It was Oscar-winning screen writer William Goldman who, when it came to predicting the success of movies, reportedly said "Nobody knows anything".

It's a similar situation in the App Store: certainly that's been my experience, particularly when it came to Skee-Ball.

Developed by small indie Graveck and published by Freeverse, it seemed to be a nice enough game but hardly something I'd expect to set the charts alight. (In the interests of full disclosure, I gave it 6/10: "Skee-Ball doesn't accumulate all the fun of the fair, but ... it hits a solid spot".

But even taking into account the naivety of an European audience concerning the power of the Skee-Ball brand for North Americans, the success of Skee-Ball - a game originally released under the title 10 Balls 7 Cups, has been nothing short of spectacular.

It's been the US Top 100 since its September launch; mainly in the top 10, peaking at #1. It's also been as high as #3 in the US Top Grossing chart. Not bad going for a 99c game.

Intrigued by the genesis of the game, as well as its relaunch, I caught up with Matt Gravelle, co-founder and director of production at Graveck, to find out more.

Pocket Gamer: Can you give some background to Graveck and how you got into iPhone development?

Matt Gravelle: Graveck started as two hobbyists developing games in their basements after school and, over the span of 10 years, has grown into a company based in Saint Paul, Minnesota, that's been our full-time jobs for over two years.

One of our defining qualities as a developer is we were the first studio to adopt the Unity engine, and have since become one of the leading studios to focus on games developed within Unity (we do both client and independent work).

A little over a year ago, we were between projects and the Unity's iPhone product was in beta stages so we decided to try it out and 10 Balls 7 Cups was born.

Can you explain the original idea for 10 Balls 7 Cups?

There are a couple major factors that influenced the idea. It was our first iPhone game, so we wanted to keep it simple yet addictive. We wanted to keep the development cycle short because it was a side project. We had a handful of ideas, but we kept on coming back to a Skee-Ball style game. We knew Skee-Ball would appeal to a wide audience, plus we had the PhysX engine just sitting here waiting to be utilised. A Skee-Ball clone as a perfect excuse to use it.

At the start of development, there were no other Skee-Ball clones out there. By the time we were finished with 10 Balls 7 Cups, there were four.

You can imagine we were quite annoyed at this. This is when two key decisions were made: the addition of prizes (although unlike Skee-Ball, 10 Balls 7 Cups only had a text-based list of prizes); and we decided on the name of the game, which was surprisingly hard to do.

I think the addition of prizes was a key to success because it offered something our competition didn't. The name '10 Balls 7 Cups' also gave us a lot of press... although I'm not sure why. Maybe it was because it has the word balls in it?

How much time did you spend tweaking the controls?

Lots. Yikes. It took a really long time. I was tracking some information while I was playing the game and in the end I threw thousands of balls to tweak the controls.

There were a lot of different factors that came into play. One was the ability to have fine control over the ball. For example, I wanted to be able to launch the ball further so it would slam off the backboard, but we ended up sacrificing that idea because by offering a wider range of velocities to roll the ball at, we started losing finer control.

Another was performance. We are walking a very fine line between ball speed and proper physical interactions. It took a long time to find a comfortable spot where control, performance, and realism all meshed together well.

Did you use any other middleware to make the game, and how do you think that improved the quality?

We used the Unity game engine. In a nutshell: Unity rocks. It offered the PhysX engine and a lot of the hard work with iPhone/iPod touch compatibility was done for us we could focus on the game rather than the engine. It was without question vital to the development of the game.

Was the sales performance of the game what you expected?

10 Balls 7 Cups performed a little better than expected - although we didn't really have any expectations since it was our first game. By better than expected I mean that we broke about even in terms of the time we spent on it.

When did the idea arise that you could remake the game, and how did the idea to get the official Skee-Ball license come about?

We've been friends with Freeverse for quite some time, ever since we worked with them on Big Bang Brain Games in 2007.

We met up with them at the Game Developers Conference 2009 for a casual dinner, and we discovered its office was polarised in their opinion of the name 10 Balls 7 Cups. Some thought it was brilliant and others thought it was the worst idea ever. One thing led to another and eventually we decided to try and license the Skee-Ball brand.

Why did you think you needed a publisher?

The decision to license the name Skee-Ball and go with Freeverse as a publisher was kind of a package deal. I suppose that I could have approached Skee-Ball Inc. with a proposal of my own but I was more than happy to let Freeverse handle the negotiations. Marketing is another thing that I'm more than happy to let a publisher handle... I'd rather spend more time developing a new game.

I should take a moment as a quick aside to explain the name Skee-Ball is a game known to virtually every American (Canada and US, at least) between the ages of 20 and 40. I'm honestly unsure how popular Skee-Ball is outside of the US, but I have European friends who have never heard of Skee-Ball in their lives (don't know anybody in the UK). In the US it's an arcade staple, and I think a large part of the success was due to the fact that it's a very nostalgic title.

When you came to remake 10 Balls 7 Cups as Skee-Ball, what were the key areas you wanted to improve?

Our biggest feature request was we wanted to improve was the store. We wanted illustrations of the prizes so that was our main focus at first. We also introduced custom balls you could buy. And there were some balancing issues with 10 Balls 7 Cups that were addressed with the star rating system in Skee-Ball.

How much of the game did you have to rework?

On the surface, the two games don't seem very different besides the illustrated prizes. However I'd say it took just as long to update it as it did to develop the original game. The previously mentioned upgrades plus lot of little factors and the addition of the Plus+ network added a lot of development time.

How easy was it to integrate the Plus+ technology, and what do you think this added compared to the global highscores you'd already included?

I think it added a lot based on user reviews. People love the Plus+ technology. It was not easy to add though. At all. I'm glad we did it but since we were using Unity as our engine, it presented a hurdle in implementing it simply because there was another layer of code we had to work through. One of the biggest difficulties just had to do with testing. It opened up a lot of bug scenarios you wouldn't think about.

Was the sales performance of Skee-Ball what you expected?

Again, with Skee-Ball we didn't have any expectations. The iTunes store is such a wild west market it's anybody's guess as to what's actually going to be popular.

But I did have a good feeling that the brand "Skee-Ball" and the amount of time we spent making it as high quality as we could would catch people's attention. I was hoping and felt that it was a realistic expectation that we would be in the top 100. In the end, however, Skee-Ball has completely blown away any expectations and is still a bit surreal.

When did it become obvious to you that Skee-Ball was going to sell a lot more copies than 10 Balls, 7 Cups?

It was apparent before it was even released. The name Skee-Ball is one of those cases where it is both a brand name and also completely defines the game. Competitors may have good names that do a fairly good job of describing the game, but in order to really know what the game is like you have to click on it and view screenshots.

The name Skee-Ball requires no additional investigation because it's completely defined right there in that eight letter name. The brand name plus the marketing power of Freeverse was a good formula and I knew right away it was going to be a bigger success than 10 Ball 7 Cups.

What parts of Skee-Ball are you most happy with?

The silly prizes add a lot of nostalgic fun and collecting the custom balls is quite addictive, which makes the game for me. I'm also happy with the controls and balance.

I hope a large part of why people become addicted to Skee-Ball is it's difficult enough that it keeps the player challenged, and to get a perfect 8,000 point game is not only hard but insanely lucky so there's almost always a higher score to shoot for.

What plans do you have to support Skee-Ball?

We're still trying to figure that out. There are a handful of feature requests and there are always more prizes to add - so we'll see what direction we end up taking. If nothing else I'm hoping to find time to add some prizes. Any prize suggestions?

When it comes down to categorising the success of Skee-Ball, how much do you attribute to the new game, how much to the new licence, and how much to the new publisher?

I'd say it's a fairly even three-way split. The license is hugely popular in the US, Freeverse was able to market it properly and get it noticed, and our hard work on development hopefully showed through.

It's been said the App Store is a meritocracy, so while you're no doubt very happy about the success of Skee-Ball, are you also a little bit depressed that it required a licence to be a big hit?

I think the point where I become a little depressed is looking forward, it will be much harder to have future titles be successful - and yes it's because without a licensed property it's a jungle out there. But a licence isn't everything, and we still see successful games that come from seemingly out of nowhere. There are still a lot of ideas out there and a lot of things that haven't been done or could be done better, we just have to figure out what that is.

The App Store is what it is. There are a lot of arguments as to why the App Store is broken and it is unfortunate that the price point of games on the App Store are increasingly low (developers need to eat, after all!).

Whenever I start getting bitter though I remind myself to take a step back and look at the big picture. Apple is a big company, and like any other company its primary interest is to further its success, and the App Store is hugely successful so why would it want to change it?

I can't fight it - the App Store isn't a democracy - so I'm gong to roll with it and try to find new ways to create a successful app or if we need to, move to a different platform because this one is getting mighty crowded.

What's next for Graveck?

That's a good question! Have any good ideas?

Thanks to Matt for his time.

You can see what Graveck gets up to next via its website and Twitter.

Skee-Ball is available from the App Store [link] priced 99c, €0.79 or 59p.

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