Getting Their Mojo Working: webOS Developer Profiles
Part 1: Self Aware Word Ace - A new type of game released first on webOS
August 27, 2009
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Editor's note: "Getting Their Mojo Working: webOS Developer Profiles" is a semi-regular series of interviews with developers who were among the first to use Palm® webOS™ and the Palm Mojo™ SDK and get apps into the Palm Application Catalog. If you submit your app and it's accepted to the catalog, you just might find your story here, too. But hurry, lots of new apps are coming in all the time. ....
Word Ace recently debuted in the Palm Application Catalog in mid-August 2009. It was instantly greeted by literally thousands of downloads, not to mention a huge number of user reviews. The editors of webOSdev decided they should check out this new kind of game, which combines elements of some of our favorite word games with multiplayer online poker.
Not only is Word Ace unique, it is currently available only on the webOS platform. We put down this addictive app long enough to chat with Self Aware Lead Designer Seppo Helava about Self Aware’s initial foray into developing for Palm® Pre™ and webOS.
webOSdev: Looks like this is the first game of its kind for any mobile platform. What made you decide to develop it first for webOS?
Seppo: Word Ace was originally designed with Palm Pre in mind. When you start with a platform, the first question you've really got to ask is, "What makes this platform special?" In the case of Pre, the main things were the keyboard, pervasive connectivity, and background processing.
When we started developing Word Ace, we had some spirited discussion about what kind of input method we'd use - whether you'd click on the cards, or type. In the end, the most sensible thing was to simply do both. That way, we wouldn't have to teach players how to input letters. They'd just do whatever felt natural, and it would work.
In terms of connectivity, Self Aware was started with the idea of using new technology to do something very old - to bring people together. To do *something* together. You get a lot of 140-character sound bites passing off as socializing these days. While it may be sharing something about you, it's not a shared experience with friends. With Word Ace, the combination of the in-game chat, the picture-based emotes, and the fact that you're playing with (or against) each other - we're not just giving you the tools to interact, but also a *reason* to do so. That's been the goal of the company, and the Pre enables us to do that beautifully.
We started developing for webOS because the Pre looked like a spectacular device. The first thing that brought it to my attention, actually, was that my wife's been a fan of Palm's for ages - her Treo was far and away her favorite phone for a really long time. When we heard about the Pre, and the kinds of things it could do, we jumped on it right away.
webOSdev: So how did you come up with the idea?
Seppo: When we sat down to figure out what to make, the first questions we asked were about the hardware. The second questions were about the people. Who might own a Pre? What would they want out of the software? We didn't want to make anything too dexterity-oriented, and we wanted to make something that you could jump into and out of quickly. On a new platform, two of the most popular genres are almost always card games and word games, so we decided those would be our focus.
The actual ah-ha moment, though - that's sort of a funny story. Two a.m. one morning, I sat bolt upright in bed, waking up from a deep sleep, and immediately grabbed my laptop and banged out an e-mail. Poker and words, combined! A short description of the basic rules complete, I hit Send, and then went back to sleep. The next morning, we (the four of us at Self Aware) talked about it a bit, and we were all really jazzed. Great!
But after about half an hour, we realized we'd had some sort of massive miscommunication, and we were talking about entirely different things! Going back and rereading what I'd written, it was the kind of garbled nonsense you'd write after waking up at 2 a.m. The core idea was there, but the wording was a disaster. So we sat down, talked about it a little more, and realized that the misunderstood version was even better than the original.
That was that, really - the original idea's still got promise, though. Maybe you'll see that someday, too.
webOSdev: Once you had the idea, how did you get going with it?
Seppo: We started working on Word Ace really shortly after Palm announced the Mojo SDK. We knew that with any developing platform, we'd have to get our sea legs. So we had one of our engineers focus totally on getting familiar with Mojo and webOS and diving into the webOS prerelease site.
At the same time, we turned to prototyping Word Ace using the fastest, cheapest possible means. A trip to the game store for some poker chips, and we were half done. A stack of index cards and a Sharpie, and we had everything we needed to play the first games of Word Ace, less than a day after starting development on the project. I still have the original index card deck sitting on my desk. When it came time to get it running on a device, we focused on a platform we were more familiar with.
Instead of needing to have the same people answer questions of "how does the game play?" and "how does the hardware work?", we were able to separate those problems. We had two people dedicated to solving two specific sets of problems. Our lead engineer Dan became the webOS expert, while our cofounder Colin got down and dirty with the game code. The two were making incredible headway almost instantly.
webOSdev: Sounds like a creative solution. Did it help?
Seppo: Absolutely. Iteration's a huge thing in game development, both from the technical perspective and the design perspective. At Self Aware, we try to get our games playable as early as possible, so that we can iterate on them early, before we've invested a huge amount of time in polishing up something that might be broken.
So by getting the game running on a familiar platform quickly, we were able to tweak and polish the game even before it was ever running on the Pre. This let us focus on getting familiar with webOS and the Pre, as well as implementing the Pre-specific features, without having to worry about how the whole package worked on the platform.
Now that we're familiar with webOS.... Well, you'll have to wait to see what we do next.
webOSdev: How did this compare with other games you’ve worked on?
My experience has been mostly in console game design, where the games require huge teams of artists, animators, designers, and engineers. In contrast, both Word Ace and our previous game Taxiball were developed by four full-time team members and a little extra help. Prototyping has been really fast, our iteration time is incredible, and that rapid-fire development means that we never spend very long working on something before we know whether it works or not.
Which means that we only spend time refining things we already know work. Compared to console development, where it might take a year to figure out whether your design makes sense, developing for webOS is much, much faster. In addition, because things can be playable really quickly, it lets everyone collaborate on the design of the game really early in the development process. It's a great way to make games, and honestly, I wouldn't want to do it any other way.
webOSdev: Good to hear. Now, some general questions. First, how many cell phones have you had in the last five years?
Seppo: Enough to play Jenga with.
webOSdev: What do you remember about your first cell phone?
Seppo: Haha. It was a solid little phone, but it had one of the weirdest UI quirks I could think of. In the single-line display (yeah, this was 1998), when someone called you, it would display their name for about a half second, then the display would read, "Answer?" for the next five. The problem was, it took a half second or so to find your phone, or pull it out of your pocket By that time, the display simply read, "Answer?". You either answered it then, or if you waited, it'd usually go to voicemail before ever displaying the caller's name again. Probably the single most pointless caller ID I've ever seen - and I'm sure if you had the same phone, you'd remember that about it, as well. Anyone wanna guess the make & model?
webOSdev: What are your primary communications vehicles?
Seppo: We do almost all our work face-to-face. But late at night, IM, e-mail, text message, or weirdly enough, in-game chat are the order of the day. We've done a surprising amount of debugging via in-game chat.
webOSdev: When you need to stay up all night doing development, how do you keep yourself going?
Seppo: Music, caffeine, the usual. Love goes a long way, as well. We knew we were on to something when you'd fire up the game in the middle of the night, and one of the other Self Aware people would be online playing. We're all really, really excited about the game.
webOSdev: When you get stuck with a development problem, what do you do to get unstuck?
Seppo: Maybe it's just that I've got Palm on the brain, but to get unstuck, I multitask. Flip that card away and go do something else. Go for a swim, walk the dog, write something - your brain's still working on the problem whether you think you're thinking about it or not. Just put things in the background for a while and let them churn.
webOSdev: Thanks for your time and enthusiasm, Seppo. We’d like to send you a copy of Mitch Allen’s book Palm webOS just to say thanks, and good luck with everything.
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