1ft Startup

An interview went up a few days ago on Nokia’s Workshop blog about coming up with and developing our first private title, and the problems we ran into with testing and porting. Check it out!

Thanks, Naveen!

We originally launched a little game called Mitosis nearly a year ago, as a cool experiment in what it would take to get a basic, unbranded game from nothing all the way through the door and as far as we can take it. Like most geeks, we’ve released very few of our own projects to commercial success, spending our time on other peoples’ projects for the actual cash.

If we were going to, say, write up the process of how we got Mitosis launched, it would look something like this:

- Build a cool game. The fun part. When you think you’ve got something good, you should consider the option to…
- Take it to an agent. We happened to know a few good people who could represent us to the carriers, otherwise we’d have languished out on GetJAR (more on that next time). Your agent will entice you with eye-popping (but un-guaranteed, of course) numbers. Your agent will also give you feedback from carriers, middlemen, basically whoever happens to be nearby, and if you’re lucky, you’ll eventually….
- Get reviewed by the carriers for deck placement. It takes MUCH longer than you think. Dealing with carriers is extremely slow; typically they have review processes that aren’t constant, but periodic: monthly, or even quarterly. If you’re one of the lucky, chosen few, you get to spend about 60 days to….
- Port your app. Foolhardy and spendthrift people that we are, we decided to do this in-house with the help of Device Anywhere. This is a possible option, but porting is never enjoyable. Do not underestimate how much work this is. It’s really a tedious and ongoing process, and some problems you simply can’t get around. Definitely take the time to streamline your build tools as much as possible, and you can survive to see the day that you…
- Get your builds certified. Like Verizon’s relationship with NSTL, T-Mobile now has a for-pay certification program with a company called True North. In our experience, their testing has been fair, and their test cases are reasonable; the true downside is simply that it’s up to the developer/publisher (depending on your agreement) to pay for the testing, and re-testing if you fail. That’s life! And now, there’s not much left to do but….
- Wait for it to show up in the catalog. Maybe we got lucky, but we ended up in some sort of deck-placement purgatory for many months while there was some sort of internal reorganization. Recently, finally, we launched on T-Mobile. Yeah!

Our important take-homes from this whole process:
- Publishing through carriers puts you at the mercy of many, many forces beyond your control.
- Decide what you want your company to be good at and focus on improving it.
- Don’t underestimate the pain of porting.
- The last 5% of the process can will drag on for months.

And most importantly, don’t forget why you’re doing what you are doing. We set out to have some fun, take a little break from our day jobs, and make some great games. And to be honest, we started to get burnt out by the actual business process. Once your game is out the door and in the hands of pre-teens spending their parents’ second mortage, though, there’s really no feeling like it.. And we may be just foolish enough to do it again.