Anders Mårtensson, Software Engineer at Illusion Labs.
Illusion Labs are the talented team behind smash hit titles Touchgrind and Sway, two phenominally successful iPhone games. We interviewed Anders Mårtensson, Software Engineer at Illusion Labs, back in March where we discussed everything from the App Store economy to the trick to making brilliant iDevice games...
Jumping straight in, where did the idea for Touchgrind come from? When the idea was locked down it must have been very daunting to implement, how did you set about this task?
I think Andreas was just bored one day and watched videos on YouTube. There were these kids who were just amazingly good at finger boarding and could do all sorts of tricks (as a side-note, we all suck at it. Here's an old video of us demonstrating how bad we are [Link] We are way better now, of course. Finger gestures on the iPhone were new and seldom used in games at the time, so we thought "hey, why not try to mimic the finger gestures you use to control a fingerboard to control a skateboard in a game?".
Andreas did most of the early implementation. Most of the time, we work something like this. If you get an idea, you spend a day or two implementing a rough tech demo and then show it to the others (we are four guys in the company by the way). If we all like it and think it has potential, we continue to add more stuff, and after a while we started to work full time on it. We were between one and four developers on it, on and off for about four months.
Did you seek input from real life skateboarders?
Andreas used to skate when he was younger, and I used to pretend I could skate when I was younger so we have some experience of our own. We both have a great interest in skating though, and love watching competitions and skate videos. They usually arrange the Quicksilver Bowl Riders final here in Malmö every year, so I always go and watch that.
We have also had some collaboration with the local skate shop Streetlab and Michael Brooke from Concrete Wave magazine.
TouchGrind has been in the top 25 paid for apps for sometime now, are you able to comment on sales numbers or any sales trends you may have noticed?
I cannot give any numbers, apart from that it has done "very well", and that our best day was Christmas Day when we actually sold a whopping 25,000 copies!
Touchgrind has amassed quite a following as evidenced by the huge list of requested features from users, realistically how much longer can you support a game with updates once sales have died down?
As it is still on the top #25 list in the US when I'm writing this, and has been so since November, sales are still good. We will continue to add features until we feel that the game is complete and we are satisfied with what we created. We feel we owe that to our customers. But of course we will have to stop sometime and move on and create new innovative games. I think we owe that to our customers too.
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