AppTalk: Interview with Rob Jagnow, The Developer of Cogs
by Staff Writer
February 8, 2010
Our AppTalk series continues with an interview with the developer of Cogs, Rob Jagnow. He discusses how he came up with the idea for Cogs, why he brought it from the PC to the iPhone, and what his plans are for the iPad?
Why did you decide to port Cogs to the iPhone/iPod Touch?
That was an easy decision. Just about every reviewer for the PC version of Cogs said that they liked the game but they were dying to have it on their iPhone.
How long was the transition from the PC game to the iPhone/iPod Touch version, and how difficult was it?
It took about five months to port Cogs from the PC to the iPhone. Changing the rendering engine from DirectX to OpenGL ES was of course part of that conversion, but we actually spent a lot more time modifying the user interface to be more friendly for iPhone. We got a lot of praise for the level of polish on the PC, so we wanted to maintain that same high standard for the iPhone.
How did you come up with the idea for Cogs?
Ironically, the inspiration for Cogs came from surprisingly uninspiring games. While playing minesweeper one night, I stopped to consider how much time I had wasted on such a simple game. I decided that if I instead spent that time creating games, I could surely come up with something more entertaining. I thought about what I would like in a game -- gears, pipes and wild machines -- and it eventually evolved into Cogs.
What do you think of the App Store economy, especially with your experience in selling a PC title?
The good news for developers is that the barrier for entry into the app store is extremely low. The bad news is that the barrier for entry into the app store is extremely low. The result is a marketplace bursting at the seams with shovelware, which makes it very hard for a new app to get noticed -- even an exceptional new app.
The other drawback to the app store is that competition for visibility has pushed prices down to the point where it's nearly impossible to make a profit on any game that takes more than a couple months to develop. Cogs for the iPhone has just as much content as on the PC -- about 10+ hours of gameplay if you want to win every achievement. And it's priced at less than half of what you'd pay on the PC. On top of that, we've broken up the pricing so that you can pay only for what you play, starting at just a buck. But some users still complain that five dollars for the whole package is too much.
What are your intentions for Cogs, to let it run unmodified doing simple pixel double, or to make your old game more iPad friendly to take advantage of the larger processor and screen size.
I'll definitely be writing an iPad-native port of Cogs. It's an ideal device for playing the game. The iPad rumors have been around for a while now, so I wrote the iPhone code with a larger touch screen in mind. It should only take me two or three weeks to retarget Cogs for the iPad such that it uses the PC UI layout with the iPhone rendering code.