Podcast Interview: Alex talks about the IGF Mobile Technical Achievement winner and I-Phone game, Real Racing

Alex, from Firemint, talks about the fun I-Phone game, Real Racing…

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Show Notes:
Interviewer: I’m at the IGF Mobile Competition and with me today is a special guest. How about you introduce yourself?

Alex: Hi, I’m Alex from Firemint and we’re about to launch our game, FiremintRealRacing, on the App Store next month in April of 2009.

Interviewer: It won the Technical Achievement Award in the IGF Mobile Competition.

Alex: That’s right, yeah. It was a great honor for us, and we’re really thrilled with it.

Interviewer: Sure. Why do you think it won the Technical Achievement Award? What are the things that it’s doing that, you know, really pushed the boundary?

Alex: We think probably some of the things that the judges would have liked about it would be the amazing graphics in the game. Obviously, I’m a little biased but I think they’re fantastic and the guys have done an awesome job. We think we really nailed the accelerometer controls which can be a little bit challenging. Possibly, it might have a little bang out in the community, but we think we’ve got them right and how they are meant to be. We’ve really got some awesome connector features as well.

For example, you can upload a video of your good laps straight to your own YouTube channel. We handle all of that for you so it goes straight from your iPhone, a very small upload to our server and then straight to YouTube.

Interviewer: Gotcha. How long does it take them to upload everything to YouTube? I mean, it seems…

Alex: It’s very quick. It’s a matter of seconds.

Interviewer: Any other kind of features that you do?

Alex: Yeah, we also have an online lead feature which means that you are an asynchronous multi-player which is a bit of a buzz word at the moment, but you’re constantly racing against everybody else in the world. But, you both don’t all have to be online at the same time. You don’t have to have that struggle of finding someone who is at the appropriate skill level to race against those people.

What happens is that you have divisions of races. You compete in rounds to cause a championship, and at the end of the championship the top people playing in the division will go up into the next higher division and the bottom people will go down into the next lower division. There’s going to be a number of different leagues, so we think there will be one that suits everybody.

Interviewer: Are you going to use Facebook Connect or any of that other stuff to keep things more social and integrated?

Alex: We’ve got a Facebook application now that we’ve already got, and it’s basically comparing your achievements with your friends’ achievements right there on Facebook.

Interviewer: Awesome. Anything else that indie game developers would like to know about the game that would be relevant or useful?

Alex: Well, I guess the main thing is that for us it’s been a pretty long road doing a lot of work for hire over the years and working for publishers, building up a lot of tools and technology and expertise, and we finally feel that now we’re in a really good position to make this awesome racing game. We’ve been working on it for a year. We’ve put a lot of time in it and put our money into it, but we’re really proud of it. We hope it’s going to do well.

Interviewer: Were you concerned that – because there’s always this iPhone buzz – was there any incentive to try and release it earlier, like in August or September, just to get something going?

Alex: It was a little tempting, but we did actually announce the game in August last year so it has been going for quite a while. We had a lot of people emailing us and saying, when is it going to be out? When is it going to be out?

It was really important to us to get it right, so we didn’t want to rush it to the door just to have something out there and then the public do the kind of testing that a lot of players are really upset about and I think rightly so. We want to make sure that when it goes out it’s something that we can really be proud of.

Interviewer: Are you going to have like a free version and then a paid version or how can other people just check this out and buy it?

Alex: We haven’t decided if we’re going to do a free version yet. We want to make sure that the pay version goes out and we give that a good shot. It’s not impossible that we’ll do a free version, but we’re very lucky to be getting a lot of media coverage. So, there’s certainly a lot of different ways that people can get opinions about the game. You’ll be able to check out lots of videos, that’s for sure.

Interviewer: Great. Thank you very much.