After our recent review of Buku Sudoku went up, we had the opportunity to sit down and speak with Buku developer Ben Moy. Hit the jump to hear him discuss his sudoku inspirations, the Microsoft de-listing debacle, what he'll be working on next and a host of other topics.

Tell us a little about yourself and your history as a developer.

At my core, creative endeavors are what make my world go round. I believe my parents are the ones I have to thank for that as I was exposed to stories, books, and games at an early age, like 3. So from there, the interesting and creative things just grew, like making board games as a kid, drawing, painting, collecting toys, modifying them, building models, decorating, modeling, cooking, making sushi, and experiencing all sorts of games, music and movies – and all the exciting, interesting, and unique people you meet along the way. There’s still so much I want to do. Designing games is a very natural fit to tie the things I love together while allowing me to learn more. Starting as an evaluator at Merscom 5 years ago, I took on any extra tasks I could to increase my knowledge of the industry. It’s an approach I would recommend, getting in any way you can, be it testing or an internship (it’s hard for a company to refuse free help), and then be eager to learn and complete new tasks well. I have to thank an old friend, Frederick Jones, for advising me on this – his advice worked splendidly.

Over the last few years Sudoku has taken the world by storm. A lot of people have commented that they're surprised that it took so long for Microsoft to put a version on their service. Do you know if you were the first developer to bring this to Microsoft? If so, what did they like about your proposal that they didn't see from other developers?

I don’t know who was first, but after developing Sudoku PC and Disoku (Disney’s Sudoku) with Merscom’s partner in all things Sudoku, Absolutist, that one feature we really wanted to include but couldn’t, multiplayer, could be a core focus instead of just an addition on Xbox 360. So I believe the focus on co-op and competitive multiplayer, as well as the thought put into multiple control schemes, made our proposal attractive.

One of the first things you notice when firing up Buku Sudoku are the crisp visuals. Not many people would think that a simple numbers game would utilize HD this well. A number of different themes were included to let the players pick their own visual style -- can we expect to see more of these down the road?

Thanks for the complement on the art. We had a lot of fun coming up with different themes, and unfortunately some were cut for being different, and for space concerns. DLC is a great way for these to be finished up and released. Early mockups had a pirate ship motif I really liked. Then there were a few playables, like a beach with animated surf lapping up, and an ocean theme of underwater bubbles as cells, animated fish, and swaying seaweed. Check out theBBPS's gallery of Buku concept art here.

Do you have any other downloadable content planned?

Further DLC really depends on what users want, and to that end I hope we can have an area of the website, or another contest, that encourages user feedback on what DLC they want. But we already have some DLC out - for launch, we put up a puzzle pack with 1200 additional puzzles for free. I’d love to do more multiplayer modes that work both for local and LIVE play. One idea, players earn points for solving different areas of the puzzles, designated by various outlined shapes – most points win. Locally, this would give points to the player who contributed the most to solving a shape. Over LIVE, each team (even if it were 8 teams of 1) would have its own grid and when a shape was filled in, and then it would fill in on everyone else’s grids so only 1 team would score points for each shape. Another would be like battleship, with players having 30 seconds to study the puzzle and put their “ships” down (designating groups of cells) so that it’s hard for the opponent to solve the ships’ cells. Then ships are hit and sunk when the other player solves the cells. Battleship Sudoku would be LIVE only though. That all said, I really enjoy co-op Sudoku, so I hope the fans will help decide where effort will be most appreciated.

One of the things that really sets this apart from traditional forms of sudoku is the inclusion of multiplayer. As no title has really offered something like this before, you were stuck re-inventing the wheel so to speak. Can you tell us a little about how it plays, and why you decided on the modes you did?

Cooperative was something I’ve always wanted to add to the PC Sudoku titles, so that was a natural inclusion. Playing other games over LIVE, I’m disappointed at the lack of including local players, guests, in LIVE play, so that was one area of co-op I wanted to make sure was included. If you have 1 friend over, and 2 other friends at their houses, all four of you can play together on a single puzzle or in Team Head to Head, where you play against another team to solve the puzzle first. That offered a range of ways to play, whether on small or large grids, whatever difficulty desired, and co-op or team vs, but we wanted a mode that could be a little more compact, a little more hectic. That mode became Duel, a 1v1 battle where completing groups (row, column, or box) caused loose figures on the opponent’s board to disappear. The original design was for easy 9x9 puzzles in this mode, like a 4-8minute match, but for the sake of giving users freedom, the grid sizes and difficulty were opened up. Surprisingly, 6x6 can be a lot of fun – it gets intense.

There have been a few other titles in the market that have helped cement sudoku in gamers minds, most notably games like Brain Age and Go! Sudoku. Did you draw any inspiration from any other titles when crafting Buku Sudoku? What did you learn from their strengths and weaknesses?

The controls and popularity of Brain Age’s Sudoku was definitely a positive inspiration. It introduced Sudoku puzzles, and an aspect of competitiveness or measurement in Sudoku, to new players who continued to enjoy playing it electronically. After some work, most players achieve rocket ship speed every time, which is understandable given Brain Age’s broad focus. Buku Sudoku’s advanced controls are similar to Brain Age’s in that they can take a little practice to get used to, but once you do they can be really fast and accurate. Past that, we were able to focus just on Sudoku, obviously, and offer a lot of options that Brain Age didn’t have, custom controls, interface, HD graphics, grid sizes and ranging difficulties. As for Go!Sudoku, I wanted to like it, and play it with friends, but its lack of the ability to Save/Load, lack of local multiplayer, lack of co-op, and lack of any controller customization instead served as points I wanted to address when making Buku Sudoku for XBLA.

What's next for Ben Moy?

Finishing up Buku Sudoku, the opportunity to start my own company came along, so while maintaining a great working relationship with Merscom I cofounded developer DigiRonin Games with some wonderful friends. And with some cool unannounced games already in development and having the opportunity to do new designs almost every week, it’s very exciting now. Eventually I would like to make an adventure game that incorporates a lot of emotion, something evoking a deep response from the player. I’m kicking around The Divine Comedy as a basis, but that’s still a ways out.

Your title debuted on Xbox Live Arcade at an interesting time for the service. Controversy has recently begun over talk of delisting titles that have been out for 6 months, have a MetaCritic average below 65% and have a conversion rate of less than 6%. As a developer, how do you feel about this?

Personally, if these 2 criteria apply to a title I worked on and the conversion rate can’t be rectified, or the game updated to warrant new reviews, then that game has failed LIVE Arcade somewhere along the way, whether it’s marketing, the game itself, or the game’s fit with the service and customers. This is speculation, but I expect there is a lot of room for positive discussion between the developer and Microsoft during the 3 month delisting process. I’m imagining the games that get slated for delisting either perform far worse than these metric goals (and are truly poor games) or are titles that will make delisting a marketing opportunity, a chance for informed users to show their support for a title and prove to MS not to delist that title. That all said, LIVE Arcade should hopefully continue evolving to better present the right titles among its vast and growing library to the appropriate customers.

The Xbox 360 allows gamers to automatically download new Live Arcade titles which in turn could lead to an artificially low conversion rate. Would you argue that this makes conversion rate a poor metric to use in making these decisions?

Speculation again, but it should be easy to run a query that includes or excludes users with automatic downloads turned on. But it’s an interesting thought, is your game appealing enough to the automatic subscribers and is that a goal you should have to hit? The difference with and without this subset of users might even be evidence that will help games not be delisted, like if the “wrong” users were electing to download it, and not buy it, but the automatic subscribers were buying it, then perhaps some other way of marketing/displaying the game would improve the non-subscriber category? But really, if I were to make a critical comment on the stated delisting metrics, it would be about using a Metacritic average to compare titles. There is little consistency between which person at a site and which sites pick up a particular title that I believe calls into question the validity of comparing % based ratings. Perhaps these 2 delisting criteria are chosen for these very reasons, that they seem very open to interpretation or clarification. They leave room for Microsoft to kick out some really awful games (cough arcade ports) while at the same time allowing niche titles to stay. It concerns me that N+ creators Raigan Burns and Mare Sheppard complain about the hundred expletively bad titles on XBLA but then don’t see the delisting as an opportunity for Microsoft to rectify that issue, but instead criticize both the harshness of delisting and then the stated metrics. I think it’s a chance for Microsoft to address that first publicized criticism. Time will tell.

There's also been a lot of talk about the Microsoft approval process being a long and grueling task. Did you experience any problems with getting the game on the service once it was completed, or was it pretty much smooth sailing?

I was a bit worried after some of the negative comments out there about the queue system, getting the game out, but we were able to secure a release slot really quickly once testing and final certification completed.

Any chance we'll see Buku Sudoku pop up anywhere else?

If things go well for Buku Sudoku on LIVE Arcade, I’d love to see the game make it back to the PC via a LIVE Arcade for Windows, once that’s released, allowing PC users to play with XBLA members and open the game up even more to families (and *cough* people at work*cough*).

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