Group 3 - An interview with the guys from Illusion Labs :)
Group 3 “sat” down with the well known Carl & Marcus from Illusion Labs. Carl-Oscar: Alright! First of all we have people in our group that have tried your games before and really love them, Touchgrind comes to mention as soon as we started discussing it in the group. (One player has a score of 2 357 600, with the online rank of something abysmal) Carl & Marcus: Nice, to hear that! We have just released an update with Game Center that shows your rank among friends as well as daily and weekly rank so hopefully you can get a more satisfying rank now :) Carl-Oscar: Who are the people behind Illusion Labs? What is your current most important working policy? Carl & Marcus: Illusion Labs was founded by Andreas Alptun and me in 2008 and we started the company to create a fun and satisfying job. That is still what guides everything that we do. We are now 6 employees and a couple freelancing consultants. We both have a computer and mobile graphics background and we really like it when people go “wow!” about the stuff we make so our tagline is “Creating the wow effect”. Carl-Oscar: The name “Illusion Labs”, where does this hail from?? Who came up with the idea? Carl & Marcus: We were brainstorming names and and felt that we love creating illusions in the form of cool graphics etc in computers. We felt that we wanted our workplace to be a lab for making such things so then “Illusion Labs” felt like the perfect name. Carl-Oscar: I’ve played games since the age of something so small that I can’t remember how old I was. Games are always fun to experience, I’m the kind of person that just got stuck in an RPG, forgetting the real life world sometimes. The world I envision when I play mobile games is that it’s rather brief. My question really is what you think about when your making mobile games. What world do you envision when you create them? What are the boundaries? Carl & Marcus: We often come up with a cool physics idea and build the game around that. We feel that elaborate story-lines work better on a computer. It could work on a mobile platform but it is not our focus. We fell that this area of the market is better covered by the giants of the industry. Carl-Oscar: When you consider the hardware implications as your create a game - what are these, are they known to developers? To me it seems that Mobile devices are bottlenecked on the hardware side e.g. we are kinda missing the old, yet new DirectX that Microsoft introduced for developers. Does this stop you when your making a mobile game? Do we need a Mobile DirectX variant as times flow past this interview? Carl & Marcus: Certainly not. We love working with OpenGL ES! Close to the hardware :) The capabilities of modern mobile devices deliver quite a lot and have not really been a big limiting factor for us. There are usually ways of working around the limitations with different tricks that can be challenging but fun to come up with. Carl-Oscar: Considering the available mobile devices for gaming at the market right now the PSP comes to mind. Do you envision yourself as a company to create templates for other platforms than the products you already use? Carl & Marcus: We might, but we love how easy it is to work with Apple products on the marketing and sales side of things. We can create a game that we love and release it. We don’t have to listen execs from other companies but can rather create what we feel will be cool. Carl-Oscar: If you envision the future right now - what game have you guys produced? Carl & Marcus: Cant really tell you the answer to this question ;) Carl-Oscar: What are the upcoming products? Any secrets? Carl & Marcus: Cant really tell you the answer to this question ;) Carl-Oscar: Who do you hire? What do you look in today’s and tomorrows creatives? Carl & Marcus: We hire the most talented engineers who we feel will be great fun to work with. That being said we don’t have any plan to become a big company. We feel that our small size make us very dynamic. Carl-Oscar: We know that you are coming to Hyper Island in October, and we are all looking forward to that, thanks a lot for taking the time to answer our questions. Carl & Marcus: Thanks, Marcus is looking forward to meeting all of you! So guys! Go and check out http://www.illusionlabs.com/ ! Maybe you will be the one with the highest Touchgrind score? Regards, Group 3
