Isla Sinaloa - Interview with the developer of a fantastic app

Did you have any prior development or coding experience?

EnsenaSoft has been developing games since 2009. Without a doubt with every game we have pushed ourselves as a team to grow our abilities and skills with each game we do. Learning to create 3d models, animations, work with physics engines and 3d worlds is a far cry from the 2d puzzle games we started with and our best known for.

What was the most challenging aspect of developing mobile app?

The scale of Isla Sinaloa is far beyond anything we have done before. After going from mainly mobile to doing some PC and console development for a few years, we wanted to take that skillset and come back to creating a mobile first game. Completing a project that has over a year of content at launch and figuring out how to pack it all in a size that runs well on the latest mobile hardware and memory limits was harder than we anticipated.

_ENSENASOFT

The interviewee, Blanca Valencia De La A, is the President of EnsenaSoft. EnsenaSoft is an award-winning game developer and publisher founded in Mexico in 2009, and consists of a talented group of designers, artists, programmers, and musicians all committed to creating high-quality digital games content across all major gaming platforms and technologies. With a portfolio spanning hundreds of released titles, it is our continued promise to produce entertaining digital games to audiences of all ages and gaming preferences.

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

One of my favorite games is Peggle 2 on console. It is a classic, but I love the music and energy of the game and all of the little things you can try to unlock beyond completing the levels. I go back again and again when I want a short break. As a company we love Unity and the way it allows us to make a game in a 3d world and bring it to so many different platforms.

How long have you been working on this app?

We have a team of 18 that have worked on Isla Sinaloa for a little over 2 years. While the game is now released, we expect a few more months to bring it to its full potential. It includes many of the animal characters that we have created ro use in prior games going back to Pamela Possum and Sammy Squirrel in our first games in 2009 up to our latest PC and console game, Renzo Racer. Beyond that, we included many of the puzzle and arcade games we have made over the last 13 years into the game as mini-games. So in many ways, it is the culmination of 13 years of work.

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

While it could be enjoyed by a board audience, we expect the game will be most enjoyed most by female audience 30-55. It is a relaxing mid-core casual experience they can escape to enjoy themselves in their free time. I think with many of the puzzles in the game, it is geared more towards adults. At the same time there are many parts they could share with their children and grandchildren and even get them to participate and in many ways, it is accidentally educational.

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.

We have a huge amount of collectible items compared to many games. Creating the buildings to really showcase all of the items instead of them just being part of a book or screen was a lot of fun. This is why I say accidentally educational as you end up learning about so many paintings, flowers, fish, marine life, dinosaurs and things while have fun and solving puzzle at the same time. We learned a lot ourselves while creating the game.

We are also very excited about the wide variety of activities and just how much there is to do in the game. It has been a fun challenge to create a game that is an open world, but meant to be played over a year or more and with enough variety of content so it does not feel repetitive.

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

Based upon early feedback, we are already getting many requests. One of the big ones is localization. We have some of our games in up to 17 languages, but the initial release was only in English even though we are a Mexican company. With over 6,000 lines and almost 50,000 words of text, the price for each new language is much more than all languages for any prior game we have done. So we are getting started and hope to have Spanish, Italian and Portuguese soon, with French, German, Danish and Polish coming behind that. I am sure we will do more, but we need to pace it as the cost and testing of quality takes time.

We are also adding in controller support for Windows and iOS versions. We really made it based upon touch or mouse and keyboard, but did not plan on controller support. We have been surprised how man people have asked for that and so are working on adding it. This is a large task due to the size of project and amount of user interfaces and the 15+ mini games include in the game. But once that is done, it does open up potential we may bring to consoles, even though we originally did not plan for that.

Lastly, we are working to add in party mode so several people can be on same island at same time. We had wanted to wait for launch until this was done. So many people asked us to go ahead with launch so we did it earlier than planned. This is still in the works though and we are glad we launched now as we also have added a bunch of little new details based upon the feedback of these first players.

We have many other ideas on how we can grow the Isla Sinaloa world within this game over the coming years.

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.)?

The best place to go to see the game is our website at http://islasinaloa.com/. We are also active on social media and so far Facebook seems to be the site where we get the most feedback, activity and followers. https://www.facebook.com/IslaSinaloa/