AppTalk: Interview with Thomas Lachartre Developer of iBlast Moki

iBlast Moki is one of the best games in the App Store, and was recently updated with 15 new levels. Our AppTalk series continues with an interview with Thomas Lachartre of Godzilab. He is part of a two person micro stuido who have developed one game to date. Find out all about him below. iBlast Moki was your first game, and it's one of the best in the App Store. How long did it take you to develop the game, and describe for us the production process at Godzilab. Godzilab is a micro studio recently founded by Moleki and me. We are both French and living miles apart, Moleki is in the US and I am living in France so working together is kind of fun, especially with the time difference. On this project we were also helped by Romain Gauthier, an excellent French musician. He also made some of the musics for the game Edge by mobigame. The development of iBlast Moki took around 8 months from january 2009 to the appearance of iBlast Moki in the appstore in september. Today, 12 months later, we are still working on iBlast Moki and we just released our second update with a lot of new puzzles. How did you come up with the idea of iBlast Moki? Why did you choose to develop for the iPhone? The iPhone has really great controls, just the way you interact with it makes the iPhone really unique, and we thought iBlast Moki would be completely adapted to this platform. We always wanted to do a game based on physics, and I personally love puzzle games. With physics game it's possible to create an infinity of combinations and sometimes you can be really surprised and satisfied with the results of your creations. That's really what we wanted to achieve with iBlast Moki, a game with multiple solutions where there's almost no limit to what you can do. We created a game combining destruction (bombs) but also construction, and the combination really worked well. At the beginning of the development the game was really loved by hardcore games, but on the other side casual gamers were quickly lost. So we dedicated a big part of the development to make the game accessible to everybody. We worked a lot on the difficulty progression through the levels as well as the controls. Iteration is really the key of our development process. We spent quite some time implementing and improving the controls, sending the build to our friends, getting their feedback, and repeating that cycle over and over again until we get a result we were satisfied with. I think we have achieved a result we are proud of, in the end we were happy to see that anybody playing it for the first time was interacting instinctively - we even tried with a 4 year old which has never touched an iPhone before and he was able to finish some of the levels with little help. What do you think of the App Store economy as whole, especially in regards to small studios like yourself? It's definitely a tough market, with over 100,000 apps it's definitely hard to be visible. I think we did a good marketing job with iBlast Moki, a lot of people heard about it, iBlast Moki was really well covered by the press and had great reviews, it was even the best Q3 2009 games regarding the metacritic score. It was featured by Apple and was in the top #10 all games of a lot of countries but even with this apparent success, we hardly make it financially. iBlast Moki didn't stay long in the charts and I think we could have done better to touch the casual gamers. The price was also in the cheap games category which is misleading as iBlast Moki would definitely be a 4-5$ game if it was published by a well known name. But as an indie developer we have to be more and more creative, especially that we don't have the marketing power of the big guys, and lowering the price is a way to be more accessible. Why did you choose to include iBlast moki as part of the appvent calendar? How do you think it being free will impact sales and notice down the line? We believe that the sale of games on iPhone mainly comes from word to mouth, and having your application being spread a lot in one day is a good way of having your game be more visible. I am not sure if being free one day had an impact on the next days, as we had a lot of great press coverage simultaneously like the IGN best puzzle 2009, so it is hard to say if it had a significant impact. In some countries like France we saw a 3x in the sales compared to the day before it was free, but in other countries like US or UK there was no extra sale. In the end it was a good thing as we really want to have more and more people playing our game. Why did you choose to use Plus+ over the other systems, namely OpenFeint? I would really like to know what the difference is for developers as I know the differences for end users. How you chose, and what were the deciding factors? We evaluated Plus+ and other social platforms, and I must say Plus+ is a high quality social platform. On top of that, Plus+ is associated with ngmoco, which is making great games. Another small detail but which was quite important for us a couple months ago, Plus+ is a lot smaller compared to its competitors so it helps keeping the game below the 10MB download limit on the iphone. iBlast Moki is phenomenal as is do you have any updates in the works? Also please tell us you have plans for more greatness from Godzilab. The first content update of iBlast Moki has just been approved, and contains some great new levels and features. Here is a brief description - 15 new levels with completely new graphics - A new doodleland world with its own Plus+ leaderboard - A Major redesign of the editor with a new intuitive manipulation interface - A tool to dress your own levels with the vegetation used in game We have a lot of ideas we wanted to add to iBlast Moki but didn't have time, so now is the time to think about all we dreamt about, be more creative and push the limits of the iPhone as a gaming platform... We will probably tell you more soon. What is your favorite iPhone game that's not your own? Auditorium, I love the poetic musical ambience as well as the polished style serving a simple gameplay. And Doodlejump, it's simple with a fast gameplay and the main character is funny. Hope you like the newest installment of AppTalk. If you haven't picked up iBlast Moki, be sure to check out our updated review. Also see the placement of iBlast Moki on the physics based puzzle games appguide.

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