Tell us a little bit about yourself. How did you start Ishisoft?

Craig Forrester: I'm from England, currently at University studying Computer Games Programming, which is basically the only job I've ever really wanted to do. I started coding at home about 8 or so years ago, with the first game I released publicly being my remake of Pushover. I wanted a "company name" so I took the super-original route and put "soft" on the end of my nickname.

Johnny Platform originally started as a homebrew game for the Nintendo DS. What made you decide to persue that platform?

CF: I really love the DS, so I couldn't pass up the opportunity to try a bit of homebrew on it. I had a bit of free time after the second year of university before moving house so I decided it would be fun to kick out a quick DS game. I'd been playing the Alien Hominid PDA Games a lot at the time and thought a game in a similar vein would suit the DS nicely.

Originally me and a couple of friends planned to start a small games company type thing during our third year of university, which is why Johnny Platform on DS goes under "Brewed Games" rather than Ishisoft. Those friends helped me out with the game, James O'Hare did the sprites for Johnny and the evil robots and Tom Chambers did Johnny's awesome voice.

Johnny Platform has a constant biscuits and coffee theme throughout the game. What was the cause of that?

CF: Coffee seemed the logical choice for a collectible given the amount of biscuits in the game. As for where the biscuits theme came from, I'm not entirely sure. I think I probably just had some bourbons lying around and thought "why not". It also helps that I love coffee.

Did you originally set out to create 55 levels?

CF: The DS version only had 50 levels, which I just set myself as an arbitrary target that seemed feasible enough. By the end of the 50 levels I was running a bit short on ideas so it turned out quite nicely. I added 5 new levels to the XNA version to at least give it a bit of new content to justify paying money for it. I managed to come up with a few new ideas for those 5 levels which was nice.

Do you have a favorite level from the game? I got stuck on level 23 for a while, but once I solved the puzzle I couldn't wait to see what else you had for me.

CF: I was pretty pleased with level 23, that was one of the new 5. A simple level really but tough to get your head around at first. I also like level 50 for puzzleness, the goal seems impossible at first and the solution is quite fun.

How long did it take to create the Nintendo DS version of Johnny Platform?

CF: It was originally supposed to be a 5-day project, but I think it took about a week in the end. It could have done with some more time spent on it, the music didn't work in that version, but I decided not to let it drag on and just get it released.

Were there any changes made to the game in its translation to the Community Games version?

CF: As well as the previously mentioned 5 new levels, I reordered some of the existing levels to try and smooth out the difficulty curve a bit. The tutorial text was another pretty big addition, it could still do with being better, but is better than nothing. The music and some of the sound effects are new for XNA, and I replaced the jammy dodgers with more generic cookies. I wasn't sure if there was any copyright on the jammy dodger design, and I don't even like them anyway!

What processes did you take to bring Johnny Platform to XNA? DS homebrew tend to be programmed in C or C++, was it at all difficult to port the game to C# and get the game running on XNA Community Games?

CF: Yeah Johnny on DS was written in C++. My process was to basically copy and paste the code into my C# framework, compile the code and then sit there and work through every error that came up. The two languages are similar in a lot of respects so the majority of it was simple changes in syntax. The process went more smoothly than I expected, and I had some form of playable game on screen after about 6 hours.

How long did the porting process take?

CF: Similarly to the DS version I was only planning on spending a couple of days on the port, but it inevitable took longer, about a week again in total. Although getting the main game running was pretty easy there was all the extra stuff that needed adding to bring it the game up to a quality level more worthy of people's money. I hadn't really considered the 360-specific things like handling gamer profiles and storage devices either.

What has your experience been working with XNA and the Community Games in general? Has it been difficult? Any specific problems when porting over?

CF: For the most part you couldn't really ask for XNA to be any easier than it is. Very quick to get going with and there's a huge amount of code examples to look at for various things. Using the 360 as a devkit works very smoothly too; it's simple to set up and it has full support for all the debugging features you get when running on the PC.

Do you have any other plans to create Community Games specific games or port over older games you've made? I think Treasure Treasure: Fortress Forage could work well since you can have two controllers.

CF: I have a lot of ideas and plans for bringing original games to the Community Games service, but what I can make depends on how much time I have.

Treasure Treasure is a game I'd love to bring back sometime in the future. I've got plans for a more fully fleshed out game than Fortress Forage, which was a sort of prototype. It would be called Treasure Treasure: Paradise Plunder, with multiple levels for varying numbers of players. It's quite a big project though, so it's on the back burner for now.

How has the community taken your game? Have many other websites take any interest in your game? Have you received much feedback for your game?

CF: The feedback I've received has been excellent. There's been various reviews around the internet which have all been largely positive, and indeed it got placed as the third best XNA game of 2008 on GamerBytes. A couple of weeks ago it was the top selling community game for that week which was very exciting.

Is there anything you'd like to see improve or change with XNA Community Games?

CF: The presence of Community Games on the dashboard is certainly a bit lacking. For a while the Community Games category was on the Spotlight channel, but now that's gone people really only find them if they go looking. There are also some other oddities, like Community Games that have been played recently don't appear as boxart on the "Game Library" option. Hopefully all this can be improved a bit in the future.

Do you have any idea if you've made any money through Johnny on XNA?

CF: I've certainly made at least a bit of money from it, but thanks to the lack of sales figures I have no idea how much. There was some talk of sales figures in January but at the latest it will be at the end of March when the first paychecks go out. Hopefully it will go towards paying off some of my student loan, or maybe I'll just blow it on a trip to Canada!

Thanks for your time.

You can check out all of Ishisoft's freeware titles, including Pushover, Bite The Bullets, Treasure Treasure: Fortress Forage and Clockwiser at their website.

You can check out Johnny Platform on XNA Community games on your Xbox 360. Click here for the Xbox.com marketplace page to queue up the demo of full game download.