It’s all about the Application for Pixelcocoa

Damian graduated from Northumbria in 2007 with a BA Hons in Multimedia Design. During his studies he’d worked on various freelance pieces with Craig Pirie, also a Northumbria graduate (BSc Hons Multimedia Design) and Richard Leonard (Newcastle University graduate), and on completing their degrees, they decided to make the arrangement a more permanent one. With a later edition of Damian’s brother, Karl, to the ranks, Pixelcocoa was born and with all four being from the Newcastle area, this was to be the company’s home.

Business quickly took off as Pixelcocoa started their company by focusing their time and skills on web development. They are registered Business Link service providers for web development in the North East. However, as the iPhone began to take off so did their ideas for the development of iPhone applications. Although they currently have a few ‘apps’ at various stages of development, it’s KickSwerve that’s made the splash and is currently selling in the Apple ‘App Store’.

KickSwerve bases its game play around a selection of soccer free-kick scenarios, ranging from classic crossbar challenge and tyre targets, through to full-on in-game free kick situations with a wall and goalkeeper to beat. The game was born out of a love of football and experimenting with physics.

Damian tells me, “We were playing around, adding various forces to a ball within a physics game engine and it stemmed from there. We found that firing a ball around an environment was a lot of fun and, all being big football fans, that seemed a great concept for a game. We wanted to create something that football lovers would be able to appreciate and that would reward skill without alienating too many players”.

They certainly appear to have ticked all the boxes as KickSwerve peaked at number 2 in the UK App Store Charts & reached number 1 in Italy and Japan, which is no mean feat with more and more Apps coming on to the market.

With this in mind, I was keen to find out from Damian what exactly goes into making a successful App for the iPhone, his answer was simple “More than people realise, I think!” He went on, “As with any creative projects, it's important to know what you want to achieve from the beginning, whether that's just to get a game into the App Store, create something you're proud of, or make your first million”.

Damian also stressed the importance of using appropriate control schemes for the game you're building and of course the very important aspect of testing your product vigorously before it goes on sale. “Testing is also hugely important, so getting as many testers as possible to play your game is vital to refining it and making it to the best it can be”.  After that it’s all down to your marketing, something which is difficult to predict as the App Store is still a relatively new concept, but it’s something Pixelcocoa seem to have hit right first time.

Pixelcocoa have made a success of their first App so I was keen to find out what was next for the company, “We're also now looking at extending our development to the Android platform (Google's mobile operating system) as well as, of course, the iPad”.

All this, on top of continuing the web development side of the company and working on new Apps, the guys at Pixelcocoa are going to be very busy! Damian assured me though, that this is no problem as they just love what they’re doing, “The variety and relative freedom we have is great - we work hard, but it doesn't get boring because we have a good cross section of work”.

If you’re keen to try your hand at KickSwerve it's available now from The App Store and for further information on Pixelcocoa, please visit their website