Interview with NoodleCake Studios

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Hi, Android users! You know we love to interview people (past interviews here) no matter wherever they are, because we like to know where our favorite apps and games come from. In order to do so, we reached Ryan Holowaty, business, public relations and communications manager and vinyl spinner and…well, he does a lot of things there at NoodleCake Studios. It’s a small company placed in a Canadian city with a funny name, and we wanted to talk with them about their Game-a-week Project first, and about their amazing system to port iOS  games over to Android with no pain and short time. Yes, you’ve read right: no more grumble and grieve over portability from there to here our beloved Android. If there’s an iOS game you’d want to bring to Android, you would wanna call these guys, because they are good both in developing and porting, and I’m sure we all know how much important it is for Android, mobile manufacturers and developers alike.

Of course, it isn’t all about porting great games, it’s also about developing them as well. In this regard, you can’t miss Super Stickman Golf, which was their first game (a sequel to Stickman Golf indeed) and it’s still recommendable to anyone. In addition, I learnt a lot of essential things about Canadian idiosyncrasies that I must share with you. For example, it’s unlikely you meet any sasquatches in open fields thousand miles wide. Likewise, it’s hard to find mountains where there aren’t huge furry faerie monsters around. To complete the picture, wheat fields can be useful to sow and harvest wheat, but if you are looking for Yogi and Booboo you have to cross the border and come down to Montana. By the way, Canada is bounded by the edge of the map to the North.

Above all, Noodlecake Studios is placed there. Let’s chat a while with Ryan.

- NoodleCake Studios. Sounds more as a hipster design studio rather than a clan of code ninjas. Why did you choose that name and how it all started?

 Yeah, Noodlecake is definitely one of those names that sticks with people.  We usually just tell people that lasagne dot com was taken when we went to register our domain so we had to settle on Noodlecake.

Like most mobile game studios, Noodlecake was born out of  the introduction of the iOS App store. In fact a handful of us actually used to all work together at a local software and web development studio and that’s where it all began. Most of us grew up as gaming nerds and would have loved to make games for a living, but before that point we were pretty much dependent on getting on with a larger studio.   That unfortunately was something just not readily available here.  So in their spare time Jordan our lead engineer, and Ty our designer, created the original Stickman Golf and released it on iOS.  It turned out to be a pretty big hit, enough to warrant a sequel anyways.  When the sequel Super Stickman Golf launched to even greater success they decided to break off from our old company and start working on games full time.  I was helping out as a business advisor behind the scenes and eventually the business has grown over the past year to what it is today with eight current full time employees.

 

- Where’s Saskatoon, Saskatchewan? Doesn’t your post mail get lost?

It’s no secret Saskatchewan isn’t really thought of when it comes to game development as we are definitely more of an agriculture based province.  But a little known fact is that Canada is actually 3rd overall in game development output worldwide.  As a country we are only behind the U.S. and Japan, so really it’s not that surprising that more and more independent studios are popping up all over the place.  Granted most people think of Montreal, Edmonton and Vancouver when it comes to AAA game studios and Saskatoon is kind of right in the middle of all that, literally. There couldn’t be a flatter more central part of Canada than Saskatoon.  A local joke is that you can watch your dog run away for 3 days because it is so flat here.

 

There are nerf bullets on the floor

 

- OK, so there aren’t sasquatches around. As we’re safe, let’s talk about what we’ve come for: what’s #GAWP and why our readers should be as excited as we are?

Yeah, the Game A Week Project or GAWP has been really cool so far.  Using our in house porting tech we thought this would be a great way to kick off our newly created Android publishing company and so far so good.  We have already released Trainyard, a previous iOS #1 game, and have some really cool ones coming down the road.  Actually since GDC and the announcement of GAWP we have had increased interest from bigger more AAA titles and are excited about the caliber of studios we have been able to work with to date.  We do most of our announcements through Twitter or Facebook so make sure you follow us to get the inside track on each release.
GAWP officially doesn’t have an end date, but that doesn’t mean we won’t continue to port over great games when it does come to an end either.  We are estimating that near the end of summer the whole GAWP promotion will come to an end.  As mentioned though GAWP is more of a kick off promotion for the creation of Noodlecake Games, our Android publishing company.  We wanted to do GAWP to prove to people that we weren’t just blowing smoke with out porting claims and figured what would be more mind blowing than releasing a game every week? Once it is over we will continue to release great games on Android whenever we are able to.  We really want to build a great cross promotional community for indie developers and that doesn’t mean we are exclusive to just our ported games either when it comes to being part of the network.
In fact the Game A Week Project was something we really didn’t set out to build originally.  When we decided to port Super Stickman Golf (SSG) over to Android, we took the painstaking route of rewriting the all the code.  After 6 months of work and countless mental breakdowns it was decided we never wanted to do that again.  Instead Jordan started working on a way to actually get native iOS code working on Android and through some sort of divine intervention, he did.  Obviously we knew that there were a ton of developers looking for an easier road to the Android market so our porting and publishing division, along with the GAWP idea was a logical next step for us.
See the Portal drone?

- SSMGolf is great (4/5), and Lunar Racer (4/5) and Trainyard (5/5) are even greater. How do you choose which games to fetch from, you know, there?

Well SSG and Lunar were no brainers since they were our own games.  And being the polite Canadians we are, we extended a hand to some of our friends in the indie game community like Matt Rix first.  We wanted to both help them get their games out to a wider audience as well really hit the ground running with some great well known titles.  Other than that though it’s a combination of us contacting devs with great games we think would be a good fit and ones contacting us to get their games ported.  It’s a bit of a balancing act and are becoming more selective as we get more and more interest.  But it should be noted that we also are also bringing some games that are not as widely known on iOS but we personally just loved to play and are bringing in games from all sorts of genres to really give out users a wide variety. Feel free to check out our site  to see what we have released and upcoming.

- We Android users were told that bringing a game from iOS to Android was an impossible mission. Think on Temple Run or Instagram, for example, eternally delayed since a few weeks ago.

It’s no secret that Android has been a bit of a circus for most developers.  The massive amount of hardware variations, ranging from CPU speeds, screen resolutions and touch interfaces, will make even the most seasoned developer curl up in the fetal position and cry.  In addition rewriting your code makes it so you have to maintain multiple code bases, another headache but is something that we have been able to remedy with our tech.  Having the native iOS code running makes it so developers can actually update both versions without the need of a rewrite for the update.  But the harsh fact is no game is going to run perfect on every device.  You wouldn’t try run Diablo 3 on your Commodore 64, would you? Ok that might be an exaggeration but the reality is that sort of thing happens all the time on Android.  Old hardware from 3 plus years ago just can’t handle some of the more process heavy games coming out today.  Yet users just assume because it is for Android it should work flawlessly.  Luckily Google Play allows us to filter out certain devices and versions which lets us mitigate the risk of crashes with problem devices.  We also have a ton of devices in office that we text on and we are confident we can get the games running smoothly on the majority of phones and tablets out there.  With our publishing company we also handle all the headaches in regards to ongoing support and the multiple distribution channels.  Developers just sit back and let us do all the dirty work.

 

Business or pleasure

 

 

- So anyone can reach you and ask about that tech you’ve stolen to aliens? Err, I mean, if I developed an iOS game can I reach you and talk about porting it over to Android?

Being an indie development team at heart we are pretty easy going and invite anyone to talk with us.  As you can imagine we are pretty busy with the porting and developing our own new games, but we are always looking to build relationships with great developers.   Feel free to email me ryan at noodlecake dot com or just info@noodlecake.com and one of us will get back to you sooner than later.

 

- Any advise to those miriad of developers and start ups who are working hard on the next blockbuster?

You know I’m going to give the feel good answer here but in the end it’s really all about the game.  It doesn’t matter what platform you choose to originally develop for, as long as it works and lets you create the game you want to create.  If it turns out to be a quality game that people actually want to play you will be surprised how many doors open up to you. This is something we can speak directly to from our own experience.  The Android market is definitely growing and going to some very interesting places. Providers like Amazon are now getting into the mix, and being somewhat in its infancy compared to the iOS market, we are excited to see where Android goes from here.

- Thank you, Ryan. 

Thanks for the interview, Peter.  It still surprises us when people actually want to talk to us about something other than hockey and poutine.  If anyone wants to get in touch with us and talk porting, GAWP, games or hockey and poutine recipes for that matter, they can email us anytime.

 - Mmm…poutine.

 

this explains it all

 

 

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