Location: France
Notable apps: Where is my Phone?, Color Cross, Scream in the Dark, Karma Tester
Platforms: PC, Nintendo DS, Facebook, iPhone, Web, and now iPad, X360 and PS3.
Specialty genres: Casual games
Company size: 20 staff
Short description of company: Little Worlds Studio is a French independent videogame developer founded in 2004. The studio has developed over 90 games on Facebook, PC downloadable, Multiplayer Browser Game, Nintendo DS, DVD, iPhone, Xbox 360 and PS3. We are proud of our games based on worldwide bestseller licenses like Tomb Raider, Tiger Woods, Dora The Explorer, Scooby-Doo, Astérix, For Dummies, etc., distributed by Atari, Ubisoft, Big Fish or Warner. The strength of the studio is its team of talented and experienced people, with a strong proprietary technology, to offer total reliability on deadlines and quality.
How did you and your firm get into the iPhone game development business?
Our company is focused on casual games and utilities. We started the company 6 years ago to make games on DVD Players, because we wanted to offer games to everybody. That was 3 years before the Nintendo DS and Wii new casual market arrived. We did great, but when we saw the Nintendo DS, we decided to move to the new platform for casual gamers. Then came the iPhone, which was for us the latest casual game platform. And so, naturally, we started developing on iPhone.
In your opinion, how has the iPhone and Apple’s iTunes App Store changed the gaming industry?
For an independent developer like us, one of the biggest frustration has always been that when you have a good idea, and even if you can fund the project, you still had to go through game publishers to get your game on the shelves! So, the publisher decided if our project would sell or not, based on their own experience. But they are not the market, and as you may see, most of the publishers make mistake in their forecast of success for their own games too. So, with the AppStore, there is no one to decide if our application will sell or not: it is the market which speaks directly. So, as everybody, we do make mistakes when planning a new application, but we also have nice successes, which may never have seen the daylight if we were still in the old days. It changes everything and that’s why you find so many innovative games on iPhone.
Describe the differences between developing games for the iPhone and the iPad.
From a technical or a gameplay point of view, it doesn’t change much. But on iPad, as the screen is bigger, the processor faster, you can have better-looking games. This is the main difference: graphics. Actually, we are finishing our first original iPad game, which will look awesome thanks to the hi-res.
What factors go into how you ultimately price your games?
We believe that except if you are Gameloft or EA and you provide a huge gameplay experience, it is difficult to be over $0.99 / 0.79€, because most iPhone gamers are used to this price. So, we bet on the success to recoup our development investments.
Describe what your dream game for the iPhone would look like.
Difficult to answer… I like many game genres, so there are many dreams I would like to come true 🙂 but check our first iPad game to be announced next month, it is my dream game right now!
