It’s been awhile since we done a Militant Optimism award here at Appy Place, and with the release of his latest game — Eyegore’s Eye Blast — now seems a great time to publish our appreciation of Gavin Bowman of Retro Dreamer!

The Ulm outlines the creed of Militant Optimism in this blog post, but the executive summary is that Militant Optimism is that indispensable special sauce of the start-up entrepreneur. It’s the ability to see opportunity in any downturn, and to stop just short of being a Pollyanna in assuming that things will get better, even when a new business is facing discouraging times. As a decades-long veteran of the indie development wars, Gavin certainly qualifies as a Militant Optimist, and so, without further ado, we’ll let Gavin introduce himself …

GAVIN: I’m Gavin Bowman, and I’m the game developer at Retro Dreamer, I work very closely with our artist Craig Sharpe. We’re physically separate at the moment, I’m in the UK and he’s in California, but we’ll be fixing that soon.

APPY: Does that mean Craig is giving up California sunshine, or will we be getting a new neighbor here on the west coast?

GAVIN: You’re getting a new neighbor, I’ll be heading over there as soon as I’m able.

APPY: Then we’ll have to have you down the pub beneath our Secret Worldwide Headquarters for a drink! You’ve certainly earned it — I think I read on your blog that you’ve been an indie developer for ten years …?

GAVIN: Ten years, yes, it’s amazing. A lot of those years I was surviving rather than succeeding, but sticking around this long feels like a major achievement. It wasn’t always games though, I’m actually relatively new to the industry. I did a bit of freelance development work, I tried my hand at some shareware business software, various things. I’ve always been interested in games, as long as I remember walking and talking, but for some silly reason it took me awhile to catch onto the idea that I could be making my own. That whole casual gaming boom on the PC had kind of passed me by, so I assumed that profitable game development teams only came in one size: AAA. Craig and I are both long time console gaming fans, it’s rare that a get together doesn’t end in some kind of whimsical Nintendo reminiscing. We’re having a blast making games of our own.

APPY: It’s all been rainbows and ponies of course?

GAVIN: There were a few lows in the middle years, but they were mostly related to me personally getting pretty close to the bone financially. I was probably a month or two away from having to give up at the start of 2005. Then I was pretty fed up with everything around the end of 2006, I’d been working hard on the same thing for a while and it wasn’t going anywhere. Fortunately, that’s around the time that Andrey Butov, founder of Antair approached me about teaming up to try and make some games (which led to Sneezies). I haven’t looked back since then.

The highlight is definitely right now, the iPhone development community is awesome, the platform rocks, and the App Store (in spite of it’s issues) is far and away the best distribution channel I’ve seen for small developers.

APPY: As regards the iPhone … when did you start development of your first game, and what attracted you to this platform in the first place?

GAVIN: Well, we’ve worked on the BlackBerry, so we have the mobile experience, and we were just finishing up a PC/Mac casual game in August 2008. The iPhone was an exciting device, and a very interesting market, so we decided to give it a try. If there was one deciding factor though, it was the App Store.

APPY: For the App Store we like to paraphrase Churchill’s comment on Democracy — that it’s the inferior form of App Store, except when compared to all other App Stores.

GAVIN: On other mobile platforms you had to work through online resellers, and hardly anyone could get their stuff onto the handsets themselves. And the revenue shares definitely weren’t as generous as the one on offer from Apple. We were always looking for a market where a small team could make great games and have a fair chance at a sustainable business model … this looked like it could be it. There are other “App Stores” now, but I get the impression they’re all a good few steps behind Apple so far.

APPY: Sneezies … can you tell us a bit about the genesis of this idea? Did it begin with technology, or with a concept? Were other themes considered?

GAVIN: The idea and the theme were closely linked, so we didn’t consider changing either. Andrey Butov’s wife, Victoria is a keen casual gamer, and she brought us this cool idea and story line. It was then down to me to make it work and for Craig to bring it to life with the right art style. We actually had a few game ideas on the table for iPhone, and Sneezies wasn’t always top of the list, but there was one day when it just worked, and then we were all totally in love with it.

APPY: Sneezies is as highly polished an App as is presently in the market — any stories to share from the development and QA phase of the game?

GAVIN: Actually a former member of the main Antair support team, Ania, deserves a lot of the credit for the QA, she was a Sneezies addict. Every day she would come to me with something that had never occurred to me. It paid off too, we’ve done a few updates, but we didn’t have to fix any desperate issues in the original version.

APPY: Sneezies features extraordinary production design and a fine audio design — were these done in-house, or did you contract out?

GAVIN: Craig and I did everything in house, Craig took care of the music, and I took on the sound effects. My wife and I had some very long sessions listening to and adjusting sneeze sounds to get the overall feel just right. Craig did an amazing job on the graphics and all the interface stuff, especially considering he didn’t have a device to test on or a leopard Mac to run the simulator.

APPY: You completed the game without Craig seeing it on the native platform? That’s crazy.

GAVIN: He eventually bought a device and got to play the game for the first time around the same time as everyone else. He saw a lot of screen recordings, but I think our future games will benefit greatly from him having the test device and access to the simulator.

APPY: Sneezies is very simple to play … it feels like my cat could play it … but it has a kind of hypnotic effect, a “just one more” quality that ensures you won’t play just one game. The simplest things are the hardest to get right — how many iterations did you go through before you arrived at your magic formula, from the first burst of pollen to the last puff of wind that sweeps clear the field?

GAVIN: A lot. As I said earlier, we were looking at a few ideas, and it took a lot of tries to get Sneezies exactly right. Even now, I worry that if I tweak a few values I’d break it and never find the magic again. Blowing them away just seemed like the obvious thing to do, so I guess I can take credit for that one, but Craig came up with the idea of adding the leaves, and that really put the icing on it. The game was “there” before we added the sound effects, but they really took it to another level.

APPY: Sneezies strikes me as a game that would have been easy to over-design. I genuinely admire its minimalism. Did you always envision such a focused experience, or did you have to remove features to get down to your core? How did you resist the temptation (and maybe outside suggestions) to maybe add more “stuff”?

GAVIN: I think I’m pretty good at reeling in flighty designs (or stomping on other peoples dreams… depending on how you look at it!). But there was never much temptation to make the game more complex than it is. Keeping things minimal seems especially important on the iPhone, both because of the short play sessions, and from a budget/pricing standpoint.

APPY: You did a spin-off Easter-themed version of the game. I know that was fishing a bit for Apple’s support around the holiday … how did that go for you?

GAVIN: Not great! Unfortunately Apple didn’t support Easter products in the App Store in any way. I’d think twice about doing a holiday themed game again, but we might have had very different views on the experience if there had been an Easter feature in the same style as for Valentine’s, Christmas, Halloween, etc. It still sells a few copies though, and I’m happy that it’s out there because Craig did such an amazing job on the easter theme. There’s always next year.

APPY: And there’s always Halloween, in a couple weeks, which would be a perfect time for Apple to feature Eyegore’s Eye Blast (and our own Zombie Pizza, of course!) Any other observations about the experience of launching and marketing your App?

GAVIN: It’s incredibly hard work, but it’s worth it. I spent almost all my time for months after Sneezies launched on marketing. As a developer, that’s very hard to do, because your primary instinct is always to try to fix your problems with code. But you’ve got to get out there and promote your game somehow.

APPY: This market seems to have bred a new creature in the developer/marketer hybrid.

GAVIN: It’s true, there are so many different angles to cover. I’ve done a lot of networking, writing, chatting, I’ve baked cakes, designed T-Shirts, collaborated with other developers.

APPY: It was through your cake contest that we met. We even cheated and won the contest, to our everlasting shame. A bake sale seems a bit mad but it did put you on the map for us.

GAVIN: It was a lot of fun, and I got to meet a lot of great people. I think that kind of grass roots effort combined with the marketing that Chillingo did for us helped to transform the fortunes of the game.

APPY: I’d forgotten that you guys were with Chillingo … I’ve traded mail with Chris Byatte and he seems like a good guy. We’re pursuing a micropublisher model with Appy, but if we were looking to outsource our sales and marketing, Chillingo seems like a good bet. I recall now that they got you some magazine placement for Sneezies, too, which is something outside our own reach right now.

GAVIN: Chillingo are great guys, they did their best for Sneezies at the time, and since then they’ve picked up a lot of hot titles and got a great reputation on the iPhone. I think they were still finding their feet in the iPhone market when Sneezies came out, so it didn’t get the kind of blanket coverage that their recent games have picked up. But even with a publisher behind you, marketing can consume a lot of time and effort, and there does come a time when you have to realize that you’re not making a difference any more. You need to be able to recognize that and get back to making more games for the sake of your business, it’s tough to spot, you get caught up in it all. I think I overshot the point by a couple of months on Sneezies, but over the course of the first couple of months we definitely did our part to keep the game alive.

APPY: It’s hard to accept that your app may have passed its peak earning days and has moved into the “catalog phase” of its lifespan. We keep expecting that everything old will prove new again as new buyers enter the market every month, but there seems a genuine “cult of the new” among game buyers in the App Store.

GAVIN: Sneezies has never been a superstar hit, but it stuck around at a certain level, and over time I’m sure it’s done better than a lot of games in the App Store, certainly well enough to make us stick with the platform. Considering the fact that we’ve never been mentioned in any of the featured lists, I’m happy with what we’ve achieved. You can never tell what will work and what won’t. What other people do might not necessarily work for you, just like creating a Lite version didn’t turn us into iShoot, but we had to get out and try something.

APPY: You did eventually do a Lite version for Sneezies — how did that play out?

GAVIN: The Lite version was definitely a win for Sneezies. It’s still getting a lot of downloads and I’m pretty sure it drives a lot of the sales to the full version. This sounds a bit mean, but you have to be very careful what you put in it. We tried to think teaser rather than demo. Even though we only have a few levels in the Lite version, the amount of mileage players get out of it is truly amazing. We also get interesting feedback from some people who prefer the Lite version because it’s so short, whereas a full Sneezies game is a multi-session thing. I think we’ve addressed that a little with our faster and easier game modes in a recent update, but it’s feedback that will definitely affect the way we go about structuring future iPhone games.

APPY: We had a hard time drawing the line with the free version of FaceFighter. The killer feature is being able to put your own photos in the game — without that, its hard to get a feel for what makes the game so much fun. But once you enable that feature, you’ve severely undercut what you can offer that is unique in the full version. Our conversion rate to the paid version has been pretty good, but we’re moving FaceFighter Lite over to ad supported … I can’t help but think we’re leaving some money on the table by giving away such a full-featured app for free.

APPY: And so on to Eyegore’s Eye Blast. There’s been quite a gap between Sneezies and your new title, time-wise.

GAVIN: Tell me about it! As I’ve already mentioned, we lost a lot of time with the various post release stuff for Sneezies, but that wasn’t the only hold up. We threw away probably 2 or 3 ideas, we lost time splitting from Antair and setting up Retro Dreamer, and invested a lot of time into another idea before we decided to make Eyegore’s Eye Blast. We’ll be going back to that one for our next game.

APPY: Let’s talk about the origins of Eyegore. Which came first, the mechanics, or the theme?

GAVIN: Craig came up with the character a couple of years ago as a bit part player in a PC game we never managed to make, so he’s been sitting around our sketchbooks for a long time. I like Bust a Move/Snood style games, building one around Eyegore just occurred to me one day. Matching and popping eyeballs just seemed so cool, and it totally clicked with the art style for Craig’s character and his world. We wanted to do something original though, and we wanted to make better use of the iPhone hardware than we had with Sneezies. Hanging the whole game from a chain and using the physics and gravity from the accelerometer just worked right away, we knew that was a game we had to make.

APPY: How was the development process of Eyegore informed by the successes and challenges of what you learned from Sneezies?

GAVIN: There were many things we didn’t have to figure out how to do this time around, and feedback from Sneezies and our own observations and preferences from the iPhone market played a big part in our design decisions. But we learned a lot more about ourselves this time around than when we made Sneezies, I think we’re a much tighter team now, and we have a much better idea of how long things take and how best to manage our workflow. I expect Eyegore’s Eye Blast to inform our development process in future games a lot more than Sneezies did for this one!

APPY: How did you come together with Clickgamer?

GAVIN: Clickgamer is Chillingo’s casual brand.

APPY: Ah! I didn’t realize it was the same publisher. Chillingo has grown like crazy so I suppose it makes sense for them to have sub-brands.

GAVIN: They thought that Eyegore’s Eye Blast would be a better fit there, so we’ll see how that works out. We’ve considered releasing games ourselves, but we really want to believe in the basic publishing model on offer here. As a team, I write code, Craig draws pretty pictures … and that’s it. We did the best that we could to help out with the marketing on Sneezies, but we lost a lot of momentum in the process, and Craig wasn’t well utilized during that time.

APPY: Marketing is a “full time part time job” at Appy. It is a job that expands to fit the time allotted, and I think it is the number one thing that new developers underestimate when getting into this business.

GAVIN: Absolutely, all that extra time investment pushed our break even point for that game into a completely different ballpark. It’s hard to strike the balance I mentioned earlier, in most cases you can’t just throw out your game and hope it’ll sell, but at the same time if you throw too much of your own time at marketing it and it doesn’t take off, you’re even more stuffed. So, if there’s someone willing to take on some of the marketing effort, and if that model works, that frees us up to work on more games. It looks like a lot more publishers are popping up, so we’re probably not the only ones who feel that way.

APPY: Nothing wrong with “paying the man” to do the things you’re not keen on doing, or to let you concentrate on your core competency. It’s like paying for middleware … it may not be exactly the way you’d do things yourself, but it’s close enough and you’re free to move on. Speaking of middleware … how did you decide on Agon as your leaderboard solution?

GAVIN: I love Agon, as a player I was a fan as soon as I saw it. It’s a hardcore high score platform. With Agon we didn’t feel any need to have a separate high scores screen within the App, because they handle local offline support so well. Their achievements are very flexible too, there’s no popups or interruptions to worry about. In Eyegore’s Eye Blast, the main game mode’s replay value is based on high scores & best times, so Agon felt like a perfect fit. Don’t get me wrong, we love OpenFeint too, we used it in Sneezies, and their recent releases have been very impressive, they have some offline support now too. But the social platform market is still in crazy flux, and we haven’t seen any evidence that the majority of players care which one we use, so we just picked the one that had the best feature fit for the game at the time. We’ll continue to do that until we feel a push towards a standard option.

APPY: Eyegore’s Eye Blast sailed through Apple submission in just a week, and took you by surprise when it came out. What’s the secret?

GAVIN: I don’t know a lot about the submission process, Chillingo take care of that for us. And if there’s secret words or magical contacts at Apple who can buy some favour, I think it’s pretty fair to say that we don’t know them. It’s too early to say about Eyegore, but we did about as well as I could reasonably have expected us to do with Sneezies. The App Store is a visibility game, and we had absolutely none to begin with, so we’ve been playing catch up ever since. I think you guys have played it right by laying out your industry pedigree and getting started early in the iPhone press.

APPY: We tried a pre-release strategy for Zombie Pizza, pushing early builds to a few trusted sources (including a fellow named Gavin Bowman, who gave us excellent feedback). The period of time between when your game is submitted to Apple and when it actually comes out seems like the time to set your hair on fire and really start pushing your game with the press. But if Apple is going to start approving things in a week, then we might need to start even earlier.

GAVIN: It was definitely a surprise to see Eyegore on the store so fast. I posted our second teaser graphic about an hour before we got the ready for sale email. But we were just happy to have it released, and we’re happy Clickgamer will be taking charge of the marketing. In terms of hype, in spite of everything we’ve learned, we did exactly the same thing with Eyegore’s Eye Blast as with Sneezies. What is it they say about insanity and doing the same thing repeatedly expecting different results? I think we need to work desperately hard on building pre-launch expectations and awareness for future games if we want to survive in this market.

The Eyegore’s Eye Blast Cake!

APPY: The speed of the release doubtless confounded your review strategy, to the extent there can be a review strategy in this market. Did reviews help significantly with Sneezies?

GAVIN: Most review sites, back when Sneezies was being covered, seemed to be worth a bump of about 25-50 sales on the day, so you’ve got to try to get as many of those as possible on the same day. We had a couple of times where 2 or 3 hit together, and it dragged us up a bit. But if you have a theme that appeals more to their audience you might have slightly better results.

APPY: Clumping reviews to generate a spike in sales would seem a sound strategy, but if there’s anything harder than predicting an App Store approval, it’s trying to coordinate release times with the iPhone press. It does sound like the key is to jump as high as you can, all at once, and then deploy airbrakes and parachutes to arrest your return to earth.

GAVIN: I don’t know where, if anywhere, you can tap into the everyday iPhone user, if you find those, let me know. Some games obviously manage to do it because you see them pop up in the charts without even a blip on the core iPhone blogs.

APPY: So it remains Apple as kingmaker, and the App Store is the kingdom?

GAVIN: The only lesson I can take from the way the App Store featuring works, is that if the Sneezies had been monkeys we could be millionaires by now.

APPY: We were going to put a monkey into FaceFighter as a pre-made opponent, but after a month in queue only to be bounced for featuring Uncle Sam as an opponent, we got gun shy. If beating up Uncle Sam was considered too edgy and disrespectful, clobbering a monkey would have been off the charts.

GAVIN: That’s one of the best things about the review queue going back down to about seven days. We wouldn’t mind waiting two weeks for a new release if we could address issues during the process, but it seems like a lot of people were waiting two or three weeks for review, being bumped for something trivial, then then having to wait all over again. It forces you to be conservative and careful when you know a slip up could cost you a month’s sales. If our recent experience is anything to go by, things are improving. You can take a risk on clobbering a monkey at seven days!

APPY: Yeah, we’re still pretty jumpy from long review times on Appy Newz and FaceFighter. It seems like photographic content in an app sets off an additional round of review and substantially increases the chance of setting off an objectionable content flag. But refreshing content in a new version release is one of the few ways available to secure a bit of face time on the App Store, and sometimes it seems like those App Store exposure spikes are the only thing that matters.

GAVIN: That’s true, although for us the spikes from updates have withered away to virtually nothing since we started. It used to give you a little bump for a few days, but now I just expect a few extra sales on the day the update hits. In spite of how much time we spend dreaming of marketing support from Apple, if you take away the magical featured App lists, the App Store can work like any other market. We’ve seen fairly predictable numbers, sensible growth, good word of mouth, reviews built awareness, all that stuff. In retrospect, we probably made a mistake with the 99c launch pricing on Sneezies, we left it at that level for a while hoping it would catch a big break, but didn’t really happen. Back then we could probably have had Sneezies selling quite well at 2.99 and used occasional sales for promotion. At 99c we had nowhere to go, and these days the level of competition at 99c is a lot higher.

APPY: That echoes comments I’ve seen elsewhere about damaging yourself by setting the floor too low. The polish and charm of your App certainly sets it head-and-shoulders above the .99 crowd.

GAVIN: The 99c intro only works if you have a massive amount of people waiting for your game, or aware of your brand. You can probably run an iPhone product like any normal market, the hardest thing is managing not to go on an evil rampage every time you hear about how easy it is to make money in the App Store, or how a kitten wrote seven lines of code to make silly noises and is now buying Paul Allen’s yacht.

PAUL: We came out at .99 with FaceFighter and figured on flipping to $1.99 after we’d built up our initially thin level of content. We clawed our way up to #37 Arcade in the U.S. without Apple recognition, then dipped back and stayed flat in the sixties. We added three more fighters, and four more finishing moves and weapon attacks, and added Bluetooth multi-player … but despite all that, within a day or so of setting our price to $1.99 we were in danger of crashing out of the top 100 entirely. It was like an episode of “House” where the patient goes into cardiac arrest, and everyone is screaming for the crash cart … but we had no guarantee the patient would be stabilized coming out the immediately following commercial break. So we quickly went back to a buck and we’ve been afraid to change it since. I think this market we have is a dollar market, whether we like it or not, and we can no more change that by changing our price than we can walk to the moon.

GAVIN: I think you’re absolutely right, that’s the market we have, and there’s very little we on our own can do about it without sacrificing our own income. As full time indies, every penny that comes in helps to keep us fed, it’s not something we can just play around with, so it’s not a fight I feel in any position to take on, especially with EA and the other big guys dipping their toes in the 99c market.

APPY: Popcap dropped the price on Peggle down to a buck for a short time and it did so much to boost their ranking that I’ve heard folks in the dev community call the tactic “peggling.” But Popcap had the advantage of a well-estalished brand and a bit of a warchest when they cut their price — as you say, if an indy gets it wrong, we’re missing meals.

GAVIN: Each time we’ve changed our price, up or down, it’s led to lower revenue. So I’m inclined to leave well alone. I expect that below a certain level of sales, sticking to 99c would be pointless and we may as well charge 1.99 or 2.99, but I don’t think Sneezies is at that level yet. I think it would just sink out of sight like you described if we raised the price now.

APPY: Anything else you care to say about the market, your games, what’s coming next, etc?

GAVIN: We know exactly what we’re doing next, we had it all set before we even started on Eyegore, we’ve completely changed the theme, but the game idea is still solid. We’re hoping that it’ll be in the App Store before the end of the year. After that, I expect it’ll be about time for us to revisit some sneezing furballs, we’re definitely not done with those guys yet!

APPY: We’re aiming for one or two more games before Christmas, ourselves, so here’s hoping we share some sales success together! Certainly I’m looking forward to seeing your sneezing furballs again, and the prospect of another new franchise is even more attractive. Any hint at all you wish to drop about the new game, or must it remain top secret?

GAVIN: If we’re near you guys in the charts at Christmas time, I’m sure we’ll be very happy! It’s a little early to give anything away on the new game, but I don’t think Craig will have me killed for saying the new theme has some aliens in it.

APPY: Aliens for Christmas? We’ll look forward to the game … and the inevitable cake!

Thanks to Gavin for being so generous with his time and sharing his insights on his games and this market. We are delighter to induct Gavin into the most holy order of the Knights of Militant Optimism … Gavin Bowman, we salute thee!

App Store links for games mentioned in this interview: Eyegore’s Eye Blast, Sneezies, Zombie Pizza, FaceFighter

Explore posts in the same categories: militant optimism

This entry was posted on Monday, October 5th, 2009 at 4:20 pm and is filed under militant optimism. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will appear immediately, but I reserve the right to delete innapropriate comments.