• Developer name: Kory Heath
• Company Name: Kory
• Location: San Jose, CA
• Apps at the App Store:2
• Company Website

About Dev:

Tell us a little about you, and your current company.

I’m an independent game designer and software developer, and for the last nine months I’ve been spending all of my time working on iPhone apps. I’m lone-wolfing it at the moment, but I do have a terrific group of friends, game designers, and playtesters who help me brainstorm and test ideas.

About your background: what did you do before taking up iPhone development?

I have a somewhat unique perspective on iPhone game development: I’ve spent the last ten years deeply immersed in board game design. I’ve learned a lot about how to create game mechanics that are simple, elegant, and compelling, and I want to apply this knowledge to my iPhone projects.

About your Work:

What apps have you developed so far? Tell us about your apps in brief.

The first app I developed was a Texas Hold’em poker odds calculator called Texas Test’em. It allows you to set up any situation with 2-10 players and see the odds of each hand being best on the flop, turn, or river. Furthermore, it allows you do “push-or-fold” calculations, which give you a solid baseline for understanding when it’s almost definitely correct to push all-in, especially pre-flop. This grew out of an online poker experiment I did a couple of years ago. I spent an entire summer playing online sit-n-go tournaments, doing almost nothing but folding or pushing all-in. This turned out to be quite profitable in lower-stakes games, and I made a few thousand dollars that way.

Texas Test’em was in the App Store on opening day, and it was the only poker odds calculator in the store for at least a month.

I just released my second app a few weeks ago. It’s called Werewolf, and it’s based on the popular Werewolf / Mafia party game. You need a bunch of human players to play, but you only need one iPhone or iPod touch. It’s a game in which a small number of players are secretly Werewolves and are killing off the other players one by one, and the rest of the players are trying to figure out who the Werewolves are and lynch them. My friends and I have been playing variations of this game for years, but they always required a human moderator. Now your iPhone can run the show, while you relax and enjoy the game.

I’m really interested in this idea of using a single iPhone to play multi-player party games, and I hope other developers try some experiments along these lines.

How do you go from idea to app? What’s the process?

It was a different process for my first two apps, and it will be different again for my third. For Texas Test’em, I simply choose a cool project for which I knew there would be a demand. The idea that people would want a poker odds calculator on the iPhone was a no-brainer, and I already had experience writing poker-related software. Werewolf was significantly more experimental. It was a public-domain game that I already knew was great, but I wanted to see how something like that would work on the iPhone. I’m very pleased with the way it turned out.

For my third project, I’m using the same board game design process I’ve been using for years: unchecked brainstorming, rapid prototyping, and ruthless elimination of mediocre ideas.

Any exciting stuff you are working on? Give our readers a hint of what to expect from you next.

I’m prototyping a couple of different ideas at the moment, and I don’t know which of them is going to work out. I’ve been focusing on ideas that use more of the unique features of the device.

Do you develop for other platforms? How do you compare the iPhone development platform with other platforms?

The iPhone is by far my favorite platform for game development. (I’ve also done web-based games in Flash and Java.) Not only is the device really fun to program, but the distribution model is amazing for an indie developer like me. A week or two after you finish your app, it can be in the hands of hundreds or thousands of customers. I’m used to the board game world, where a couple of years may pass between the time I finish a design and the time the box is in a customer’s hands.

Tell us something about how users are responding to your apps. What’s the most flattering comment you have received? Or the weirdest?

You know, in the early days of the App Store, I’d browse through the store reading reviews of other people’s apps, and there were some really scathing reviews out there - probably more scathing than some of the apps deserved. (This was back when you didn’t have to buy an app to review it…) I kind of braced myself for a similar treatment. But as it turns out, people have been very kind to both of my apps. I really appreciate that. I was especially happy with one of my first App Store reviews, which said that Texas Test’em is “the best odds sim for Hold ‘em poker I have seen for any mobile platform, and I’ve yet to see one as easy to use or as comprehensive on ANY platform, PC or mobile.” That felt great.

About the App Store:

Name two iPhone apps you consider are cool, excluding the apps you’ve developed. What makes these apps stand out?

I have a high-profile pick and a low-profile pick. My high-profile pick is Rolando. There’s not much to say about it that hasn’t been said already. I love the action, the exploration, the art, and the music.

My low-profile pick is a game called Alphabetic. This might be my favorite app in the App Store right now. It appeals to my design sense on so many levels - the gameplay is brilliantly unique, the implementation is top-notch, and the visual style is a study of elegant minimalism. I consider it a small work of art.

I want to believe that a game like this can make it to the top of the charts - because it’s the kind of game I’d love to design!

Any message to your fellow developers?

This is an exciting time in the world of indie computer games. Let’s enjoy it!

Thanks Kory Heath for your time.