Cursed Treasure – Level Pack - Interview with the developer of a fantastic app

Did you have any prior development or coding experience?

I represent a game developing studio (IriySoft) and we have great game dev experience as we started making games as a studio in 2005.

What was the most challenging aspect of developing mobile app?

To be honest, developing this one wasn’t hard, but this is only because of the previous experience we accumulated doing hard work. First of all, this game is a port from the Flash game that we made almost 10 years ago. And that game, in turn, is a sequel of Cursed Treasure: Don’t Touch My Gems – our very first fully independent strategy tower defense game. We ported Cursed Treasure to HTML5 and mobile-first (thanks to OpenFL) – and it was challenging and took quite some time, and only after that, the porting of Level Pack was smooth. Technically the most challenging things were making the game work full-screen on various devices and adapting the controls to touch controls, for example, we had to add map scrolling.

_IriySoft

Dmitry Pavlenko, the interviewee, is the CEO and co-founder of the IriySoft game development studio since 2005, based in Bryansk, Russia.

Name a few of your favorite apps and reason you love them.

Right now it’s Hearthstone – because it’s a really well-crafted CCG. I played Magic: The Gathering long ago and Hearthstone is a great adaptation of this type of gameplay to mobile.

How long have you been working on this app?

Well, the original game back in 2010 took 4 months. Then Level Pack took 3 months in 2011. Next was Cursed Treasure poring in 2019 that took almost 3 months and then Level Pack took another month.

What need of the user did you have in mind when developing this app?

The goal of making the very first game in 2010 was to make a casual tower defense game that is easy to understand and play for everyone. And the goal of porting it to mobile was to let the players enjoy the game after 10 years of its initial release – it’s still fun to play we believe. Besides, Flash is going to be disabled soon and if the game wasn’t been ported, there would have been no way to play it.

In what way do you think your app is better than similar apps on the market? Please describe in detail what innovation you think you bring and what you are proud of in your app.

The game was innovative in 2010 so I don’t think it can bring anything new now, but it’s still fun and simple. I’m really happy that the players can re-invent it in 2020 :)

What are your future plans and expected features of the coming new versions of this app?

I don’t think we’ll be making more games based on this one, but it may happen that we could make another level pack with new levels and some new features. But most probably, we’ll focus on updating and extending Cursed Treasure 2 instead, that was released several years ago and still has the potential to be improved and expanded.

Assuming new users of your app are reading this page. What do you want to ask them to do (contact you about X, Share the app, etc.)?

I think the main question is: would you like to see another level pack based on the same engine?