We recently had the opportunity to sit down with Astraware’s CEO, Howard Tomlinson.  In doing so, we learned quite a bit about the exciting games that the company has brought to us and some of their plans for the future.  Howard opens up about the Astraware and Handmark relationship and also provides some very interesting thoughts on where the mobile gaming industry is going.  Be sure to check out the full interview below, as Howard as provided us with quite a bit of information!

As you read through the interview, please note that JAMM’s questions are in bold while Howard’s responses are indented.  When finished, don’t forget to leave your questions for Howard.  We’ll make sure that he gets the opportunity to see them.

Hi!  Thanks for agreeing to this interview.  Can you start by telling the readers of JAMM a little bit about the history of Astraware and the games you offer?

Astraware as a company is nearly 10 years old now – but history goes back much further, into the early days of Palm Pilots and beyond that back into PC games and Atari ST software. We’ve always been technology enthusiasts, and we love creating things that are fun, useful, and make good use of the available technology. We’ve dabbled in music, productivity, utilities, reference, but we’ve always had the best name for making games. As the tech world has evolved from PDAs to smartphones, we’ve always been making use of what’s available and keeping an eye on the future too!

We’ve had lots of approaches to games – we’ve licensed some games and made them really successful on handhelds/smartphones, sometimes we’ve taken an evergreen title like Solitaire or Casino games and made our own take on how to make it fun, and we’ve created a lot of original games, experimenting along the way with ideas – sometimes contentious ones!

Over the years, for many different mobile platforms, you have developed game after game, each being high quality and entertaining.  How do you go about choosing what games you will create?

I’d love to say that every game we’ve developed has been successful, but the truth is that probably only a fraction do reasonably well, and a very small percentage are hits. If only we could always know in advance which will be hits!  The iPhone market has made this very obvious for a lot of developers. There are so many really great games that don’t get exposure, and that’s a shame.

We come up with lots of ideas for games, we pick just a fraction of these that look sensible (i.e. discarding dozens of frivolous ideas involving bodily noises…), and we’ll ask “Will it be fun?” The best way to answer this is to make a quick prototype, and see if the core mechanic – the thing that the game revolves around – will be fun. Sometimes we may know in advance that there’s a particular question (will the control mechanism work for this?) that we need to know about, and we can build in tests for that issue.  We’ll prototype it as quickly as possible, using whatever artwork the developer can find or draw, and then try it out. There’s a survival of the fittest here – there are game ideas that are kind of good, and with a lot of polish might look really nice, but unless the core gameplay is really fun, it isn’t worth pursuing. There have been lots of games that have been my ideas, but when trying the prototype we’ve realized that the game isn’t quite good enough. It’s sad to not complete every game, but much better to make that choice early on!  We do keep all of the game designs in a file and on our internal wiki, so that we’ve got a reference to go back to for ideas. Who knows, maybe a change in technology (for instance, a much larger touch screen “pad” kind of device) might mean that some games that wouldn’t have worked before would be just perfect now!

What is the business of creating games like?  I picture your office space as really laid back with lots of creativity boosting stimulants around, such as toys, Christmas lights and comic books.  Am I way off base here?

Actually, our office isn’t as wacky as you might think – no beanbags or basketball hoops – it’s relatively conservative, although people do adorn their spaces with random things (drawings, toys…). We do have a number of musical instruments around the office – guitars and keyboards, and we occasionally jam through some ideas for game music on these, or perhaps just pass a bit of relaxation time with some strumming.  My room is a bit wackier (i.e. untidy) than most, with piles of paperwork, random boxes, books and folders around, a couple of Lego sets (my excuse is it’s for when my children visit!), and random things I’ve made out of aluminum foil.

The one major feature is that we have lots of whiteboards – and some huge whiteboards in places where everyone goes past and can see them. There’s a lot of advantage to having brainstorms about a game and various people coming past and asking questions and chipping in with comments or ideas – it really helps to sieve the idea into something that makes good sense.

Most of the work that goes into games – the 99% of the effort – is the hard work of creating the code and artwork of the game. Designing is an iterative process, but probably accounts for less than 10% of the total time on the game, and the initial “OMG listen to this idea!!!” kind of inspiration is less than 1% – but it’s true that the energy from that 1% is often enough to carry through for the entire game. There’s always a middle lull while the game is neatly in progress but the project isn’t exciting, before it ramps up again to excitement (and pressure!) as it gets close to completion, having to make tough decisions on what to change, cut, or add, and then the build up to the game being released. We tend to get wrapped up in the excitement of a new game starting or being released, but because there’s usually several games in different stages on the go at the same time, this averages out so that there’s always something fun and exciting going on

As for stimulants? A nice cup of tea certainly helps, and there’s always some chocolate available!

What do you view as your most successful game that you have developed to date?  Why?

The obvious answers are:

Zap!2000 – the (vertical scrolling shoot-em-up) game that pretty much launched Astraware as a major handheld developer back at the start of 2000;

Bejeweled – seeing the great web game, and working with the PopCap guys to license and make a great handheld version which has been very successful!

Astraware Sudoku – very successful for us, despite being in a crowded field (we weren’t the first to bring it to handhelds!); we put in a lot of hard work to make the game work right, have a really good interface, have logical hints and assistance that helped you to be a better player (i.e. not just give you the answer!). We took longer over this than we originally thought, but it was worth it to make a game that we’re really proud of!

I’d say that Astraware Sudoku is probably the most successful of these, as it helped to turn us around when we struggled around 2006, and as a result allowed us to grow again, and it was great for attracting new customers because it has been bundled with a lot of devices!

You’ve recently been in the news for first becoming a part of Handmark and then more recently becoming an independent company again.  How did the two cultures of Handmark and Astraware mesh when you were under their control?

There’s always been a great culture match between Handmark and Astraware – we’re still great friends with the founders and staff at Handmark, and we merged because it made sense to do so and bring the strengths of the companies together when they were in the same direction. This worked really well – our games creation and multi-platform talents and creativity, along with Handmark’s fantastic distribution partnerships. Handmark helped us get a lot of stability (great for a small company!) but acknowledged our strength in creativity – and they made every possible step to make sure they didn’t harm that!

Is there anything that you can do now that you are an independent company again, that you could not do when you were under Handmark?

Actually, Handmark allowed and encouraged us to do whatever we thought would be best, and people loved the creative (and wacky!) ideas we came up with. Of course, we’d try to do things that made clear sense – like adding BlackBerry to our platforms for instance – rather than taking daft risks with niche new platforms just because we liked the sound of it! (something Astraware has had a reputation for doing!)

Perhaps also we can follow up some more of the quirky ideas, or even try out things that don’t make sense otherwise, for instance doing PC and Mac versions of games, as well as the various mobile versions. How retro is that!

How did the decision to split Astraware back into being it’s own company again come to fruition?

The market has changed over the past couple of years – the move to open stores has really changed how we all look at the business and has consequently changed how we all look long-term at where we’re going. It became obvious that the energy we could all put into the groups if they had their own focus again would make much more sense than trying to justify a middle-ground kind of approach. We’re continuing to work together – just as we always have – and making best use of the skills, talents, and business in both directions!

There are so many different mobile operating systems to choose from right now, and it seems that you are working to address each one.  What do you predict as the future of mobile technology, in terms of these operating systems?

Tough question! I wasn’t told that this would be on the test!

I reckon that all of the current operating system players will still be around for years to come, but which of them will grow is harder to predict. My feeling is that the technology of mobile devices is now hardly a restriction on what’s possible – for instance there’s no fundamentally new technology in the iPhone, and that caused a massive shake up for other reasons. I would say that future seismic changes are more likely to be in terms of :

- usability (making interfaces slicker, faster to get to the stuff you want to use most, like Palm OS managed!),

- usage (applications or other usages we didn’t have before, more like the Facebook kind of revolution in the last few years which used technology that had been around for a while, but changed how many of us work on a daily basis),

- content purchase and delivery (hooking up the discovery, payment, and delivery so that it’s trivially easy for users). Everyone’s playing catch-up to Apple there at this point, and some current offerings have a long way to go!

Of course, we can expect to see continuing incremental improvements in such things as screen and battery technologies, memory and storage capabilities, connectivity speeds, etc. It’s hard to see any of these substantially changing what’s already possible now, though.

Since I’m a bit more focused on games than specifically technology – a word about where I see games (and mobile games in particular) going.

A few years ago I was talking about where I saw the future of gaming, and I was explaining that I saw it going wider – your game on one platform would be available on others, they’d all be interlinked, and you’d get a different “window” onto the game experience depending on how you were accessing it. I gave an example that you might play the full sports game while at your PC or Console, and do admin kind of tasks (like team management, transfers and training, etc) while you’re using a mobile device. The different sizes of window would be determined by the designers who would be paying attention to the limitations of the devices, such as connectivity speed/bandwidth/latency, memory and screen sizes, etc. This is just beginning to happen, and I’m really excited to see the possibilities that it opens up for designers to be thinking about games in a wider way.  The rise of internet based always-on games that are played over time, and in an asynchronous way with your friend groups (i.e. you don’t have to all be online simultaneously), has made this seem a lot more within reach – as anyone who’s been invited to join a vampire/pirate/mafia band or help out with someone’s parched crops will certainly know!

It’s fair to say that games mean a lot more to us when we play them with our friends, whether it be as little as everyone competing on the same high score table or comparing achievements, or actually collaborating or competing in real time on various kinds of games, it gives us so much more satisfaction than just the standalone 1-player games.  I see more and more movement to connect games – and other collaborative pastimes or creative outlets – within your social circle. For me, it’s certainly the most interesting new dimension to making entertainment software and designing for fun, even if it’s very hard to figure out!

Can we expect to see any Astraware titles running on Windows Phone 7 Series devices in the future?  If so, any hints as to which ones?

Yes, that’s a fair expectation – after all we’ve been supporting Microsoft & Windows Mobile for a long time now! We’re still looking at the movements in technology and what it means for us to support the platform, but I don’t expect that to be limiting as technology now is pretty powerful!

We’ll certainly be moving our main “own IP” games across, and hopefully working with our licensors to make a great job of bringing over some other popular games too!

Are there any exciting new games that you are working on that you can preview for us?

Got a couple of things in process right now – along with updates and new features on a number of games, we’ll be bringing a couple of old favorites back and making a new treatment for more modern devices, and we’ve got some new ideas in the works. Can’t be too specific right now, but there’s definitely something nautical in the air…

Finally, is there anything else that you would like to tell the readers of JAMM?

Oooh, a few bits of cool news: we’ve started up our newsletter signups again, but now it’s possible to join up for news about different platforms – kind of a necessity since we’re covering quite a few!  We’re also going to be looking for more input on upcoming games – both with closed and maybe some open betas, and we’ll be after a wide range of helpers from techies to mobile enthusiasts to game fans. Our newsletter signup page is at: http://www.astraware.com/my/subscribe.php

Alison also likes to let people know about new offers and specials to people who follow us on Twitter too, so there are a few ways people can hook into what we’re up to!

We’re also aiming to write up more about our games, the technology, the design process (and even some theory bits!), as well as other kinds of tech fun we get involved in. Rather than running a blog on our own site, we’ve mostly been uploading this via Facebook, so if you’re interested to read a bit more behind the scenes about what we get up to and what we’re enthusiastic about, then we’d encourage everyone to follow us on Facebook! We recently uploaded loads of pics and info about how we created OddBlob, which was a pretty new process (we’d never done a clay based game before!) so if you’re interested in that, there’s plenty to see!