The iPhone has allowed many indie developers to create a name for themselves while helping them earn a bit of extra cash in the process. Hearing their stories can be inspirational and thought provoking, helping others strive to do something great as well. Today's developer interview allows us to get a glimpse into the mind of a lone developer who has seen his fair share of success.
We recently had a nice chat with
Ian Marsh, developer of a few hit titles at the App Store, to find out more about his story and where he feels the App Store is headed.
Ian Marsh has been around since the beginning of the App Store and he has seen a lot happen over the past eight months. His very first game,
Hanoi recently surpassed the 1 million downloads mark,
Scoops is currently being showcased on Apple's in-store demo units and
Textropolis, his most recent game and my personal favorite of the Marsh collection, has received extremely favorable reviews.
When did you first decide to write applications for the iPhone? Did you have any previous experience in coding?
I first started coding with Actionscript 1 and Flash 4.0 around 10 years ago when I was in high school. Throughout high school I did a lot of web and flash stuff which really got me interested more in the visual, interactive, and creative side of development. After graduating with a B.A. in Computer Science from UCSD, I got my start working at a small mobile game studio. Since then I'd been doing various interactive work up until the iPhone came along.
I wrote my first line of Objective-C after downloading the beta iPhone SDK the day it was available. To learn the language and the platform I decided to code up the classic Computer Science problem/game Towers of Hanoi. A week later I had created Hanoi, but then lost interest after failing to be accepted into the iPhone Developer Program.
What was your previous job and/or place of employment?
My previous job was working as a Flash Developer at Chumby Industries. While there I helped to create a fully featured Pandora client for the Chumby.
When you launched your first title, Hanoi in July of last year, did you consider developing full-time?
After iPhone OS 2.0 was publicly available, Apple opened the Dev Program to more developers and I was accepted. Soon after I threw my "hello world" app Hanoi onto the App Store thinking at least a couple people would get a kick out of it. A couple weeks later it had made it up to #1, and my hastily created Hanoi Plus was selling enough to surpass my full time wages. While it pales in comparison to the story of Ethan Nicholas and iShoot, I'd always wanted to work for myself and decided to take a shot at it.
How/when did you know you could afford to develop full-time?
Having some savings, it seemed like an acceptable risk to quit my day job once my sales were averaging around what my day job was paying. In the worst case, I'd have to find another job (with the additional iPhone experience tacked onto my resume).
Do you currently work by yourself? Intend to expand?
I've worked alone for all of my games up to this point. I share an office with my twin brother Dave Marsh who is one half of NimbleBit, who I am collaborating with for my upcoming game SkyBurger.
You have developed mostly games so far for the iPhone, have you always been interested in video games?
I've always been into video games. The hallmarks of my youth were Super Mario Kart, Goldeneye 64, Counter Strike, Sim City, and Age of Empires.
What kind of games/platforms do you play most often?
I've been dividing what time I have to play games between Little Big Planet (which I bought a PS3 specifically for), and Left 4 Dead on the PC. Lately I've found myself enjoying casual games which I get way more enjoyment out of than most of the $60 console titles I buy.
How did you come up with some of the ideas for your games, specifically Scoops and Textropolis.
Scoops was born from my wife's insistence that I needed to make an ice cream game. I coded up a wobbly cone of scoops and we both thought that it just had a really fun feel to it, and the controls seemed to work really well on the iPhone. A month or so of tweaking, and adding gameplay features, and Scoops was born!
Textropolis is a game that has been in my head for a number of years. It started as a little side project I made a few years ago in J2ME for my old K750 phone. The whole idea of working with 9 letter words was so that each number key on the phone could be mapped to a letter. This made the word input really quick and effortless on old phones and I think it still translates over to the iPhone in terms of button size and thumb reach. I was able to include way more features making the game for iPhone with its connectivity, memory, and speed.
Can you take us through a short walkthrough of your development process?
Being a one man show, it's not terribly structured. Most of my game ideas spring from nights when I'm laying in bed and can't fall asleep or just talking with my brother. From there I flesh out some game screen mockups in Photoshop to see if it feels like something worth making. If it gets past that stage I will start coding up the elements of the game to see if they work on the iPhone. If so, it's off to the races.
In general, what are your feelings about the current state of the App Store?
It has certainly been interesting developing for the first open platform and distribution system. I think both indie developers and the big publishers are learning a lot being locked in a room together. The ratio of throwaway apps to quality apps on the store is frightening. It should be a lot easier than it currently is for shoppers to find the needles in the haystack. Something like Genius for the App Store would certainly help, but I think the flow of throwaway apps needs to be slowed. Part of the problem is that developers pay $99 for an all-you-can-make publishing fee. For one low price developers can play App Store roulette by churning out as many novelty apps as possible, wasting a huge amount of time in the App Store approval process, and taking up valuable iTunes real estate. I think a small submittal fee per application could go a long way to addressing this problem. If the annual $99 developer fee was waived in favor of a $99 submittal fee per app, the cost to first time developers would remain the same, but it would become cost prohibitive to churn out shovelware.
Do you personally think small, indie developers can sustain their success when the large developers start bombarding the App Store with premium titles?
As long as the platform remains open, indie developers won't be going anywhere. The herd of indie developers might get thinned out from the flood of $0.99 apps, but if they have talent I like to think they'll be able to survive. I don't think indie developers will ever compete head to head against the publishers until they get the same attention when it comes to getting featured. I'm not saying that Apple doesn't feature indie developed games, but the big publishers are pretty much guaranteed to get featured and promoted while it is a welcome surprise for independent developers.
What excites you the most about the future of the App Store? The least?
The most exciting thing about the future of the App Store is that the number of customers is increasing every day, and Apple seems to recognize that they've created something ground breaking. The scariest scenario is that the App Store collapses under the weight of so much garbage and the iPhone as a platform ceases to be taken seriously.
What are some of your favorite App Store applications currently available?
I don't play too many games, but apps that I use every day are TV Forecast, TwitterFon, Pandora, and Facebook.
You have a couple of new games coming out soon, Kyper and SkyBurger, what do you think will make them stand out amongst the many other titles available?
What Scoops, Kyper, and SkyBurger all have in common are simple and intuitive tilt controls that let anyone pickup the game and enjoy it with zero learning curve. I believe that the sweet spot in accelerometer controls on the iPhone is single axis controls. I think many people have a difficult time wrapping their head around controlling two separate axis with tilt controls in 3D space.
Any words of advice to other developers just starting out? What has worked for you and what hasn't?
Don't bother unless you have a passion for what you're doing. If you're getting started with a main goal of getting rich you'll quickly realize what the odds of that happening actually are. Start with the goal of making something special that you want to share with millions of people around the world.
What's worked for me is making something that I would enjoy playing/using first, and then worrying about making enough from it to survive after the fact. Surviving on the App Store is 50% development and 50% promotion.
Thanks to Ian Marsh for allowing us to pick at his brain! Watch for his two new games, Kyper and SkyBurger, coming to the App Store soon.
