Astraware's Tomlinson: iPad games are a no-brainer for us

With many iPhone developers pondering and planning their assault on iPad, one of the best placed could be UK studio Astraware.

With a long history of developing traditional board and card games for the likes of Palm devices, PDA and smartphones, the newly independent studio is keen to get its big four - Astraware Solitaire, Astraware Casino, Astraware Sudoku and Astraware Boardgames - ready for the big screen.

We caught up with CEO and founder Howard Tomlinson to gauge his opinion on the new opportunity.

Howard Tomlinson: It's a no-brainer for us. We've been geared to developing games in multiple resolutions for years. Whenever we create a game, we think about the different resolutions and aspect ratios we need to cover.

Of course, any iPhone developer can move straight into iPad development with only minor optimisation on their games. When we create graphics for a game however, we always create them at four times the maximum resolution we think we are going to need because whatever device is available now, you can guarantee that next year someone will come out with a double resolution device.

At the moment, we're creating graphics at PC resolution and then shrinking them down and tidying them up for smaller screens.

Word and text games haven't done very well on iPhone but my guess is they are likely to do better on iPad because of the demographic difference in the device ownership.

For example, I'll be buying one for reading books and web browsing. It won't replace a PC but when you're travelling, you might forgo taking a laptop for short trips. I think it's going to appeal to people who are more interested in newspapers and reading, and that will feed into the games.

It's a good market, but the limitations are technological. Anything requiring high levels of animation isn't going to work, although the screen isn't too dissimilar to Palm technology back in the mid-1990s in terms of it being an LCD screen with a really low refresh rate.

With these, you have to understand what kind of a blur something will leave behind when it moves.

Certainly games like Solitaire and Sudoku will work on Kindle. Actually, I think there's value in Astraware releasing our own version of Sudoku, even though there's likely to be one from Amazon because I know we will make a much better job in terms of the interface.