Interview With Console/PC Game Developer Turned iPhone Indie Noel Llopis

Noel Llopis became an indie after spending 10 years building large 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. We talk about the 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.

You can listen using the Flash player below, download the MP3, or subscribe to the iPhone Developer Podcast using the instructions at the bottom of this post.

For easy scanning of the interview, here is what was covered and when:

• 1:00 – Leaving a 200 person, 3 year cycle game dev team to go indie
• 2:30 – Choice to build Flower Garden; difference from shoot-em-up games
• 3:15 – Sharing flowers fundamental part of the game, viral marketing benefit
• 4:15 – Flower Garden “play of the game”
• 5:00 – Flowers procedurally generated from DNA-like structure
• 8:45 – Real-time component to the game play / while you’re away implications
• 10:00 – Designing a game for play on the phone vs. console or PC
• 13:00 – Before committing to the project: spent a month creating a PC based prototype to test out procedural flower generation
• 15:00 – Choice between OpenGL & UIKit
• 18:00 – iPhone feels “familiar” to a game developer?
• 19:45 – Graphics hardware: Dreamcast-like capabilities
• 21:00 – Creating textures minus modern shader capabilities
• 23:00 – Using assembler to access the vector floating point processor
• 28:00 – Pricing strategy
• 30:45 – Plans for in-app purchase under 3.0
• 31:45 – No plans for a lite-version

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