10 Burning Questions with Marek Wyszynski of Infinite Dreams, developers of Jelly Defense

Infinite Dreams has a knack for making great games. Perhaps best known for the tower defense title Jelly Defense, the independent development house has over a dozen top-rated games available from Google Play and has recently unleashed their latest, Shoot The Zombirds. While they have seen plenty of success on iOS, Infinite Dreams took an early adopter approach with Android. Unlike some of the bigger developers who decided to wait out the first couple of years of Android before diving into development, founder Marek Wyszynski and crew jumped right in, though it hasn’t always been easy.

We pitted Wyszynski against our “10 Burning Questions” to get his take on the Android platform and experiences developing fun and addictive games. Read on for the full text!

Phandroid: How did you get started with Android Development?

Marek Wyzsynski: Our strategy was always to create games that could be played on multiple systems. In case of Android we had to wait until the platform started supporting native applications (via NDK). We released our first Android game as early as December 2009 and it was our classic, historical shooter Sky Force.

P: What phone do you personally use?

MW: Currently I use Galaxy Nexus and I’m really happy with it! I’m gonna try Galaxy S3 soon and decide whether I should upgrade or not.

P: What was your biggest challenge in developing games for Android?

MW: I’m not going to be original when I say that the most challenging thing is fragmentation. It’s really difficult to design and develop a game that works great on both low-end and high-end devices. On high-end devices you always want to push its hardware to the limits but on the other hand you need to maintain the compatibility with older devices. It’s always a matter of having a good balance between those two worlds.

P: What has been your favorite game to work on and why?

MW: I believe that my most favourite game that we’ve developed is Jelly Defense. I love the style, graphics, gameplay and music. It’s also very challenging and fun – great to see how many people are enjoying that game!

P: Monetization: in terms of driving revenue, can you tell us about your experience, your strategy, and the overall potential?

MW: Currently we still get most of our revenues using traditional paid model but we definitely see the potential in freemium and in-apps. Actually our latest game called Shoot The Zombirds was released for free and is using full potential of in-apps. In my opinion both models are here to stay – it just depends on how the game design fits into one of the strategies. It’s worth noting that if your game has been downloaded in big numbers you can also get pretty decent revenues from ads. In our case Can Knockdown for Android was downloaded almost 2M times and it’s generating about the same money from ads as it’s paid successor Can Knockdown 2.

P: What do you want to see in future versions of Android?

MW: For at least few years I see Android as the most dominant OS in mobile space. It’s a choice of mass market where people can choose between cheap low-end phones and expensive power monsters.

P: Do you develop for other platforms and how does Android compare to those platforms?

MW: We develop for multiple platforms but our current focus is set on iOS and Android. In terms of revenues iOS is still a big winner as it generates a big chunk of our incomes. On the other hand we see a trend that our Android sales are increasing. We definitely need to understand that demographics on iOS and Android are a bit different and address that in our games. This is what we are working on!

P: If you could give one tip to fellow Android Developers, what would it be?

MW: Keep in mind that you have an opportunity to present your application to hundreds of millions of people. The market is very competitive so don’t be surprised if your first app turns not to be a great success. Work hard, listen to your customers, focus and quality and eventually you will be noticed!

P: Tell us one thing that most people don’t know about you.

MW: Did you know that our games were downloaded more than 25 million times already? :)

P: Which game that you have worked on would you like to see ported to the Google Project Glass concept?

MW: It’s a very interesting question. If Google makes those glasses right then it enables endless opportunities for game developers. For me it just opens the gates to completely new genres using for example a mix of social, geolocation and augmented reality. In case of our games I would really like to play Let’s Create! Pottery and alter the shape of my pot using hands in virtual reality.

Here’s hoping Marek and crew will be around to create such next-gen concepts for Project Glass. If their past success is any indication, we suspect we’ll be seeing awesome games from the group for years to come. If you haven’t checked out some of Infinite Dreams great titles for Android, there’s no better time than now.

Want to get involved in Developer Appreciation Month? Contact us and start your message with “Developer Appreciation Month”.

Don’t miss your chance to win! Sign up for our Developer Newsletter: it’s required to win most of our contests and it’ll feature some huge announcements that you won’t want to miss.