During a session at the Edinburgh Interactive Festival last week, Lima Sky co-founder Igor Pusenjak charted the history of the company's evolution from developer of a bubble-wrap popping app in the first days of the iPhone, to creator of the four million-selling Doodle Jump. We caught up with Pusenjak afterwards to talk about how mobile development is continuing to change, why the App Store is still ahead of its competitors and the importance of self-promotion.
Lima Sky is comprised of just you and your brother. Is the games industry moving back towards a time where such small development teams were commonplace?
Definitely. I've met a lot of brothers, a lot of husband and wife teams, friend and friend teams - I've even met a father and son-in-law team, which I think is the oddest combination - just setting up shop together, creating compelling content, pushing it out and being very successful with it. Not necessarily Doodle Jump successful, but certainly to a point where they can make a very good living out of doing something that they love and being their own bosses. I know why the media is interested in Doodle Jump, but the real story is the mid-level developers who are making just enough consistently to support their lifestyles.
Doodle Jump co-creator Igor Pusenjak
In the early days of the App Store it was much easier to get noticed. How difficult is it for developers to make themselves known now?
I think Apple is doing a fantastic job at featuring games that deserve it, and not really being selective about big names. If you have a game that's good, and has something interesting about it, without doing a single thing you have a good chance of Apple picking you out from the crowd and featuring it. You can heighten your odds by things as simple as asking Apple for a design review before the game or app is published.
I've been looking at the things that they feature and I'm very impressed about how wide they cast the net. But there's only so many spots. There are tonnes of games coming in, and naturally they'll miss some, but what they are doing is really more than anyone has done for independent developers, or even big ones – you can get featured without paying them anything. It's almost like getting press coverage. You don't pay for the shelf space, you get it on merit, from someone's subjective idea about what's good and what deserves to be there.
Isn't the App Store too big now to really be able to make an impact?
It's huge, but what's too big? If you look at the amount of music in the world, it's not even comparable to the number of apps. Certainly in July 2008, back when the app store opened, it was beautiful because you could put anything up there and it would sell, and that's definitely not the case any more. It really puts more pressure on you as a developer to be creative about how you're going to promote your game and to really make sure that you create something that's good. There are tonnes of methods [for promotion] out there, from Facebook and Twitter to blogs, so it is possible to accomplish it.
It's not as easy any more. It took us a long time to get to where we are now, a lot of work, a lot of pushing and promotion - the money doesn't come pouring down from the sky. Luck plays a certain role - for some people it just happens, and they're lucky enough to be featured on a big site and rise quickly to the top of the app store pile before falling back down again, whereas what we've been able to establish is a continued and solid place for Doodle Jump on the App Store. What I'm really proud of with Doodle Jump is that we've been able to get it to this level by work – really hard and focussed work.