Aaron Fothergill Interview: Creator of Flick Fishing and Plank
With over 30 years of combined experience between the brothers, it’s hard to expect anything less than the best from them.
Aaron (right) and Adam Fothergill (left) are the developers behind the wildly popular iPhone game Flick Fishing (AppStore), currently the number one game in the App Store. Adam was responsible for the graphics and sound of Flick Fishing, while Aaron did the game design and coding.
Aaron was kind enough to take part in this interview, in the article Aaron discusses Flick Fishing, iPhone gaming and the potential of Mac gaming.
How did you get started in games development?
“Way back in my schooldays, I’d picked Computer Studies as an option because a friend of mine told me it was a really good skive, they always went on field trips to computer centres and never did any actual work. From that I learned 2 things. One is that friends can be a tad unreliable with their information sometimes (only one field trip!) and that you could have immense fun writing Star Wars Tie Fighter shooting games on the Commodore PET
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Since then, I’ve either been writing games for my own company or working on them at bigger companies. My younger brother Adam joined in the fun in the late 80s when he got fed up of my dodgy coder art and he’s been doing most of our art and sound since then.”
What were your biggest challenges in developing Plank and Flick Fishing?
“Initially, getting the information we needed on some of the iPhone’s gotchas. The memory one being the biggest fun of course. What doesn’t tend to pop up on the dev iPods and iPhones is that when an iPhone is left switched on and used for its normal daily business of being a phone, web browser, email client and general uber gadget for any length of time is that when you run an app on it you get a lot less memory available to you than you normally should. Annoyingly the app installer appears to be one of the biggest offenders here, so you get a lot of people complaining about apps that crash if you launch them straight after being installed.
Part of the problem is making sure your app responds to the OS telling you that it’s not got enough memory, so as we’ve gained more data on the issue we’ve tweaked our code with tricks to avoid grabbing memory we need until we’ve persuaded the OS to give up some of the memory it’s not using any more. Plank 1.1 and Flick Fishing both have the first iteration of this, and we’ve got a 1.2 update for Plank and 1.1 update for Flick Fishing in the works that improves things even more. As always though, switching your iPhone off and then back on again once in a while is always a good thing to do for gamers, as games are generally the heaviest apps to run on a system and the most needy of resources.
The other challenge was timescale. As we’re not porting games to the iPhone (Plank was a ground up re-write of our ToySight game) and we’re treating them as full on game projects where we need to have them complete with professional quality art, sound and production, it’s a tough job working all that into a project time that doesn’t price them out of the iPhone games market.”
I’ve been totally hooked (no pun intended) on Flick Fishing, the game has excellent graphics, intuitive controls and fun gameplay, what feature or aspect of Flick Fishing are you most proud of?
“Overall, the production quality. We wanted to make Flick Fishing a quality game for people to pick up, play and have fun with, but also be able to compare it to console fishing games and still be impressed. We’ve spent time on tuning the gameplay, animation, art and sound and not been tempted to simply bash something together in a month with graphics grabbed from wikipedia.
From the purely coder geek standpoint though, I’m quite chuffed I got network play working
Will there be any additional features or fishing locations added to Flick Fishing in future updates?
“Oh yes
[Update: 1.1 Flick Fishing update has been released]
The 1.1 update to Flick Fishing is currently going through approval and that improves the memory handling and fixes the bugs that always show up when you go from tens of testers to tens of thousands, but 1.2 will be adding some new stuff (hoping to get 8 player network play in for that build
.”
Care to share any hints about easter eggs in Plank or Flick Fishing?
“Let’s just say that odd statements in the manual aren’t as disconnected from the game as they look, and you can get a lot more out of maps and menus by double tapping things once in a while. It’s also worth looking very closely in the margins on our hints page for Plank“
Besides Freeverse games, what games have you enjoyed most on the iPhone?
“I’m still an interactive fiction fan, so Frotz is probably my favourite there.”
Out of all the game platforms out there, why did you choose the iPhone?
“Since writing Bushfire, Airburst and ToySight for the Mac I’ve wanted an excuse to write another OS X game that wasn’t just in ‘hobby’ time while Strange Flavour makes its money from console games. We’ve got another Mac game planned, but it’s more of an experimental and arty project that we’re just working on in our somewhat limited spare time, so it was good to be able to put proper resources into writing a game for the iPhone, which gives Adam something to do while he waits for me to finish the code tuning on Airburst for the Xbox 360 and gives me a chance to get myself familiar with XCode again, having been a big Codewarrior fan in the past.
The iPhone is also ideal for small games devs like Strange Flavour, where it’s just 2 guys with a couple of Macs. With excellent backup from our publisher Freeverse‘s team of course!”
How do you feel about Google’s Android platform in contrast to the iPhone as a game developer?
“I think it’s Apple’s biggest competition potentially. I don’t think it’s an iPhone killer by a long shot, but it’s going to have enough interested developers to keep Apple honest
In an interview with Pocket Gamer, Will Wright stated that he believes mobile games will become less immersive, how do you feel about this? Do you think mobile games will become more or less immersive?
“What we’ve been finding from a lot of iPhone gamers is that they want to be able to pick up a game immediately when they’ve got a few minutes spare, compared to console and Mac/PC gaming’s main focus where you have hardcore gamers who want to sit down and play for a couple of hours. So it’s extremely casual gaming.
This generally means the best selling games are going to be ones you can learn instantly and either have simple and short gameplay that lets you complete a game in a few minutes, or lets you quit and carry on where you left off (both Plank and Flick Fishing auto-save your games when you quit). With Flick Fishing we tuned everything around being able to play a quick game but being able to carry on and fish as long as you want if you have time and want to relax. Plank’s a more relaxed and longer game with a slower build up, but you can simply quit and come back and carry on where you left off.
I don’t think this means all iPhone games will become less immersive. The only thing stopping something like a big MMO on the iPhone is working out a good way of doing the controls in a way that doesn’t detract from the game and working out how to fund a huge server farm on 99 cent game sales. Also, just because it’s not commercially viable for a big games company to do a huge immersive game, the iPhone is a perfect platform for a hobbyist or small dev to write something big and in-depth, just because they want to.”
What are your thoughts on game grip accessories for the iPhone/iPod touch that are designed to mimmic gamepad controls, with d-pad and buttons. Would an official gamepad attachment for the iPhone/iPod touch create any additional challenges for game developers?
“Assuming they added features that were easy to access (like a d-pad) and there was a straightforward and standard API so that you don’t have to tie a game to a particular branded one they could be an interesting addition. There might not be enough gamers buying them to make it worthwhile making them the default controls for a game, but if they just involve adding a standard and simple set of function calls (*not* a HID library with 8 pages of setup code!) then I can see games devs including them in designs. It’s potentially a nice little market for smaller devs like ourselves who can risk doing a custom game aimed at using add on controls, but all games should be playable on the default device.
If there were an official gamepad, it would probably increase the numbers using them, but it would still have to be an optional control input and not the primary. If Apple released one tomorrow and then released a iPod game version of the iPod touch, with one built in, they’d both have slightly different relatively positions to the screen (one being an add on and the other being built in) and they’d still be a subset of the main customer base, which is people with normal iPhones and iPod touches.”
With Apple pushing for better graphics on Macs across the board, do you believe Mac gaming could take off in the near future?
“I really hope so. It’s taken a bit of a dent with casual software theft and being able to play PC games in Boot Camp, so there’s less incentive to write a full on commercial Mac game when you’re also limited by the lack of a graphics card on the consumer Macs. Now the MacBooks (and hopefully Mac minis in future!) have proper graphics cards in them, that’s one less hurdle for the bigger devs.
Freeverse of course have always been publishing great Mac games and there’s a strong Mac games dev community. iDevGames.com for instance have just started the latest uDevGames competition for new Mac games. uDev’s been going since 2001 and there’s been some really good new Mac games come out of every one.”
Shelf space is often brought up in forum discussions as one of the key challenges facing Mac game developers, not many retail stores are willing to use valuable shelf space for Mac games. Do you believe Apple should take the App Store concept and expand it into Macintosh software, using iTunes to digitally distribute software and games (similar to Valve’s Steam for PC games)?
“Absolutely. The other factor that’s important there is the signing system & DRM. The usual journalists will complain about DRM, but having a system that lets us sell a game without it being casually stolen by customers who would probably have bought it had they not been able to just find a copy online and gives them a good degree of security in knowing it’s the actual game and not a dodgy copy with some sort of trojan app added to it is necessary. It would have to have iTunes other good features though, like being able to re-download any games you’ve bought at any time, and being able to play it on any of your Macs (or at least a decent number of them).
As with the current App Store though, I’d like to see Apple think about it as something different from a music and video store. We’re already seeing problems with the App Store’s layout as far as selling games (and other applications) are concerned, so if Apple was going to do an online Mac store I’d hope they would consider a bit of a re-think about how everything is displayed.”
Lastly, is there anything else you’d like to share with the readers?
“Enjoy your iPhone and iPod gaming! Preferably with Flick Fishing and Plank of course
Switch your device off and on again once in a while to get the most out of all of your games and ignore the old guy in the lighthouse, he’s just making up stories
For more information about Aaron Fothergill please visit his website, Strange Flavour.
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