macelleria

Tom Cain is the sole developer of Smallware, a software company focused on gaming. So far, Smallware has published two games for the mac platform: Solavant, a solitaire suite with over 200 solitaire games and Septavo Tangram that features 1000 Tangram puzzles. This is his interview:

What got you started on building software for the mac and creating Smallware Software (cool name btw)?

I've been a Mac user for a long time. My original profession is graphic design, which I have a BFA in, where Macs have a strong presence. The advertising industry that I worked in for many years uses Macs almost exclusively in the art departments.

Smallware itself started when I saw an opportunity to make software for the Palm handheld platform. I have a background in programming and studied it as a minor in college. The Apple Newton handheld was a device I really liked and I had played around with making software for it. When the Palm came out I was pretty sure it would take off, so I wanted to try making software for it. Two partners and I owned a small ad agency at the time and I convinced them that we should try branching into software. It was just a sideline idea. So "Smallware" originally applied to a company that made handheld software where the name was more clever. :)

Around 2004 it was clear that the once fast-moving Palm software market had slowed down. I wanted to branch onto another platform and I wanted it to be niche. Mac was an obvious choice for me - I'd been using them since the Mac IIsi.

You create games that "challenge your mind". Solavant is a great paradigm and the same thing goes for your newest game, Septavo Tangram. In the age of "instant gratification" and cheap thrills in gaming and elsewhere, do you find it hard to "sell" these kind of games that rely on your brain instead of fancy visuals? What's your target group?

It actually isn't as hard a sell as it first seems. There is likely an audience for just about anything and most of them aren't served very well because most software products target the largest common denominator. It's risky to develop for niches because the audiences are smaller. On the other hand, it's risky to develop for large audiences because of competition.

It became clear to me as I developed Smallware's original Palm solitaire product through 4 versions that there was an underserved audience of clearly intelligent people that enjoyed thinking games. The product evolved in that direction based on user feedback. As a graphic designer I tended to want to make the visuals fancier, but the audience actually preferred the cleaner, simpler look. I just carried this idea with me onto the Mac with Solavant Solitaire. The Mac itself and it's audience fit well with this idea. Smallware software isn't for everyone, but the people who do like it tend to *really* like it. That's the best kind of user a software company can have, in my opinion.

What kind of development tools do you use to create / enhance your apps?

I've been using REALbasic to create the Mac software. It was suited for the type of games I planned to make and it was going to be easier for me to get up to speed with. Also, I had never developed for desktop computers before and didn't know what to expect. I was planning to make a niche product on a niche platform - so, honestly, I felt better knowing that REALbasic would let me port the game easily to other desktop platforms.

But my hunch was right and the Mac is an even better commercial software environment than I thought. I do like the idea of Apple's native Cocoa environment and hope to use it someday for other games.

You had/have a very successful Solitaire suite for the Palm platform. Now that the iPhone/iPod Touch platform is making waves as the "next big thing" in mobile platforms and Apple will provide an SDK for it, do you plan on building the definite Solitaire Suite for the iPhone? The touchscreen interface seems like a perfect fit for these kind of games.

You're right about the touchscreen and the potential of the device. I have an iPhone now specifically to explore it's development possibilities. I'm planning to make software for the iPhone if Apple releases the SDK in a way that works for Smallware. Right now I don't know if the platform will be completely open like the Mac or closed off like you see with videogame consoles. If they close it, I'm not sure how Smallware could afford to work with it. Apple has expressed security concerns and closed development is a way to handle that. We'll have to see how they do it.

I actually don't plan to build *the* solitaire suite for the iPhone. I believe a definitive suite would require features that Smallware won't include because it doesn't best serve our thinking audience. I hope to build the definitive solitaire suite for our typical audience, though. :)

Also, I do have a working prototype of our software running on iPhone's Safari browser, which I let you try out last month. I think the browser works well for lots of different apps, but maybe not for games. Our games don't even have much animation in them, but the input feels very slow using the browser. I think our audience may be disappointed with a web solitaire game because of how it will behave, so I'm holding out for the native SDK.

Your Solitaire suite for the mac, Solavant (and it's stripped down version Sol Basics Solitaire), is in my opinion, the best looking Solitaire game for the mac platform. There are a lot of trashy looking Solitaires out there but yours stands out for it's classy visuals. Septavo Tangram also offers a great interface, that knows when to avoid excessive use of flashy animations. Did you design the UI and the elements of all your apps by yourself?

Thanks! Yes, I design everything myself including the software web sites. To me, there's a certain look that Mac applications should have and that's the direction I'm taking it in. I actually don't think Solavant is quite there yet. I've made some slight interface changes in version 2.5 that's being released this week, and there will be even bigger changes in version 3.0. I think I'll have it "right" in version 3.

One problem is the temptation to add more visual stuff. Some players ask for extra things that are good ideas, but they don't quite fit with the overall goal. I hate disappointing players, but Solavant probably isn't really what they're looking for. There are some other good solitaire games out there that they would like better. I'm afraid that if I adapt Solavant to please everyone then it will end up pleasing no one.

However, lots of people have requested alternate deck choices and that's something I hope to get in by version 3. The best thing may be allow players to design their own decks and share them since the Mac has lots of very artistic users.

Solavant 2.0 introduced a community aspect to the game. You can sync your wins with Smallware's servers and get other people's wins as well. You can then chose to play games that are "winnable". There are more than 77.000 winnable deals on your server right now, so I guess that the new feature was a success. What got you to introduce this feature? What's in store for Solavant 3.0?

An interesting puzzle for solitaire developers is the idea of offering deals that are known to be winnable. "Winnable" means the deck isn't completely stacked against you because of the random shuffle. Those kinds of games are the worst because you lose even though you didn't make any mistakes. So it's known that winnable deals may be preferable to some players.

The puzzle is how to make sure the deck is winnable. The discussions tend to drift toward complex algorithms or genetic things that go over my head where the software takes any given shuffle and plays it out in every possible way to determine if it is winnable. It just occured to me one day that the result of doing that would be trillions+ of known winnable deals. Who is going to play all of those? No one could possibly do it, so what good would having that many known winnable deals be? That's when I realized that the players themselves were solving this particular puzzle as they played - players were figuring out what deals were winnable by winning. After that realization I just fixed it so players could easily send those won deals to the server and others could download them.

Here's something that occured to me once I saw how many people were using the feature: do people enjoy playing winnable games, or do they actually enjoy winning the games and sending them to the server? I have no idea if anyone plays the winnable deals, I just know they are contributing them. So for version 3 I plan to build in optional player profiles so other players can see who is contributing what. This should be more fun for people who enjoy syncing a batch of wins to the server.

How do you choose what your next software/game is going to be? Do you evaluate the market first by doing research and trying to feel a "void" or do you simply choose to create a game that interests you no matter the number of contenders in the same space?

My problem here is my marketing training. I think I spend too much time analyzing the market and kill off some potentially good ideas because I don't think they are viable. It would be different if Smallware was hugely rich, but right now I can't afford for a game to do poorly. But I do over-analyze.

The good thing about making games is that they really don't compete like other software does. There are people who play multiple solitaire packages because of their differences. These kinds of people are in Smallware's audience because people who do this tend to be fanatical about their game choice, and I like fanatics. :)

However, I do think it's important to fill a void if your goal is to make a living. Burning Monkey Solitaire for Mac is a really good piece of software, especially if you like the humorous angle it has. It wouldn't make sense to try to make a "better" Burning Monkey Solitaire package, it's already great. It makes more sense to make a solitaire package that's nothing like Burning Monkey for people who prefer something other than the humorous angle. At least it does to me.

Septavo is a great way to waste some limited free time, between tasks etc. It's also the first game for Smallware, available for the Windows platform as well. This, seems to follow a trend of other previous mac-only software houses, like Rogue Amoeba's Airfoil and Plasq's Comic Life that now have Windows versions counterparts. What's the story behind this decision? What's the sales ratio between the mac and Windows versions of Septavo?

I saw this opportunity in the number of people searching Google and Yahoo for tangram software. I used to love playing tangrams as a kid and made my first tangram game for the Palm platform. There really aren't any big, modern tangram software packages for any desktop platform, so I thought I'd try to make something for those people searching for it. I figured a lot of those searches would be school-related and that lots of schools would be using Windows, so I decided to make it for both platforms to cast the widest net. Plus, the REALbasic software I was using made it trivial to make a Windows version as well.

Some of my assumptions proved to be wrong. The Mac version is outdoing the Windows version 5 to 1. I think it's because Smallware's typical audience gravitates toward the Mac. There are changes I could make to Septavo to appeal more to the Windows crowd and I've considered making them, but ultimately decided against it. Septavo is pretty much what I wanted to make, and it seems Mac users like what I make more than Windows users. So there will probably not be any more software released by Smallware that runs on Windows because I don't think it's worth the effort.

(That sounds weird to me, because in my experience the vast majority of developers look at it from the opposite direction: Is it worth the effort to develop for Mac.)

I noticed that you offer a lot of pricing flexibility for your Solitaire games. One can choose between the stripped down version, Sol Basics Solitaire, that offers 3 popular card games (Spider, Klondike & Free Cell) for 9.99$, the Solavant Spider that offers 12 Spider-like solitaires for 15$, the Solavant Core edition for 17$ that offers the 25 most popular Solitaire games and finally Solavant with all 223 solitaire games in 3 editions as well: Student licence for 17$, Single license for 27$ and Family license for 37$. How is that working for you? Don't your customers get confused? Do you offer post-upgrade options as well? Let's say I bought Sol Basics Solitaire and enjoyed it so much, I decide to buy a single license of Solavant. Do I get a discount?

I haven't had any players complain about being confused, but they could just not be telling me. :)

At first we only offered the full Solavant package with the three licensing options. The Solavant Core and Spider versions were added later because lots of players were asking for stripped-down versions. They liked the idea of hard solitaire, but they didn't care about a large number of games.

Later I discovered that I had this all wrong. It took some talking with players over time before I figured it out. Most of these people were switching to Mac from Windows and OS X does not include any solitaire games like Windows does. Like most of our users, these people are fanatical solitaire players but they just like 1 or 2 game types. After I realized what they really wanted I stripped Solavant down into Sol Basics, which has 2 Klondikes, Free Cell, and 3 Spiders. I knew I had it right when Sol Basics caught Solavant's unit numbers even though it was released a year after Solavant.

Sol Basics is so successful now that the Solavant Core and Solavant Spider packages will no longer be sold as of version 2.5. We sell almost none of these since Sol Basics came out. Current Core and Spider players will be upgraded to 2.5, it's just that version 2.5 won't be sold to new players and will be removed from the order web page.

We do offer upgrades within our solitaire package line and many players have used them. It's a simple formula: Smallware credits you 100% for your previous purchase and applies it to the upgrade. So if you bought Solavant Core for $17 and want to get the full Solavant for $27, just write us and we'll set you up with a store link that let's you upgrade for the $10 difference. There's no time limit on this.

Something I've been meaning to ask you for some time: Where do you get all those ideas for new solitaire games? Solavant 2.5 will add 17 new solitaire games, bringing it to a staggering figure of 240 solitaire games!

I have several reference books that have hundreds of historical solitaire rules and I've developed a few. I come from a huge family where we used to play games a lot as kids, and my grandmother and great-aunts taught me lots of solitaire games. I still have my grandmother's book she taught me from, "150 Ways to Play Solitaire" by Alphonse Moyse published in 1950. Most of the games in Solavant are ones I've known about and played for 20 years. There are certainly more than 1000 known solitaire games and probably many more when you count the proprietary games created for the huge solitaire packages on Windows. Everyone I talk to is surprised by the number, probably because solitaire isn't as popular as it was a hundred years ago.

How about Tom Cain as a mac user? You spend top dollars to get the latest and greatest mac pro hardware or are you a happy macbook user? What's your favorite apps that fill up your dock bar?

We tried to keep cutting-edge if not bleeding-edge Mac hardware in the shop when I was in advertising full time. But the last desktop Mac I had was a G5. Now I have a Macbook Pro and my wife has a Macbook. These Intel Core 2 Duo chips make these the fastest Macs we've ever owned and they can do everything we need. I just hook a Cinema Display, mouse, and keyboard up to mine and I forget it's a laptop. We shouldn't need new Macs for quite a while.

I have REALbasic on there for making software, but otherwise I use fairly standard apps. Safari, TextWrangler and Cyberduck for web development. Photoshop, Illustrator and FontExplorer for design. And Calculator because humans don't add manually any more. :)

Let's get back to the iPhone as a gadget. Do you own one? Do you think that Apple will ignite the mobile "pc" platform market with the iPhone as it did for personal computing with the original Macintosh 24 years ago and digital music industry with the iPod+iTunes ecosystem 7 years ago?

I do have one and it works great. But I've got the same complaint as everyone else - it's slow over the cell data network when you're used to broadband.

I think the iPhone will do very well, but I don't think iPhone will have the same effect as those other Apple products. Mac and iPod were among the first devices in a new tech space, but iPhone is a cell phone and an iPod, both of which have been around for years. From a marketing perspective I don't think the situation is similar enough for ignition. I think they could have done it with the Newton when the handheld idea was new, and would have done it if the press hadn't jumped on the handwriting recognition feature as the "coolest" part of the thing. I think Palm actually ignited this market when they picked up where Newton left off. The growth of Palm devices was staggering.

Also, iPhone is a convergence product, and those typically don't do as well as people think they should. I don't think the "why" of this market phenomena is completely understood but it does happen. Hopefully Apple will get over that hurdle and grow the userbase large enough to keep it going for a long while.

Writing software is cool, especially if you create games. But working for yourself brings lots of problems, the most obvious one being how to convince yourself to get to work. Do you self-impose deadlines to get some work done? What do you do with your spare time?

Writing games is cool, but writing solitaire games is not so much cool. My nephews will tell their friends that I make games which they think is awesome - until I tell them it's solitaire and puzzle games. They just can't get excited about that.

I pretty much float around on getting work done. I've worked for myself or owned the shop since 1994 and I've worked at home for most of that time, so I've learned that I either get it done or I don't eat. Now that I have two kids I tend to take work more seriously. It's not that I'm a flighty type of person. I think it's 4 parts being easily distracted by many projects going on at once, and maybe 1 part laziness. :)

Honestly, I just know that it has to be done and I get it done. There's no formula to it for me. I wish there was, though, I think I could get things done faster.

My spare time right now is taken up with building a house. I'm doing the work with a contractor friend of mine, and we're doing nearly all of it ourselves. Mostly it's to learn how to build a house, but it's also so my family can live in a nice house that we otherwise wouldn't be able to afford. It's been fun so far and it's good exercise for me since I usually work at a desk. I recommend building your own house to anyone with a schedule that allows them to do it, it's going to be a good investment for us.

What's next for Smallware in terms of software?

I have several things I'd like Smallware to release. Currently I'm waiting to see what happens with the iPhone SDK. If that happens in a way that works for Smallware, we'll be making a few apps for it next.

Thanks Tom!