Mobile Orchard Podcast

There’s a lot to be learned about marketing an iPhone game from the story of Dapple as told by its creator Owen Goss of Streaming Colour Studios. In March Owen made headlines with “The Numbers Post” in his blog; summary: Dapple cost $32K to build;$535 first month’s revenues. In this interview, Owen talks about what he’s learned since then, his challenges adapting his initial idea to match existing game genres, the risks trying to build one game to appeal to two distinct gamer-audiences, the importance of concentrating your buzz around an app’s launch day, the critical “pick up and play” requirement for iPhone games and more. Almost everything we talk about applies to creating success in non-game categories to.

Noel Llopis became an indie after spending 10 years building large scale console and PC games. In this interview, Noel talks about what it’s like going from a team of 200 on a three year release cycle to being a lone gunman developing his no-gunman Flower Garden iPhone game in six months. Flower Garden is remarkably detailed, with some intricate tech behind the scenes, including flowers generated procedurally from a DNA-like structure. The interview also features insights into the differences between building for consoles/PCs and the phone: Console/PC games are often termed “appointment games,” games on the phone are played more frequently, but for smaller intervals. The iPhone is hardware-equivalent to the 10 year old Dreamcast; learn what it’s missing vs. a modern console, and some of the methods — including assembly language optimization — to make up the difference.

Bill Heyman and Damon Allison of CodeMorphic created the Public Radio Tuner. Currently the #1 free audio application, the Public Radio Tuner lets iPhone owners listen to live streams of hundreds of public radio stations. This interview features detailed instructions for creating streaming applications, and some of the similar-but-different challenges they faced when creating a forthcoming media center application for Cisco. Finally, we talk about creating “Obamify” — an app that transforms images into those iconic 4-color posters from the campaign — and the problems they ran into getting it into the App Store.