Following on from Gamevil’s recent announcement that an Android version of Zenonia will be released later this month, we thought we’d take the opportunity to find out a little bit more about the company and their plans for their Android titles.  Gamevil have a few Android games on the market already, including the very popular Baseball Superstars.  Kyu Lee, President of Gamevil USA, kindly agreed to answer a few of our questions.

Firstly, can you tell us a little bit about Gamevil and it’s background in mobile games development?

“GAMEVIL is a public mobile game developer and publisher. It was established in the year 2000, and ever since we have been developing for handhelds. We currently have offices in Seoul and Los Angeles with around 110 employees in total.”

You recently announced the release of an Android version of Zenonia.  Do you have any plans for further ports of your games to Android?

“Yes, we are planning to continuously develop and port new games for the Android platform.”

You have a few titles in the Android market already, such as Path of a Warrior and Baseball Superstars, which has proven the most popular?

“Baseball Superstars has been the best performing title on the Android platform so far.”

What is Gamevil’s prefered development environment?  Do you code for one particular format (eg iPhone or Windows Mobile) and then port a title to the others or do you use a separate, generic development environment and port from there?

“We originally develop our games in native C/C++ language to support WIPI-C, and we then port to other platforms including Android.”

Can you tell us a little bit about the general development cycle for your titles?  How do you approach creating a new title and how is your team structured?

“We currently have about 110 employees and among them 80 our involved in game development. And we produce about 10 titles annually every year. So on average, you can assume it is a 8 person team working on a single title for a year.”

Which, if any, Android devices do your team use (either for testing or for their own personal use)?

“Our team primarily tests on the G1, Hero, DROID and the Nexus One.  Nexus One is the more popular device among members of our team. For our team in Korea, the new MOTOROI is the device that they have been supporting.”

Fragmentation of hardware and OS versions has been the biggest criticism of the Android OS so far.  Has fragmentation caused any issues during the development of your Android titles?

“We now support two different screensizes as default. And fragmentation also does involve more testing, and we expect the amount of testing to increase in the future if this continues to happen.”

Piracy is an issue which affects all professional games’ developers to some extent, how badly would you say Gamevil have been affected by piracy?  Do you use any copy protection methods for your mobile titles?

“We’ve been using the default copy protection methods that Google provides, but however, we haven’t been adding any internal solution to our Android titles yet. We respect our users, and believe they will not pirate our titles to create an healthy ecosystem to continuously develop better titles for the platform.”

A number of games publishers have already expressed dismay at poor sales of Android titles, have you found that sales of your Android games have been disappointing compared to your predictions?  And, going forward, how much potential do Gamevil see in Android as a platform?

“Baseball Superstars has been one of the better selling titles on the Android platform. It may be small but it is enough to justify our development cost and we believe it is an investment into the future for the Android community.”

Can you give us an insight in to any future titles we can expect to see Gamevil releasing to the Android Market?

“We’re currently considering bringing Baseball Superstars 2010 to the Android platform, and also planning on bringing more based on the amount of success we see here.”

Thanks again to Kyu Lee and Gamevil USA Inc for granting us the interview. Baseball Superstars and Path of a Warrior are available for purchase on the Android Market now and Zenonia should be available at some point later this month.