Did you meet Phil “The Complete Package” Hassey, developer of the Amazing Real-Time Strategy Game Galcon? He took time out from his games Galcon and Galcon Lite to answer AppCraver’s questions and illuminate us all about the iPhone development process.
1. When did you start developing apps for the iPhone?
Phil Hassey: Best I can tell from my subversion logs, June 3rd.
2. What was the inspiration behind Galcon?
Phil Hassey: I was inspired by an old MS-DOS game called “Galactic Conquest” which was released in 1987. It was a turn based multi-player-at-single-keyboard game:)
3. How did you settle on the price point for Galcon?
Phil Hassey: Random guesswork? Nothing terribly clever, that I’ll tell ya.
4. Roughly how many apps did you sell in the first month of operation?
Phil Hassey: Just Galcon.
5. How did you like the developer tools provided in the iPhone SDK? Is there anything missing?
Phil Hassey: They were pretty okay. I think the addition of a search box in the documentation would have helped a lot. More examples would have been nice too. I’ve always been a huge fan of the PHP documentation. It has great examples, and an area for user comments, so users tend to fill in any notable gaps.
6. Is your company privately owned? Venture backed?
Phil Hassey: At present, it’s just me and my wife. I hire out some of the art and music.
7. What are some of the other iPhone apps that you like?
Phil Hassey: Hmmn. I haven’t actually had a chance to really try any others! I’m planning on getting Koi Pond, because it looks like fun.
8. What kind of features should apple implement in future versions of the iPhone / SDK?
Phil Hassey: Nothing in particular .. It had most everything I needed.
9. Are you working on any other apps that you will be releasing soon?
Phil Hassey: I recently released a real quick and simple app called Watermelons. I’m currently in the planning phase of a couple others. Check back in a month or so, I’m sure I’ll have something new by then!