Gavin Bowman is a developer at Retro Dreamer - a small indie dev team founded with artist Craig Sharpe.
Both are old school gaming fans from the UK living in Los Angeles, where they help each other battle against overt politeness and cravings for fish and chips.
The duo's mobile game was Sneezies, and their more recent titles include Velocispider, Duckers, and Ice Cream Jump. But what's it like to be an indie developer working in a US industry that doesn't always support the little guy?
'Huge and open'
While he and partner Sharpe like the freedom that comes with the territory, Bowman acknowledges that things can be a bit tricky.
"It's great picking and choosing your projects, and the marketplace is huge and open," he said.
"The downsides are that it is risky and tough, there's a lot of competition and a lot of big money in the market, standing out takes a lot of effort, smart choices, and a little bit of luck."
Sneezies
Sneezies was published by Chillingo at the end of 2008 and still maintained today. However, Bowman and Sharpe opted for the self publishing route thereafter.
There haven't been too many trade-offs, he said, and the difference between working with a publisher and self publishing games has proven smaller than it might seem.
Even Chillingo, he notes, didn't make any changes, making it a non-issue.
" if the publisher was funding the game," he said, "I'm sure we'd notice some [more] differences. Even if the development process doesn't change, working with any publisher will change the dynamics a lot at launch and post launch."
Mother duckers
The team's latest independently developed game, Duckers, uses the free-to-play business model, offering the app up free to players, with no need to ever purchase in-app items.
Extra content is available, of course, including various characters to play the game with (Mother Duckers, anyone?), health potions, extra lives, and a variety of power-up hats to help gather even more gems and gold.
Ice Cream Jump - a game discovered by many players of other Retro Dreamer titles thanks to the studio's prevalence for in-game advertising - follows a similar model, letting gamers download the app for free and providing an adorably fun gaming experience, hooking players in before offering the option to purchase items within the game.
Ice Cream Jump
Bowman says that even though these more recent games like Ice Cream Jump and Duckers have been a ton of fun to make, "cross platform development brings with it a lot of busy work and maintenance that I probably underestimated!"
The team spends a lot of time searching for the perfect balance between making a game that is fun for its players while keeping the budget and scope of each project manageable.
Spirit
Making sure a game is enjoyable while still finding ways to monetise the experience - without taking advantage of younger players, for example - takes a lot more behind the scenes workt hat is immediately apparent.
"I think these recent games are the closest we've come to that in all our years of mobile game development," he said, "and I hope we can continue to build on it with updates and new games."
Bowman didn't reveal any new titles, instead preferring to talk about games already released games that serve as examples of the studio's continuing assault up a learning curve in an ever-expanding pool of corporate and mid-sized app store development teams.
With seven games released for iOS, and several more on Android, this two-person team continues to find meaning and relevance in creating games for mobile devices.
Here's hoping that spirit continues, as diversity in the mobile gaming space is a priceless commodity, and one we all can support as gamers and fans of the devices we love to play games on.
Thanks to Gavin for his time.
