• Developer name:Thomas Hentschel
• Company Website
• Company Name:Full Control ApS
• Apps at the App Store:2
• Location:Denmark

About Dev:

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

I am a true entrepreneur and indie game developer, who lives the typical Jeckyll and Hyde life that so many others do too. Consultant by day and game dev nerd at night + week-ends. Iʼve been doing that now for the last 15+ years or so interrupted by the occasional job.My current daily bread and butter work is running my own consultancy shop as technical project manager on typical national healthcare projects in the many million $$ class and/or problem solver. Similar to “the cleaner” in pulp fiction. Someone made a mess of a project and I come in and try to pick up the pieces from the backseat and make management happy.

The last years Iʼve tried to take the company into a direction where I also start to earn money off this hobby that wont go away. But its hard to give up life on the monetary bright side where I earn the same in a day consulting as I earn in a month on my iPhone games. So in the future it will still be a healthy balance of consulting together with more and more games. While consulting in the game dev space would be possible, I try to choose very carefully what to take in. The main focus is producing long term product sales revenue on the games rather than short term bodyshopping money. Healthcare still pays way better than game dev - also in contracting. With the success of our iPhone games I have now hired a full time developer to do the major coding work while I do consulting. So things are definitely moving in the right direction with producing own games.

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

All my teenage years and up to now have been full of sitting in front of games both as an avid player as well as sitting deep into the night typing off source code listings in magazines (in the early days). But it was not until around 2000 or so that I finally decided to do something more serious about it and actively sought out other people to join in a group and develop games. At first I tried the open source community, but game dev is not suited for collaboration of this kind in my experience. The effort to come through crunch time at the end of the project is too large, and only very few people are willing to make that sacrifice. But Iʼve been through all the major pitfalls in those early days. Trying to develop clones of games I played myself - giving up due to the project being unrealistically large. Trying to develop my own 2d and 3d engine - giving me a lot of insight, but spending (wasting) time reinventing the wheels. Etc. I think most of the indies have been there and done that. Finally I ended up working with Torque and later Unity game engine as a very active community member. Iʼve done various tools and extensions to both, all the while trying to code PC games together with selected few other indies. It is the same community people that Iʼve banded together with to make iPhone games.

About your Work:

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

ElectroCute was the first released game. It is a game where you have UFOs trying to snatch up sheep to do weird experiments with them. As the player your job is to electrocute the UFOs by pressing your fingers on the screen to create a lightning bolt between them. Smack Boxing has been the biggest success until now. The first boxing game on the iPhone much inspired (but not a clone) of Punch Out and similar games. It is again a game with a humerous twist where you fight non-typical enemies like Santa Claus, a pirate, a robot etc. Initially we had charicatures of George Bush, Kim Yong-il and Fidel Castro in there similar to spitting image, but it was very harshly rejected by Apple. If you look closely you will still be able to spot the same characters in there though :-D Smack Boxing Lite was released around start of February, and has been a good success. The first 3 weeks have seen 300k downloads with top-50 placements in the major countries as well as top-3 ranks in some of the smaller countries. Sales of the premium version have seen a boost, but we did not shoot the parrot with the game. In general I think people expect something else from Smack Boxing. Either a 1:1 clone of Punch Out or a real boxing simulator. The humour part of both ElectroCute and Smack Boxing seem to get slightly lost, so the upcoming games will be less in the same direction and more hardcore.

The most important part of it all is experimentation and iterating over ideas. I have a large idea catalog, where I try to write down all the ideas I get. The ideas could either be in terms of some overall theme (I want to make a boxing game), a game mechanics (shooting by pressing your finger on a target is too easy and obscures the view lets try with 2 fingers) or simply wanting to take some old retro game idea and implement it in my own way. One of the first things that happen is to spend 2-3 days on implementing the core mechanics. If its fun while being ugly, then its also fun when polished. If something doesnt work at this stage, then it gets tossed. From there its more or less sitting on Skype together with my partners and brainstorming the next iterations. Slowly the game evolves while walking the fine line of sticking with the basic idea and not ending up in feature creep. What we decided early on with the iPhone games is to release early and develop the games in cooperation with the players. This has been harder than expected. First most gamers dont expect this type of development, and the app store does not have a good community around the individual games or developers. In that way they are similar to the other portals, where its not suited for iterative work. We then keep adding features to the games that players request until sales die out. For ElectroCute that happened around xmas, but Smack Boxing is still selling nicely, so we might give that another set of features yet.

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

Ahhh yes - we do have several games in mid/late production. Very close to being finished is another game using the ElectroCute game mechanics. This time it will be used in a hardcore space shooter game in the geometry wars kind of setting. It is pretty fun to play already, and will be great to get out to people and see their reaction. Another game in development is a multiplayer 3d turn based game. It will most likely also be cross platform with a web/PC and Mac version, where everyone can play everyone. Iʼve wasted a week of my life lately on playing Kings Bounty, and that tactical gameplay is something that I want to try to get onto the iPhone. This game will bring back the twisted humour again with  the game pieces being monsters from the closet battling monsters from under your bed. Lets see how it turns out! 

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

Yes, I have developed for PC and web before, and where I hit the wall is either finishing the game in the first place - or when having finished it actually getting it published. Not producing ultra hardcore games specifically made for selling tons of copies - like shooters or racing games makes it very hard to find someone who actually wants to publish it. The app store has allowed the customers to judge instead of the gate keepers at the publishers, and thus the iPhone has finally allowed me to take the “serious hobby” into “serious indie business”. Besides that iPhone development is perfect for smaller games - and that allows indies to compete versus the more established game producers who usually have way more money and manpower that I will ever have access to.

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

Our users are split in 2 camps - those that get it and those that do not. Producing slightly  weird/niche games gets us either 1* reviews or 5* reviews - averaging out to 2.5-3 when you look at our app store rankings. That is perfectly OK, as we will most likely never produce games that are aimed at pleasing everyone. Some of the most flattering comments have been reactions from people when showing ElectroCute for the first time at a game dev conference. I think we sold our first 30 copies right there with people really digging the control mechanics with 2 fingers. Initially people pressed with 1 finger not really understanding why the UFOs didnt pop. So we inserted a “Use 2 fingers” message 10 seconds into the first level and that made people play and play and play. That was a great moment seeing people smile while playing your game. In the other end its more a matter of a collection of comments rather than a single weird one. I simply dont get the players who dont read the instructions before posting weird reviews on the app store. E.g. we have an accelerometer calibration setting in the options menu of Smack Boxing. We even write that in the FAQ on the app store, but we still have reviews telling us to add calibration. Go figure out.

About the App Store:

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

The 2 most played games on my iPhone are Pinball Dreams and Orions: Legend of Wizards. Pinball Dreams because I love pinball (I had my own machine when I was a teenager) and I remember the original game from the old days. Its a great port, but I do hope that they also port the other games in the series as those were my favorites at that time on the Amiga. It also shows that things dont have to be 3d to be fun. Orions because there is such an incredible amount of gameplay in there and its well balanced. It is great fun for a train ride, and 2 games are never the same. I do realize that none of the above are original iPhone games, but they are still my favorites. The most favorite original game is Blue Attack, as its just so super well produced and executed.

Any message to your fellow developers?

The main message would be to stick at making “real and original content”, and not to fall into the $0.99 crapware trap of trying to reproduce yet another iFart clone. I know it can be tempting, but do you really want to get known as the person producing shovelware?

Thanks Thomas for your time.