USM are the iOS developers implementing the legendary game of Setters of Catan. Settlers of Catan is perhaps the most recognisable of all the Euro games, having expansions of Seafarers of Catan, Cities and Knights, and a collection of smaller expansions found in Traders and Barbarians. Not to mention the expansions for each of these that expands to 5-6 player games. However, USM are also the developers that implemented the iOS versions of Ingenious and Keltis.

In this interview we have Thorsten Suckow Project Manager for games and apps at United Soft Media Verlag GmbH.

Note: that USM are primarily a publishing company and collaborate with different development teams. Catan is developed in cooperation with exozet games from Berlin. They’ve successfully been working with exozet for years now, starting with the first Java version of Catan.

Angelus: We’ll get to those games later, but the big focus for now will be Catan. Catan is easily one of the giants of the gaming industry, often labelled a gateway game to eurogames. It was also one of the very first eurogames to be implemented into an iOS format, I think maybe even the very first if I recall. Since this effectively helped pioneer the large variety of iOS euro board games websites like ours owe something of a thank you. What was the line of thought that prompted this development?

Thorsten: We already published Catan and Ingenious for java-based feature phones a few years ago and the first PC version in 1995. Bringing these games to iOS was the obvious choice: This new platform simply offered so much more in regards to display resolution and usability (touchscreen instead of tiny navigation buttons etc.) than what had been available on mobile devices before.

Angelus: How did you go about securing the rights to implement this game and what was your interaction with Mayfair like?

Thorsten: USM belongs to a group of companies that also includes KOSMOS, the original German publisher of the board game “Settlers of Catan”. Therefore we have a longstanding relationship with the game’s inventor, Klaus Teuber, who personally provided the basics for developing the AI opponents and keeps track of the game’s further development.

We’ve partnered with Mayfair to include their Catan graphics into the game in its last major update, so the user can now choose between the two original board game layouts (KOSMOS and Mayfair) as well as our “classic” look. Last but no least we’re cooperating in regards to marketing – not all Catan players know that there are mobile versions of the game available and others are first introduced to the board game via our adaptations.

Angelus: One of the main questions that I would challenge USM with is the interface around the trading and bidding. My position on board game implementations is that games with a heavy element of bartering, bidding, or player trading tends to be a stumbling block when it comes to implementation on the iPad.

Normally when played physically, the interactions are a lot more fluid and (unofficially) allow for a lot of promises and bargains, such as a promise not to place the robber on your square, or the trade of a random or unknown card. Granted some of these softer trading options would be extremely difficult to implement on an iPad and may not be worth the pay off. Perhaps the biggest barrier in the trading is that none of the other players are proactive about trades, they are entirely reactive to what you offer.

Normally this proactive bidding from opponents gives a player an idea of what’s on the market before having to reveal what he has to offer. So, I would ask whether USM has any visions about what it might be able to do to streamline the trading and make it more organic?

Thorsten: Certainly the trading aspect is one of the most challenging design decisions: What is a short exchange of words on the gaming table would necessarily mean manipulating the offer a few times in the trade menu of any digital version. At the same time many players request that the game’s speed is increased – offering more trade options would further increase a turn’s length. This isn’t a bad thing, but with both casual and experienced board gamers playing Catan we need to find a balance between different expectations on gameplay. We’ve added features like trading any resource for specific one (“?” option in the trade menu) and will continue to optimize the UI and AI behaviour.

The one-after-another trading cycle currently implemented in Catan mobile is probably the fairest way to ask your fellow players for their trade offers and counter offers. Adding features around pro-actively communicating one’s trading demands and offers is something we have on our roadmap for the upcoming multiplayer mode. This will allow players to show their wanted and on-offer resources to others while it’s not their turn. We might extend this to AI players, too.

Angelus: When Seafarers of Catan was released, I would opine that it made Seafarers a lot more accessible to players. I, for one, was a player that found it difficult to enjoy the Seafarers expansion on the physical board game, but have loved it in the iOS implementation. I distinctly remember starting the campaign and finding over the course of about two days feverishly completing the campaign. It caught me with a desire for ‘one more game’.

So now for a couple of questions on Seafarers: the first being on what were the most difficult features to implement, and secondly what prompted the desire to deliver a loosely affiliated collection of scenarios into a contiguous narrative?

Thorsten: The narrative was developed by Klaus Teuber and his team. We agreed that connecting the scenarios via a small narrative would benefit the AI players as they’re displayed like actual “Catanians” and not only abstract “Hard AI 1” “Easy AI 2” opponents etc.

The most difficult features were definitely the extra rules that are present in some scenarios and reward extra victory points. Sometimes VPs are scored for building somewhere that would normally be an absolutely inferior position, e.g. on small islands with only one resource. However when building on the mainland isn’t possible anymore or when settlements on these small islands reward extra VPs, the AI has to adapt accordingly based on specific scenario rules and game progress.

Also, the increased map sizes of the Seafarers maps imposed some challenges, especially on the iPhone screens. So we did quite a lot of tweaking when it comes to auto-zooming and navigating across the game map.

Angelus: We’ve reported previously at ipadboardgames that the expansion for Cities and Knights is currently being developed at USM. Naturally, Cities and Knights increases the complexity of the game by an order of magnitude. What sort of stumbling blocks have you encountered, trying to implement this, and what aspects of its development caught you off guard or surprised you?

Thorsten: On the iPhone/iPod screen real estate is a major problem: The UI already needs to display lots of information and still in Cities and Knights we need more room for things like the Barbarians and the different levels of knights etc.

Another aspect is the increased demand for advanced memory management. Through the additional graphical assets the game needs to be smart managing what’s loaded into memory and what’s unloaded, in order to still run on older mobile devices.

Angelus: It is also one of the more dense expansions, which almost transforms it into another game entirely. Settlers itself tends to be intuitive enough for most people to catch on quite quickly, but Cities and Knights has a much steeper learning curve? Do you intend to create a tutorial to explain this new expansion, and if so, what kinds of things have you had to deal with in relating this steeper learning curve?

Thorsten: Of course we’ll extend the existing tutorial to cover the new rules of Cities and Knights. In addition to the tutorial we also add some more context-sensitive help texts on the corresponding screens. These will give some more detailed help to the players. Also, the integrated Catan-Almanach is undergoing some major rework, featuring content chapters.

Regarding the extended rules: It certainly makes testing and QA more demanding, as there are many more combinations of special rules that the AI needs to adapt to.

Angelus: Now, in terms of expansions, Traders and Barbarians offers a range of mini expansions. Some of them are compatible with the main game, while others are stand alone. Has USM considered whether it would like to implement these? If you have made any considerations about them, can you suggest which ones you think would be easier to implement over the others? What kinds of barriers do you anticipate in trying to implement any or all of them?

Thorsten: We’d certainly like to make all expansions available for the mobile versions in the future. However after Cities and Knights we’ll concentrate on the online mode.

Angelus: That concludes the tour of Catan. Next I’d like to ask about your next major game, being Keltis. We note that Keltis is the twin of a similar game, Keltis Oracle, any relation between the two?

Thorsten: We developed Keltis with our partners at Promotion Software, Keltis Oracle was developed by Tribeflame, whom we’re not affiliated with.

Angelus: How do you think the two games compare?

Thorsten: We can only speak for ourselves, and like them both – If we really had to choose, I’d say we slightly prefer the original game.

Angelus: Considering that Kniza has such a massive catalogue of games, what made you choose Keltis, or how did they choose you?

Thorsten: We had already worked together with Reiner Knizia on the PC and Nintendo DS versions of Keltis as well as the PC and feature phone version of Ingenious – adapting these for iOS was a natural choice after successfully launching Catan on the same platform.

Angelus: Lastly, I’d like to visit one of your more recent games, War of the Roses. This is an implementation of a classic strategy board game and recently won an award in the 2011 iOS Board Game Awards on Board Game Geek, for best Abstract Game. Firstly, how did USM come to develop this property and what went into the negotiations?

Thorsten: We think 2-player board games work really well on the iPad: Two players can get a good view of the game board without handing the Pad around, therefore offering a board game experience without having to worry about bringing the boxes. The 2-player “table mode” was well received in our iPad version of Ingenious so we started looking for another suitable 2-player game. Our colleagues at KOSMOS have a great 2-player game series. Rosenkönig is part of this series and as it happens it’s one of the favourite board games of our head of mobile

Angelus: Are there any interesting aspects to this game’s development that you’d like to share? Any quirks, challenges, or moments of glory as this application came together?

Thorsten: Rosenkönig is one of those abstract games, that (at least from our point of view) – really benefit from the surrounding artwork and story. Our development partners at Purple Ape did a tremendous job at preserving the spirit of the game on iOS while bringing in great ideas to increase playing experience.

During the initial stage of development our (experienced) test players were constantly beating the AI; one evening our lead programmer Tim sent us a new version and suddenly the tide turned and even our best players started losing repeatedly. That’s when we knew that this core part of the game was progressing well.

Also quite a few testers of the final version told us that they liked the iOS version better than the board game – one can’t get higher praise than that.

Angelus: What is USM’s reaction to having won this award? Did you envisage that it could be a potential prize winner?

Thorsten: We really like the game and believed that its mechanics appeal to all fans of abstract, strategic games, not only to fans of this specific board game. That’s why we developed it in the first place as we saw the game’s potential despite the relatively small brand awareness. Nevertheless there were many other great board game releases for iOS this year, so we were pleasantly surprised as we heard about Rosenkönig winning!

Angelus: Finally, what is on the horizon for USM in 2012?

Thorsten: The online mode for Catan will keep us busy for the coming months as we’d like to offer cross-platform play between iOS and Android devices. Also we’re bringing Catan to new platforms as well – once again in collaboration with our partners from exozet.

Another Catan game will be available for beta testing shortly: Rivals for Catan is currently in development and will bring this exiting 2-player card game in the world of Catan to iOS.

Apart from Catan we’re working on another 2-player board game adaptation for iOS.

But we’re not only a publisher of games – our award-winning astronomy app Redshift is constantly getting new updates and a few other apps are currently in development, e.g. a few educational and reference titles.

[Edit note: I've corrected this entry, where the answers were actually supplied by Thorsten, rather than Michaela who has been in contact with me about the interview].