Juan Gril is the head of production at Joju Games, which recently released Fishing Craze. Previously he has worked for Yahoo! Games as lead producer for the downloadable games area and community manager of multi player games. We had a chance to speak to him about the amazing work he’s been doing for casual games.

CR: Juan, could you tell the readers a bit about you and what work you’ve done in game development?

JG: I’ve been making games since I was a teenager with my Commodore 64. I always wanted to be involved making games, so fresh out of college I tried to land a job in the video game industry. But it was just the time when Duke Nukem came out and everybody wanted to do a game where blood was splattered all over the screen. Since I’m anti-violence, I decided to go into making web sites instead.

But games are in my soul, just not the GTA types of games. So while working at Yahoo!, I’ve got involved in the localization of the Games site, which was catered towards a more general audience. Later on I moved full time to work for the Y! Games team, and I ended producing a bunch of games.

CR: What led you to Joju Games?

JG: While at Y!, I saw the birth of the Casual Game Industry. But most of the games were catered towards the sector of the audience who was buying games (the 35+ female audience), and I felt that there were people like me or younger who wanted to play casual games too. People who like games but they don’t have the time to play Mass Effect, or they would feel weird playing Metal Gear Solid with your 3 year old in your lap asking you why you are killing people on screen. But just making a polished version of Frogger was not going to make it. We needed to make a new generation of arcade games. That’s when I decided to open a studio and make it happen.

CR: We really enjoyed playing Fishing Craze! What were some of the ideas that led to Fishing Craze being an arcade-action type of game? And was the process of making the game easy?

JG: Thank you very much! While working with Fernando Sansberro from Batovi Games, he had a game he made for mobiles called Arcade Fishing. He liked the Gold Miner series, and came up with something more action oriented. I loved the Fishing theme, because it was something that most people could relate to. So I came up with the idea that you were going to retire and buy a motorhome, and go cross-country participating in fishing tournaments. And I decided to make the game much accessible than the AF, so it could be played by all kinds of people.

It was tough to find the right balance between easy and dull though. We had to continously test the game out with people of all ages. We knew from the get go that not all people would be able to play the game, as the arcade genre is not for everybody. But we think we made a pretty good job getting the right balance.

CR: Tell us about the art direction that you chose for the game. Why cartoony, instead of more realistic? Cartoony styled games seem to be something that Joju tends to do often.

JG: We feel that the cartoon style goes well with comedy, which is what we want to do. We always use funny elements in games. I remember that the first time we did a focus group test on Fishing Craze, people were laughing hard the first time they were electrocuted by an eel. That’s when I knew we were doing something right.

CR: How many of the developers of the game are fond of fishing? As in real-life, hooks-and-fishing-rods-and-worms fishing?

JG: I had gone fishing when I was a little kid, and I have always been interested in the sport. We did a lot of research on the gear fishermen buy, so we could have interesting things for the shop. But we also wanted to focus on making the game interesting. Real-life fishing could require a lot of patience, as you could sit for hours before you catch something. So we came up with a game that looks like fishing, but it’s far from the real experience.

CR: Are there any other interesting bits of trivia about Fishing Craze you’d like to mention?

JG: All the lures are inspired in real-life lures, as well as the boats. We had an scenario called “Graceland”, which had Elvis’ mansion on an island in the background, and there was a fish with an Elvis’ hairdo. It was our homage to Elvis, but we had to take it out as we didn’t have the rights to use it. And some of the couples in the game are actually good friends of mine who like fishing!

CR: Juan, you’ve produced a lot of casual games for a lot of different platforms, including media tie-ins for MTV, Comedy Central and Nickelodeon. Which have been your favorites?

JG: I think my favorites are Fishing Craze, Acrobatic Mud Diving, and Brown Noise Poo Blast. But that’s going to change as we release the games we’ve been working on this year!

CR: What’s next for Joju? Have you got something new lined up?

JG: We’ve been working for almost a year on a game for WiiWare. It has all the different elements you see in all the games made by Joju: it’s funny, it’s non-violent, it’s action oriented, and it’s accessible to be played by everybody. And we’ve been also working with the guys at ourWorld in a pretty cool multiplayer game for their world.