Korean publisher Gamevil has built its reputation, both domestically and in the US, on RPGs such as Zenonia and its Baseball Superstars series.

Expanding aggressively globally however, it's been looking for more easily digested fare for the casual gaming audience - something it's most definitely discovered with cute 99c bouncing game Air Penguin.

Developed by Korean studio Enterfly, it's been #1 in 16 countries, including the US, France and Germany.

We caught up with Gamevil's US president Kyu C Lee to find out how and why.

PocketGamer: When did you first find out about Air Penguin?

Kyu Lee: Our relationship with Enterfly started when we first cooperated on our game Baseball Legends, which was published on feature phones in Korea a couple of years ago.

Enterfly noticed the market quickly switching to smartphones, and came up with a title for iPhone, which it originally planned to self publish. When our publishing team presented the title to our management, we really thought that the game mechanics were unique and fun, which gave us confidence this may be big hit.

Did you need to change any significant aspects from that first experience?

Although we thought the core mechanics were very solid, our team and Enterfly had to work together on adjusting the game balance to appeal to the global audience, and also polish the title in a lot of aspects such as the user interface and monetisation. The game looks a quite a bit different compared to several months ago too.

Gamevil hasn't done many publishing deals so how are you finding this?

As you mentioned, Gamevil's organisation is tightly set up in terms of building our own projects. Publishing titles is a fairly new business for us.

Working with different teams within Gamevil such as the game design, QA and marketing departments required a lot of coordination with respect to schedules. We learned from some of our experiences working with UK studio Paw Print on Kami Retro, and our publishing manager Youn Il Jung really stepped up, putting all the pieces together.

Enterfly has been a great partner to work with, especially in terms of its quick turnaround on all of the feedback we have provided. We believe our publishing efforts are improving as we've been working with more developers.

Air Penguin shot to the top of the iOS charts very quickly. What do you think were the main reasons?

The game was featured by Apple, which helped, and we also saw a quick increase on the amount of clicks coming through the twitter feeds right after the launch and noticed that the game was very viral.

I believe the game is visually viral too, and you'll understand what I mean by being 'visually viral' if you've ever seen your friend playing Air Penguin using the tilt controls.

Being another bird, we also believe the icon was very appealing for the audience. We got a lot of responses from our fans that the penguin was very cute.

Have you noticed any differences in terms of how the game has been received in different countries?

One interesting thing was the pattern in terms of how the game hit the number 1 spot in different countries. It first hit number 1 in the US, then in Europe it started from Russia, and gradually came down to the southeastern regions. Finally, it started hitting Asia.

How have you worked to maintain the downloads since release?

I don't think our team and the developers expected the title to be such a huge hit within such a short amount of time, although Enterfly already had a couple of updates planned.

We've been working through the weekends to build more depth to the character, provide more content, hustling to get the Android build out, as well as working on licensing efforts to expand the brand. You'll see more stages in the next update and a new character in the following update.

Regarding shorter term efforts, we've been spending additional amounts of budget on marketing online, and also have posted a video contest to make the game more viral.

Can you be more specific about the updates?

We've already updated to 1.0.1, which has some bug fixes, and we've also given away additional fishes to ease the game.

Version 1.1 will have new levels, which will be playable for everyone, and we're planning on showing the new character in 1.2. We will try to provide more levels every time we do an update.

Will Air Penguin be coming to any other platforms?

Right now, we're working on Android, and we'll try to bring this over to as many platforms possible in the future.

Thanks to Kyu for his time.