Congratulations to Yvonne Kammerer and Roland Watterott, developers of our July GameSalad Game of the Month, Symbol Swipe
Our July winner is a strategy game that requires your focus and has a funky beat!
GameSalad: Tell us a little about yourselves and your experience as a game developers.
Yvonne & Roland: We are a couple from southern Bavaria.
Yvonne: I am the true gamer of the two of us, my eyes still glaze over when I think back to the days of Atari. Although I have no formal training in design, my strong creative drive always had me tinkering with crafts or handy-work in my job as an educator of young children, or around the house (which sometimes made my partner nervous). I do have basic programming knowledge, but prefer to come up with game ideas, concepts and work on graphics. Since finding GameSalad, I can go wild with my creativity.
Roland: I am more the hacker, never having played a game through to the end, rather taking it apart or trying to recreate the mechanics. My programming days started with the VIC20, then building my first commercial product at age 16. Although I chose a degree in Psychology, I was willingly trapped forever in software development. Currently I am running a couple of software companies offering big data mobile and replication solutions, but I have always been fascinated by the games industry, likening it to the Formula 1 of software development.
GameSalad now fills our spare time, allowing for more tinkering, a creative outlet, and above all the ability to produce quality commercial games in a manageable time frame.
GS: Sounds like you guys make a great team! Is Symbol Swipe your first GS game?
Y&R: No, we published two children’s games with GS last year. The first of many in our Jaylee series.
GS: What inspired you guys to go in the direction of Symbol Swipe?
Y&R: We had been tinkering with gesture recognition for a while, then, a couple of months ago the game Darklings, as well as a discussion on the forums inspired us to make Symbol Swipe.
GS: Have you both been pleased with the final product?
Y&R: After many design variations we finally settled on the clean design that it is now. We are pleased with the overall feel and responsiveness of the gesture recognition. It is hard to say if it would have benefited from being “juiced” up a bit more. We feel that the pacing and uncluttered design is just right, as the game-play is mind bending enough.
GS: We’re glad you guys are happy with the final product! I personally like the nice clean look. How long have you guys been using GS?
Y&R: We started using GS in April of last year after evaluating most of the usual alternatives. Although having in depth programming knowledge, none of the others combined speed of development and cross-platform results in such a fun and convenient way.
GS: Well we’re glad you chose us! About how long did it take you guys to develop Symbol Swipe?
Y&R: We can give quite an accurate estimate – programming took exactly 41 hours, prototyping a few variations of the actual gesture recognition and coffee breaks included. A huge plus for GS!
GS: It’s great that you guys were able to make such a polished game with GameSalad that quickly! Any words of advice or tips to share with fellow GameSalad devs?
Y&R: Our advice to developers new to GS or new to game development, would be to take their time. To break down the individual features and mechanics of their idea into manageable pieces, prototype and experiment with these until they work to your satisfaction. Use the wealth of fantastic community tutorials, recreate and play with them until you have a thorough understanding of how they work. Then you can slowly start piecing these features together into a complete game.
To the more experienced developers, throw more at GS, it can handle it!
GS: That’s a wonderful tip, thanks for sharing! What do you guys plan on doing next?
Y&R: We currently have 7 completed games being rounded off with “fluff”. These range from educational activity games for toddlers to blood squirting brawlers, from girly dress-up game to fast paced strategy space shooter. Three will be released in the coming week. Other than that we are constantly expanding on our analytics solution for GS which already now rivals the offerings of the industry standards.
We are very excited about the future developments of GameSalad and the possibilities it will bring.
GS: I think we’re all very excited about the future developments of GameSalad! Congratulations again to Yvonne and Roland and best of luck with all your games!
If Symbol Swipe sounds interesting to you, then you should…
Find Symbol Swipe on iTunes!
Check out the Symbol Swipe Gameplay video!
Follow the developers on Twitter: @HopscotchApps
Check out the developers facebook page!
