GameSpy: Carbonated games has brought poker, UNO and Settlers of Catan to electronic form. What's the best part of working with these long-established games?
Joshua Howard: I love the challenge of delighting our customers with something they think they already know. There are, in my opinion, versions of computer poker that could be more compelling -- it's as if they were built by folks who have no passion for the game. We try to honor all of the long-established games we build, because we know to the fans of those games they are special, so they deserve special treatment from our team.

I think Carbonated Games has some of the best versions of several classic games, whether it's hearts, spades, dominoes or Texas hold'em. In some respect we think about all of the well-established games as we do about licensed games; we treated UNO (for example) as if it were one of our own children. Our relationship with Mattel has been very strong, in large part because our respect for the brand is so in line with what Mattel, themselves, believe.
GameSpy: And the worst?
Joshua Howard: Even if Carbonated Games was only interested in delivering a bland version of a classic game we would still be challenged by the fact that every customer has a slightly different expectation about the same classic game. So with a classic game, it's more difficult to please everyone, in the way that when you make a beloved book into a movie you risk some of your audience being upset when the movie version does not match the version in their head.
GameSpy: When bringing UNO to Arcade, what was the biggest challenge? Was there any difficulty at all, other than double-checking network code and deciding on price?
Joshua Howard: UNO is a great social game. How do you keep the digital part of it from getting in the way of the social part of it? The team thought a lot about this, and in the end decided upon a number of things which contributed to the game's success. The UI is very simple and very not-in-the-way. On one hand, the look of the game is just what is necessary to convey what users need to know but on another, it's not plain or over-the-top.

The card flipping element is an example I like to point out -- when the cards simply slid across the board (no card flip) the game felt much flatter. It can be hard to articulate why some of the things that worked work (like the card flip) but it was undeniable that they did work. Like with many things we develop, all of the hard part was in deciding what to build, and not in the actual building of it. Deciding to try the card flip, and the work to get it right, were more difficult than the code necessary to make it happen.

This makes sense to Carbonated Games; we are not in the business of shipping software, we ship interactive entertainment. In the way that an architect thinks about the experience of the building, then uses brick and mortar to build it, we think about the game experience, then use software development practices to realize that experience.
GameSpy: When bringing Catan to the MSN channel, what was the biggest challenge, and how was that addressed?
Joshua Howard: We were building Catan Online in parallel to the development of the in-house multiplayer game platform the MSN Games team was developing. This is part of what it means to be an internal studio -- we often don't have the luxury of working on a completely baked platform. For Catan Online this was a challenging situation, as it turned out that Catan Online was a more complex project than the platform anticipated. Part of why we exist as Carbonated Games is to deal with this kind of situation, as it serves to improve the platform.