for us. I shared it with Duy, and he totally agreed to go with Gideros! :) Until now we have released 2 titles:
Number Rush and Number Rush Free (iPad only): a number counting game in which you have to find and touch numbers placed randomly on the board as quickly as possible.
Meow Meow Number (for iPhone/iPad/Android): similar to Number Rush, but designed to be kid-friendly :) (here's a link to HD version)
We've 2 more titles coming soon. One is called Whack-a-Zombie (I think you can guess how it looks like) which is already done but I have just decided to hold a little bit to integrate IAP into it. The other is a bigger platformer game which was started 2 months ago (70% progression)
How long did it take to develop both, and what was your biggest challenge?
Our first game is called Number Rush. We took the original idea of a classic game we used to play on paper, back in our childhood school days. Duy gave me a playable prototype running on his iPad after 2 days - he coded it while learning Gideros and Lua. From there, we brainstormed to conclude the next steps to make it a fun game. Then started implementing, changing, tuning, dropping features. In the end, it took us approximately 30 working days for Number Rush.
After we finished Number Rush, Quan joined us as a part-time programmer to start working on our 2nd game: Meow Meow Number. After 2 months (well, it's a total of just 20 working days, to be exact), Quan helped finish the game for iPhone, iPad, as well as Android.
Duy gave me a playable prototype running on his iPad after 2 days - he coded it while learning Gideros and Lua.
The biggest challenge I faced when making these 2 games was... time. My role is to make sure the team go on the right direction and within limited budget, yet still be able to finish the game with acceptable quality. I encourage good ideas; On the other hand, I have to stay with reality. I have to make sure that every new feature or change in the game can be implemented as fast as possible, and that the team can show me the result instantly so that I can see whether it worths to go on or drop and change direction. This "circle" is very time consuming. Fortunately, Gideros Studio really helps save time a lot: continuous iteration and quick deployment on device.
Do you think design is the first and foremost important criteria for mobile development?
In my humble opinion: yes it's one of the most important criteria; on the other hand, I can't say whether it's the foremost one. With the same great idea/concept, different people could turn it into a great design or... a bad one. Then, with a great design, it could be implemented (executed) to produce a great product or not by different people.
What advice do you have for new Gideros Studio developers?
Mmm... I'm not an expert nor do I have much experience to give the so-called "advice" to people yet :) Anyway, if I have to say, then: Your choice of Gideros can't be wrong ;)
Fortunately, Gideros Studio really helps save time a lot: continuous iteration and quick deployment on device.
Where do you see yourself and mobile world in 6 months? in 2 years?
Although my experience in mobile development is quite long, my real-life experience in the "industry" and in the business world is almost nothing since Guava7 is still very new, the adventure has just begun :) Anyway, from the information I have and as you can see, the mobile industry has been growing very fast, and mobile gaming too. That means my direction could be right. In short, my target for this year is... to survive :P And the plan is to have at least a total of 7 game titles by the end of the year. After that, we'll see :)