Interview: Team Phobic, Developers of GravBot, Bounce On, etc.

We recently had the chance to interview a few key members of Team Phobic, an independent game developer based just outside of Boulder, Colorado, that specializes in producing content for Apple’s iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad. In many ways, Team Phobic embodies the best aspects of the new economy – handheld game development is a neo-cottage industry that has made entrepreneurs out of regular guys, becoming their own bosses and allowing them to create what they want, their way.

This talented group of seven young men have already developed several games right out of their home office – the living and dining rooms are a collection of desks and multiple big screen monitors, with pots of coffee brewing and empty liquor bottles stacked neatly like some kind of glass talisman of many long nights spent working on content and updates.

In our interview to follow, we got an in-depth look at game development from Team Phobic’s perspective. They let us know what it takes to make it, their future plans, what the trials of developing for the App Store include, and more.

GD: All businesses have an interesting founding story. How did Team Phobic come about?

JB: I guess I’ll take that one. So, almost all of us during our school years: middle school, high school – we used to make games. Even Josh, who we didn’t know at the time, he used to make mod tracks and did some programming, too. At some point during our Junior year in high school we met this guy name Kai, who was a real game developer, as opposed to us who were just aspiring game developers. He sort of organized us and got us all to work together. And so we ended up working on this game called Capture the Flag, which is up on Source Forge, just the first game that we never finished. But then, from there, we all started to work. And within a few years, after we graduated, when we went to college, we started the company.

JC: You forgot about Electropy!

JB: Yeah, we released our first game, Electropy. But that’s basically how it got started.

GD: As gamers, we sometimes overlook all the effort that goes into bringing a new title to market. What is Team Phobic’s development process? How do you go about creating a game? How many man hours go into your games? Are there any rituals involved – perhaps a certain breakfast at IHOP? Offerings to Jobu?

JW: I’ll go over GravBot, our latest game. We’ve refined the process down, but GravBot took about three months to make. It started off, we had about half our team doing it – we had one programmer and one artist just fleshing out the basic gameplay, because it is kind of hard to have a bunch of people doing that at the same time, and then you slowly add more people in and start adding new content and new graphics. Then it is easier, once you have the actual beginning of the game to start adding in new people. So, rituals we do… we go to lunch every Monday. That’s just something we do to get the week started. We used to keep track of all the pizzas and alcohol we would drink. Like how many six packs and boxes we had. During GravBot… How many did we have during GravBot? It was insane, it was like over a hundred. Basically we just work hard and get it done.

JC: We argue a lot.

JW: Yes, lots of arguments.

JC: It’s constant arguing.

GD: Just creative differences, or nitpicky things?

JB: I think what we find is that we’ll have this idea for a game, but then we’ll all have a different idea of what it is going to be. And then, throughout the development process, we are clashing or fighting about how it is going to end up. So, we have a lot of arguments… spirited discussions.

GD: Obviously the mobile game space is exploding. Apple, in particular, has made an important push, capturing significant market share. Will traditional, game-centric handheld devices maintain their dominance, or will do-it-all smart phones completely unseat them?

JB: First, I think smart phones are going to ultimately unseat gaming-specific devices like the DS… not necessarily Nintendo. I feel like, just from a consumer level, you already have an iPod or an iPhone. You are already carrying it around with you all the time. And it’s running pretty good games now that are actually beyond DS quality in a lot of cases. So, why would you go out and spend more money on a separate device when the device you already carry all the time can do it? So, I think from that standpoint multi-purpose devices and phone gaming is really going to takeover.

JW: I’m not entirely in agreement with him. I think… I mean I wouldn’t be surprised if Sony or Nintendo came out with a phone. The majority of our sales are to iPod Touch users and that’s not a phone. It was an MP3 player initially, but now it is a device for games. It almost is a dedicated gaming device now. So, I think Apple’s just entered the competition with mobile gaming, they're taking a piece of it now. There’s a lot of money there because it is a connected device… the DS doesn’t have a social infrastructure and the PSP doesn’t really have the social infrastructure that iOS is bringing. And I think that’s what’s new about the iPod really. I don’t know if you guys saw, but this company in Japan [DeNA] bought a big iPhone developer [ngmoco] for $400 million [USD]. It is insane to think about, because ngmoco runs the biggest social gaming platform for the iPod.