Interview: Soeren Walls, creator of Gravl

Soeren Walls is the creator of Gravl, a 2D puzzle platformer with an interesting mechanic: the player controls gravity by hitting certain switches as he moves along.  For a visualization of this concept, check out the game's trailer:

Gravl recently released on the Google Play Store for Android devices, and it has already been downloaded over a thousand times.  I decided to talk with the developer to get an inside look at the process of making and marketing this game.

If you would like to listen to the interview in its entirety, check out the Soundcloud player below.  (My apologies for some audio issues near the end.) Otherwise, feel free to read the transcribed highlights.

So, Soeren, tell me a bit about what it’s like developing a game and putting it out on the market.

It’s super high stress.  Lots and lots and lots of work, hours and hours—but it’s very rewarding, I’ve got to say that.

You made this game by yourself.  What kind of hours did you put into the coding of Gravl?

I started about six months back—well, actually, I guess it’s more like eight months now, since it was back in November—and I put around a total of eight hundred hours into the design and programming of the game.  Any free time I had (after school, or in between extra curricular stuff), I spent coding alone in my room.

That’s crazy!  Even with you spending eight hundred hours working on the game, were there any features you had to cut?

One of Gravl's switches.

There’s actually a lot of stuff that I still want to do with the game, that I’m working updating right now.  I’m planning on adding twenty-five levels to the game (there are twenty five right now) along with more gravity switch types.  Right now there are just up and down switches, the rotating blocks, timed gravity switches, and some jumpy ones.  I’m working on developing some teleporters and that kind of cool stuff.  I released it with the minimum viable product sort of idea, just to get it out there and see what people’s initial reactions were.
  

But yeah—there’s still a lot I want to do with it.

I thought it played well even without these features you’re planning to add.  That said, one thing that disappointed me was the lack of story.  Did you consider adding in more cut scenes than the one at the beginning? 

Phil, Gravl's silent protagonist.

Right.  The funny thing is that the story was the very last thing I added because I actually came up with this idea for the game back in eighth grade, six years ago.  I had just learned basic programming skills and I wanted to make a game.  So I thought of that idea—and I still have the basic PC version of this game somewhere on my computer—and then I just dropped the project after I made like three levels.  Then this year, when I learned how to code Java and I was trying to figure out what kind of app I should make, I remembered that I still had this really basic project that I worked on back in eighth grade.  So I thought “Hey!  Maybe I could do that.”

So I took this game—and it was a really basic game, just a ball with a hardened side, no astronaut or any of that cool stuff—and I made it into Gravl.  At the last minute I decided the game needed something to give you sympathy for the character, some sort of connection, so I made him an astronaut instead of a little ball.

One of the aspects of Gravl that I really liked was the music.  What was the process of writing the music?

My brother actually did that.  He has been producing music for a long time, and he got one of his songs last year signed by a German record label.  I couldn’t tell you the name of it, but he went ahead and gave it to them for free even though they offered him some money.  He’s been making electronic music for quite some time, so I asked him if he could make some music for the game and he said “sure.” 

We went through several demo tracks he was giving me, asking me for my feedback, and we decided on that one.  We really liked it initially, and that’s why we decided to release Gravl with that track, but now he’s working on a new track to replace the current one.

Gravl is a very difficult game—even though hundreds of people have downloaded it, only the top twenty on the leaderboards have actually beaten it.  Did you have people test the game?

Very extensively, yeah.  But it was only a select group of people.  I had three beta testers from about the beginning of development help me catch bugs and figure out everything that was wrong with the game, as well as give me feedback on what they thought the blogs should be.  In fact, two of those people are in the credits, and the other one is my brother.

Seems pretty impossible to me.

I really wanted it to be challenging.  The first level is pretty darn simple; you just press the right side of the screen, then the left side, and then you’re done.  I wanted it to be a really simple concept, but I also wanted it to be expandable into higher levels.  One thing I like about puzzle games is when you know how to do something, but your personal skill level isn’t high enough for you to be able to do it yet.

And that’s what I think makes a game like Gravl so addicting—you know what you need to do to progress, but you just can’t yet do it.  And that makes you keep trying, because you know you’ll eventually figure it out.  For me, that’s something really attractive about puzzle platformers.

One last question and I’ll let you go:  Do you have any advice to any other indie developers out there?

My advice would be that if you’re trying develop [as an indie developer] for money, it’s not going to work out.  If you’re doing it for fun, it’s going to be rewarding no matter what happens.  Unfortunately, the innate state of being an indie developer means you’re not going to be making money from your stuff—at least at first, until you pick up some momentum with your brand and your name.

I had to learn this the hard way: releasing a game on the app store only works for huge brands.  You either need to have a gigantic budget or tons of resources in order to get your app to any level of decent popularity. The app store is not built for indie developers.  That’s a sad realization I learned by going through this process. But if you’re doing this for fun and you just want to have something so you can say “Hey, that was an idea in my head and I did that, go to the app store and check out my game”—well, that’s your reward.

You have to think about the reasons you’re doing these things, as in what motivates you and why do you like being an indie developer.

You can find Gravl at gravlgame.com, or through Facebook.  If you're also interested in Soeren's upcoming projects, check out his website and Twitter.

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