Palm Pre Challenge – Interview with Gobico Games’ Dave Balmer

When I started the Palm Pre Challenge, I set developer interviews as a high priority for articles I needed to write. Luckily, so many of you have agreed, and I now have a whole list of people to interview and do app reviews for in coming weeks.

Our first one is Dave Balmer, Owner of Gobico Games and developer of Wobble Words, an excellent game which I reviewed earlier. Dave was a great sport when answering a few questions for me, and I’m glad to be able to post his answers for you here right now.

1. How did you get inspiration for this app (Wobble Words)?

I love classic word games and the top my list are “Boggle” and ”Scrabble”. I started thinking about what a mashup of those games would look like and took it from there. Wobble Words ended up being a “Boggle” like game that has “Scrabble” letter scores and blanks, and some puzzle game elements along with a more exciting way of scoring. I also wanted to make it configurable, so players can turn features on or off. The app ended up with a total of 64 variations, each with their own high scores.

I don’t know of any other word game app that has that much diversity in gameplay.

2. What steps have you taken to become a great app developer in your career? Did you go to school or study under a senior developer?

I started programming at six, and I have to thank my father for that. I started my professional career at 13, and when it came time to go to school and earn a degree, I’d already had five good years as a programmer. I made the call then to continue working and get a degree later. That was 20 years ago.

3. What are the best and worst things about developing for webOS and Palm?

The best thing about developing for webOS is, honestly, Palm. Their OS is great, their development tools are excellent, and their development relations folks go the extra mile to make things happen.

The worst thing about developing for webOS today is the weird random Palm bashing that’s prevalent in the tech press. Some days it’s tough to weather that storm, but ultimately I believe in the platform and that keeps me going.

4. Do you plan on making any updates to your app in the future? What can we expect?

I’m pretty happy with Wobble Words with version 2. Aside from a couple user requests left in the queue, this version feels “done”. So it’ll percolate for a while until I get some exciting ideas for a version 3, hopefully by this fall.

5. Any thoughts on developing another app?

I’m rolling out a couple of new apps, and am about to release “Poker Drops”. It has similar gameplay to Wobble Words but you’re finding poker hands instead of words. I’m trying to bring the best elements of Wobble Words to an audience of people that don’t play word games. Plus it’s a lot of fun (at least, so say my testers). Beyond that? Have to follow @GobicoGames on Twitter to keep in the loop!

Do you have any questions for Dave?

If so, leave them in the comments below (I’ll let him know about them) or catch him on Twitter.

- Sent from my Palm Pre

The Palm Pre Challenge is a series of articles written by Tim Stiffler-Dean. For 30 days, he uses a Palm Pre exclusively for all of his computing needs. You can read all of the Palm Pre Challenge articles here.

Follow Tim Stiffler-Dean and his Palm Pre Challenge here on webOSroundup.com, or on Twitter: @anotherguy and #PalmPreChallenge. You can also see his personal blog AnotherGuy.us