There aren't as many veteran game developers for Apple devices as there used to be.

Freeverse got bought by ngmoco and is now making freemium games. Texas studio Pangea Software continues to fly the old skool Mac flag however.

It was one of the early success stories when the App Store went live in June 2008, and has continued to support every major Apple technology launch including iOS 3 (iPhone 3.0 OS as it was called then), and iPad.

Maybe we should have expected it to go big with Game Center, as indeed it has, releasing substantial multiplayer updates for three of its games - Nanosaur 2, Cro-Mag Rally, and Enigmo.

We caught up with president Brian Greenstone to find out what it's been like working with Game Center so far.

Pocket Gamer: When did you start working on multiplayer options/Game Center support?

Brian Greenstone: Only about six weeks ago or so. It really didn't take long to add the multiplayer features into the games, mainly because Cro-Mag Rally and Nanosaur 2 were originally multiplayer games in the old Mac versions.

So, we already had all of the art assets, and some of the multiplayer code was still in the iOS versions. It only took about a day each to get multiplayer up and running in each game.

How easy was Game Center to work with?

Game Center was very easy to work with.

After doing Cro-Mag Rally for the Mac many years ago I had vowed never to do another networked game again because it was such a pain, but this time around it was a total no-brainer. GameKit pretty much does everything for you.

Have you yet seen any uplift in sales yet?

Yes, but since the new stuff came out so late in the day yesterday it's hard to say what the amount is.

We did about 300 percent normal business yesterday, but I suspect it'll be much higher today since we have a full 24 hours of sales to work with rather than like 5 or 6 hours yesterday.

What issues do you have to think about when designing multiplayer modes for Game Center?

Latency. Plain and simple... latency.

You try your best to keep all of the players synchronised, but since it takes time for data to get from Player A to Player B, you can never really know each other's true location at any time. This always causes some lack of synchronisation, but it's pretty manageable in these games.

How have you dealt with issues such as people dropping out, lost connections etc?

With people dropping out, we just put up a notice on the screen if all of the other players have left the game, but we need to do a little more for a future update.

There's limited screen real estate, so it's hard to notify users of too many things regarding player states. In general, we rely on the voice chat to give people the extra info.

Why do you think Game Center is important?

Well, it's AWESOME! It makes doing networked games so incredibly easy, and networked multiplayer games are the best kinds of games because it's true competition against other people.

There is now a unified system and interface for doing this on the iPhone, so I would think we'll be seeing a lot more multiplayer games coming down the line.

As a developer, how do you expect to make the most of the opportunity it provides?

I think most of the games we do coming down the line will now support Game Center multiplayer capabilities.

It encourages people to play the games for more than five minutes before deleting them, and it also encourages additional sales because people will want to play against their friends.

Thanks to Brian for his time