This week at AppTrawler we speak to the team at Etherfield Studios who are behind the addictive bouncing ball iphone game ‘Pitz’.
The game revolves around a ceremonial rubber ball belonging to the god which must be returned by the second hour of night otherwise the Lords of the Night will not be appeased.
See our review here >>
Welcome to developer George Péchy
Tell us a bit about Etherfield Studios and how/when you started the company?
Etherfield Studios is a small creative development studio, based in Budapest, Hungary. At the moment there are 5 of us, programmers, graphic designers a 2D, a 3D artist and a musician. Everyone has some experience in game development. We’ve started a year ago. At that time we were working on a Flash-based project. Someone came up with the idea to try to create an iPhone version as well. We’ve started to “dig” ourselves in it, and finally we stopped the Flash project completely to focus on the iPhone application.
What attracted you to get into app development for the iphone?
As soon as Apple introduced iPhone it was clear that it has a lot of potential. The way you can reach millions of possible users through a single media was really attractive.
What software do you use when creating apps?
Basically Objectiive C, C, C++ for programming, Photoshop, Flash, Illustrator and 3DS Max for the graphics.
What was the inspiration behind the ‘Pitz’ game?
N+ inspired us greatly.
Why did you choose that particular visual style?
The visual style comes from “Bellfort”, our unique fantasy world. We’ll introduce it in every game we’ll develop.
Get Pitz here>>
How long did it take from initial creative idea to App store?
Nearly 8 months. But it’s because Pitz is our first project. We’ve collected a lot of experience from this long period, and we’ll incorporate it in our future games.
What have you found really helpful during development?
The development forums and the feedbacks from different development communities. Also “the red book” was a great help at OpenGL.
What problems did you encounter creating it?
There were only smaller problems, basically at the coding.
What were your biggest issues or problems during development?
The optimization for the hardware was a problem during the early stage of development.
How did you go about marketing your app and which had the best return?
It’s too early to say anything about the best return yet. As we don’t have a strong connection with international sites, we’ve tried to send our application to as many forums and sites as we could.
What hints or tips would you give to budding developers?
Take your time on preparation! Keep your quality standards very high!
What does the future hold for Etherfield?
We want to be known as a development company with high quality applications, we have a lot of ideas and we want to show it to the world.
No Comment! Be the first one.