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Q&A with Mitosis creator Jesse Boyes

Naveen Selvadurai Feb 20th, 2008

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Get inside the mind of Jesse Boyes, creator of the mobile puzzle game Mitosis, for his perspectives on mobile game design and development. Can you give us a little background info on yourself? I've been programming since I was 8, then got into development at government labs for a while, then to a bit of the dot-com action (that didn't last too long). I got started doing mobile development around 2000 when I started work at Vindigo, building a Palm and Pocket PC city guide, then went on to BREW and J2ME handsets. What is Mitosis? Mitosis [1] is a pretty simple action/puzzle game. The goal of the game is to destroy all the white cells on a level before the cells advance over your player. The cells descend from the top of the screen, and your player can shoot each cell - if you're the same color as the cell, you'll destroy it, but if it's a different color, you will swap colors with that cell. How did you come up with the idea for Mitosis? What inspired you to create this? I actually started wanting to write a clone of Zoop [2]. This was a game that I really loved in the 90s, but it never became super popular. I think it was probably just too difficult to play. Mitosis has evolved pretty substantially since then, but the gameplay definitely has Zoop fondly in its ancestry. So one week, my girlfriend was out traveling, and I decided to stay up late all week and write a game pack. I wrote three games, and Mitosis was one of them. We took the games around to a few publishers that we knew, just for fun, and this was the one that stuck. Can you give us an idea of your past projects/games? When I was at Vindigo, we worked a lot on a BREW and J2ME platform for rapid development of cross-platform apps. That became fruitful for rapidly building apps like mobile MapQuest, NYTimes and Plaxo, all with wide handset support. Since then, I've done a bit of consulting doing graphics effects for mobile phones, as well as some mobile game dev for MTV and other companies. I don't know if this is a great thing to admit or not, but I also lead the official mobile version of Mad Libs, which someone pointed out may not actually be a game, because you can't win. Can you talk a little bit about your development environment when doing games? How do you test your application? I use Eclipse with the EclipeME plugin for development, and Antenna for the build and packaging needs (like preprocessing, preverification, obfuscation, etc). I always start off with Sun's reference J2ME emulator. All of the emulators are flawed (with the possible exception of RIM's), so you may as well use the one that most other people are using. It's been useful to us to make heavy use of a web-based emulator when collaborating with people. It's much more convenient to fire off an email or IM with a URL to a playable game than it is to send a JAR/JAD. MicroEmulator [3] is a good one for this. How do you optimize your game and make it playable across handsets? This is definitely the most frustrating part of mobile development! To get Mitosis prepared for T-Mobile, I loaded the game onto handsets well over 300 times, so it was extremely important to streamline the process of specifying the characteristics of a phone, building and deploying the package, then detecting the right device and loading it onto the handset. Also, I don't think this would have been possible for a small shop like ours without our friends at DeviceAnywhere, who wire up hundreds of actual handsets to the internet for testing. That saves us the burden of actually buying and/or begging for phones to fulfill our porting requirements. What made you become a mobile games developer? Have you developed games for other interfaces before? I'm very into writing code for cramped spaces - limited memory, speed, capabilities. It forces you to be more creative as a programmer, and the result is more unexpected. I did a lot of development in a pretty obscure computer art niche known as the Demoscene [4] back in the day, where we really tried to cram as much performance as possible onto a 25 Mhz machine with 1 meg RAM, and make something beautiful out of it. Mobile game development is just that all over again. Do you have some ideas for future versions of Mitosis? We've received a lot of feedback along the way, and have made a lot of changes (both subtle and drastic) to the game because of it. I think that it's more or less mature as a first revision, though there are certainly new directions to explore: multiplayer modes, more special blocks, etc. I don't know what's in the future for Mitosis itself - we are handling ports to other platforms at the moment, and are happy to push it as far as we can. But you'll probably see other games from us before you see a Mitosis 2. Are you working on anything else interesting? Glad you asked! There is another game in the works now - we have a playable demo and concept graphics, and are trying to gauge interest from distributors and publishers. One of the nice things that came out of Mitosis was a LOT of reusable code and tools - everything from a font rendering engine and well-tested audio system to a build/deployment infrastructure - that will make subsequent game development much easier. That aside, I'm also involved in building a location-based city guide called Outalot. Expect to see that launched in New York extremely soon. There's not a lot more I should say about it now except that it is a much larger project than Mitosis. [1] http://www.getjar.com/products/13395/Mitosis [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoop [3] http://microemu.org [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene