Interview: ustwo Pushes the Boundaries of iPhone Development
As part of our one stop shop for all things apps, we will be conducting interviews with some of the industry’s best developers. This time, we interviewed ustwo, a development company that will make sure you are entertained from the second you visit their website till the second you close any one of their apps. Their latest accomplishment, and it is quite the accomplishment, is to develop a fun and exciting game on the iPhone platform, and to do it in no more than 48 hours. Well, when ustwo puts their mind to something, it gets done, and so their new DOT app was born.
Other feature apps they have developed include Mouthoff, a highly entertaining iPhone app that makes use of the device’s advanced sensors and features… ustwo also created the highly amusing game Steppin, which is sure to keep you smiling as well. ustwo has managed to create a name for themselves in the developer community, and so we thought it was appropriate to conduct AppBoy’s very first developer interview with this highly professional and impressive team of developers.
1. Please tell us your name and a little bit about yourself.
“@millsustwo is the name I seem to be best known as these days, spending so much time in the studio means my digital persona superseeds the real me, I tell it how it is, if people don’t want to listen, they don’t. As co-founder in ustwo™ (the studio of dreams™), I am deeply involved in all areas of the company continued growth. From initial brainstorming of the .™ concept, to the ongoing publicity and hype of our beloved, and most successful application to date, MouthOff™.”
“Although ustwo™ is primarily a user experience/interface 45+ ustwobie™ studio working in multiple UX digital sectors (mobile, medical, financial, TV) my passion is the entertainment area, apps fits this bill nicely.”
2. How long have you been developing?
“I myself am no developer, ustwo™ is a multi(Digi)plined™ studio, born out of a love for creativity, entertainment and passion. If I had to say what I was, I’d say I was an ustwo™ Evangelist. Actually I wouldn’t say that but I hear others saying the same stupid saying about their professed company passion. I’m passionate about making sure ustwo™ continues to be considered creative and innovative.
Growing a design studio capable of delivering client solutions is one thing. But it’s the exposure of the studio to the world that is the key to its real success. And this year we realized this more than ever. So what did we do? Well to start we have committed around £150k into the App area, building a quality iFocussed™ team, proportioning it over the first 12 months of the ‘new app age’, giving us the confidence to say NO to paid projects that the chosen developers would have been on. Thus the iPhelopers™ were born, and were able to concentrate on the one and only: iApps™”
New Mouths for Halloween
3. On what mobile platforms do you develop?
“Currently we are working across iPhone, OSE, s60 and Android. We’ve spent many years working in Flashlite for big mobile manufacturers, and are set to release the .™ onto Android in the next few weeks, along with some other special applications.”
4. Please tell us about your latest app.
“.™ is our first forray into what we call casgasm™, AKA casual gaming. .™ is 1/6 of a suite of forthcoming apps from ustwo™, called 48hApps. Each of the apps is created in a 48 hour time period, and each is about simple, stunning design and simple, addictive game play. Collect all 6 games to complete the set. they are ‘cool’ectable™.”
48 Hour App
5. What inspired you to develop this app?
“The issue we saw was that apps were taking too long to make, we needed to have a constant stream of quality apps. I Got frustrated by not being able to talk about fresh apps, needed something to talk about prior to Inkstrumental™, post Stepping™ and MouthOff™. Nothing better than producing quick turnaround projects. Pulling that crack team together over a beer one night. Simple task, we need something cool, something addictive, something that showcases quick thinking. We only produce what can be done in a 2 day period. Bottom line is that it has to go to Apple on hour 48. Once the app is in apple, the fun begins, for this app we not only created a flickr group asking the question ‘have you seen the .™’ inviting users to photograph what they thought the app was, but we created 2 promo videos that told the story of the main .™ character from the perspective of the good and bad in the game.”
GOOD
BAD
“So we created .™, the worlds first ‘48hourApp’, Concept. Design. Development. Marketing concept. All produced in the space of 48 hours. The name of the game is survival. It’s simple (so are we!!). You are .™. Blue circles are food. Red triangles are death. .™ starves and shrinks without food. Red death makes .™ hungrier. The gameplay is simple, and the name even more so, the name is the character.. and nothing better than trademarking a .!
The key skill in this project was being able to say NO to the extras that we all wanted, but couldn’t be done in the time. We wanted a global scoreboard, but it wasn’t possible in time. So we said to ourself that if we cover our costs, (enough = 5750 at 59p after apple cut) then we will update with new features. In this case it’s the reverse Kostner©, ‘if you buy it, we will build’.”
6. Where do you see the mobile industry 5 years down the road?
“With data subscription not longer a concern and having vastly improved capabilities, mobile phones will be the primary interfaces for the digital world, especially in developing countries where people use them instead of (bigger) computers. The most thorough uptake will probably be in social services, which are already building up as the killer app beyond basic things like calling or knowing the weather. This makes much sense as the mobile phone is our genuinely personal device always taken along and rarely lent for anything longer than a call. It will however be standard to be able to interact with pretty much any imaginable service too on the go, soon every company will realise the power of being available on the impulse.”
7. Please tell us your impressions on the various mobile platforms from a developer’s perspective. Please include iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, Symbian, and Windows Mobile
“It`s difficult to argue the iPhone`s game changing position when it comes to enabling 3rd party developers. While Objective-C might not be the easiest language to work with, the homogeneity of Apple`s device portfolio makes fragmentation much easier to deal with, letting go of one of the most annoying problems existing on other platforms.
The Android platform is very easy to develop for, but pretty much everyone is holding their breaths for a Marketplace bustling with users eager to download even paid for apps, there doesn`t seem enough uptake yet. This might change by the end of year as soon as sexier Android devices will be available.
Symbian`s future depends on both the transition to the open source model with the Foundation and Nokia`s effort to iron out the kinks with Ovi Store. The user base is there, but people with the millions of older S60 devices are not yet aware of the fact that their phones are capable of running apps without Ovi Store preloaded on their devices or they just got turned off by the less than ideal experience.
BlackBerry needs a bit of time to catch up with the new contenders when it comes to 3rd party app offerings and touch screens, but are moving in the right direction with switching on to a WebKit based browser and generally trying to become more design savvy.
Windows Mobile has mature development tools inherited from the desktop, but the overall experience of using the actual phones is very cumbersome, the mediocre interface design of the desktop version transferred very badly to the smaller screen. This made the otherwise powerful and feature-laden devices much less joy to use and mostly kept them in the corporate world. Let`s see what version 7 will bring though, the Redmond giant has clearly not quit the game yet!”
