FingerGaming

[The following feature is written by Simon Parkin and appears at FingerGaming sister site Gamasutra.]

This week marked the first anniversary of Adam Saltsman’s one-button Flash game, Canabalt, whose stylish visuals and ‘outrun the carnage’ concept made it one of the signature indie titles of recent times.

Produced in just five days as part of the monthly themed Experimental Gameplay Project, Canabalt gained an evangelical following on release, its fanbase growing yet further following its later arrival on the App Store for iPhone and iPad.

Gamasutra caught up with Saltsman to talk about life after Canabalt, a period which has seen the developer assist in porting Japanese indie-darling Cave Story to the Wii and become a regular feature on the conference circuit.

“Financially speaking, Canabalt gave us a great deal of latitude to prototype, travel and decide what to work on in a relatively low-pressure, low-stress environment,” he explains. “It also helped us establish a relationship with Apple, which has been a very good thing for us and even for some of our friends. ”

“However, and this may sound bad, as Canabalt was a runaway success for our tiny team, but proportionally I think it received far more press than sales,” he adds. “Perhaps, at $2.99, we got the price-point wrong? I’m not sure. But either way, we didn’t make the top 10. This is fine, as a company of our size doesn’t require those kinds of numbers, but in the long term Canabalt has been best for our reputation, not our wallets.”

Saltsman’s admits that he found Canabalt’s success brought with it a heavy burden of expectation when deciding what to work on next. “There was also a kind of weird ‘dark side’ to Canabalt’s success. It felt is sort of like…sophomore album risk or whatever (even though Canabalt was our second game) as, while working on [recently released vertical jump and swing iPhone title] Gravity Hook HD, I felt a lot of pressure to live up to people’s enthusiasm for Canabalt.”

The Austin-based independent developer, who also worked on hit iPhone title Wurdle and has released the free Flixel tooklit for making Flash games, commented of his pressure to perform: “It took a while to kind of climb out from under that. But once I managed to, [Gravity Hook HD] became a lot more fun to work on and play, so it was a valuable skill to learn.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: adam saltsman, canabalt, interview

Epic Games is best known as the hardcore developer behind games like Unreal Tournament and Gears of War, but in formally moving its popular Unreal Engine 3 to Apple’s iOS devices, the studio hopes to bring hardcore flavor to iPhones, iPads and iPods.

The developer on Wednesday was front and center at Apple’s latest media event, showing off a sharp-looking UE3 demo dubbed Epic Citadel (available free) on an iPhone. Also on hand was Epic subsidiary and Shadow Complex developer Chair Entertainment, which revealed Project Sword, an iOS action adventure RPG that uses UE3.

The projects could be the beginning of a significant change at Epic. Here, studio president Mike Capps talks about how porting large games to an Apple iOS device can be done, gives details on licensing plans, and why “It would not be smart for us to try to get in and compete with the Bejeweleds and Angry Birds of the world on the iPhone.”

You put the Citadel Demo out now, and it represents a full game that’s coming down the road for you guys?

Yeah, and this is basically the environment, the castle space and everything which you saw there, it’s basically a “no, this isn’t fake, this really is real, it really does look this good” kind of thing, because the game won’t be out until later this season.

So Chair is developing the game?

Exactly. They’re the primary developers on the game side, and then Epic of course we’re working a lot on the tech with the Unreal Engine team.

Does Unreal Engine 3 now, for external developers, have iOS tools in it?

Well, we’ve got them internally, and we’re just starting to work with a few guys now, but yeah, absolutely, we’ll be putting them out to all of our Unreal Engine developers.

Do you use all of the exact same back-end tools, like Kismet and everything?

Yes. Everything’s supported. The difference of course is that it’s not quite as powerful a graphics processor as on the Xbox 360, so you’ll probably do some custom content work, but you’re using the same tool chain of UnrealEd and Kismet and the same physics tools and everything.

The Citadel demo is for 3GS and up. Is that also the specs for the engine, or is that up to developers?

That’s the current plan, because of the various shaders and things we have support for, that’s what we need a 3GS for.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: epic games, interview, project sword, Upcoming

As part the latest feature at FingerGaming sister site Gamasutra, Game Strategies: iPad Vs. iPhone, Angela Peters, community manager at Firemint (Flight Control) says that the company’s development and pricing tactics preclude ‘universal builds’, which allow gamers to buy one app and get access to both iPad and iPhone versions of the title.

The 11-year-old Australian mobile-game studio is adamant about not creating universal games “because the considerations, capabilities, and markets for iPhone and iPad are quite different,” says community manager Alexandra Peters.

“Given our approach of tailoring adaptations of our games to suit the specific hardware, it makes more sense to launch separate apps for separate platforms and to set pricing separately,” she adds. “We don’t think that releasing identical games on both platforms is an effective strategy.”

Firemint’s current policy is to develop new games first for the iPhone — which the studio considers its lead platform — and then, if they do well, consider launching enhanced adaptations that are optimized for other platforms — with enhanced price tags.

Peters cites as an example Firemint’s latest release — Real Racing HD for iPad — which started with Real Racing for the iPhone. The studio overhauled the graphics throughout, adding more detail and higher-resolution textures, and also included the ability to add any photo from the player’s library as a custom skin to the cars.

The company released newer, more expensive and feature-rich versions of its popular Real Racing and Flight Control games for the iPad — Real Racing HD costs $9.99, compared to the iPhone version’s $4.99, but features updated graphics, control, and other upgrades. “We think the HD version is worth it,” says Peters.

A lot of thought went into re-imagining the game, says Peters, which is exactly the process Firemint intends to pursue if creating an HD version is justified. “If a title does well — and if it makes sense to adapt that IP to other platforms that are a good fit,” she adds, “that is certainly something we are keen to do.”

However, there are differing opinions on this strategy. Notably, Semi Secret Games’ Adam Saltsman (Canabalt) and IUGO’s Sarah Thomson (Implode! XL) talk about their attitudes to developing universal versions of iPhone/iPad titles in the full feature, Game Strategies: iPad Vs. iPhone, live today on Gamasutra.

Tags: firemint, Interviews, iPad, iPhone

[While Korea-based mobile publisher Gamevil is a major player overseas, the company only recently made an impression stateside, thanks to its success in the iTunes App Store. Within the last two years, Gamevil has released several hit titles for the iPhone and iPod Touch, including the popular Baseball Superstars and the action-RPGs Zenonia and Hybrid: Eternal Whisper.

At E3 last week, Game Developer Magazine editor in chief Brandon Sheffield caught up with Gamevil USA president Kyu Lee, discussing the recent Zenonia 2 and other Gamevil projects, including the upcoming Hybrid 2.]

How do you think that the mobile market has changed in the last two years?

Kyu Lee: Two years ago, our focus was on traditional mobile phones, or “feature phones.” With over 100 million iOS devices out since the introduction of the iPhone almost three years ago — and with over 65,000 Android devices being shipped every day — most of our high-data consumers have been switching over to smartphones.

For that reason, we thought it was a logical move for game developers to move into that space. Before, we had to work with a lot of different carriers. Even in the U.S., we had to work with 15 to 20 different carriers to get our titles out. But now, with one submission to the App Store, you can get distribution to 84 countries around the world.

The tough part for a game developer like us was that we didn’t want to spend so much time getting deals done for distribution. We wanted to concentrate on creating better games. So it’s been great. The changes have been great for us.

Percentage-wise, how much are you doing for smartphones versus feature phones?

KL: In the overseas market, it’s getting close to 100 percent.

How about in Korea?

KL: In Korea, smartphone penetration is less than 20 percent. It’s still early, but the pace is really fast. Within the last six months, KTF — which is the iPhone’s exclusive distributor in Korea — sold 700,000 devices. That’s almost the fastest rate ever for a single device.

And if you combine all the iPod Touch devices with that, we’re also getting into the MP3 player market. It’s not just the phone market alone. And SK Telecom announced that they’re going to launch 13 Android devices by the end of the year. That’s going to be really interesting, to see how the market will be changing. Our development will adapt to the market changes.

You guys have been taking the tactic of making larger games that offer a much longer play experience. How has that been working out?

KL: I think it’s been working out pretty well for us. Putting in larger production costs makes it easier to compete in the App Store, and the RPG genre itself is very underserved. I think it has to do with the budget RPGs need.

I think in the RPG category right now, five games in the top ten are from Gamevil. Our only other competitor right now is Square Enix. As for other traditional large console players, I don’t think they’ve explored the RPG sector much. It’s an open opportunity for us, so why not take advantage of it?

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: baseball superstars, gamevil, hybrid: eternal whisper, soccer superstars, zenonia

After establishing itself as one of the most successful independent iPhone game developers, Firemint gained a strong early foothold on the young iPad platform with HD versions of its major iPhone hits Flight Control and Real Racing.

Those games have been regular presences in the iPad best-sellers charts since their launch, cementing the Melbourne, Australia-based studio as one of the premiere developers on Apple’s App Store.

Notably, touch-based plane landing casual title Flight Control on the iPhone had sold 2 million copies as of January 2010, and a DSiWare version recently debuted, in addition to the iPad version’s success.

Much more complex 3D motion/touch-based racing title Real Racing has also seen major success at higher price points than Flight Control, both on the iPhone/iPod Touch and more recently on the iPad.

Gamasutra caught up with Firemint community manager Alexandra Peters to discuss the company’s quick rise to success, its current development and marketing strategies, and the deceptive simplicity of casual game design.

Prior to your iPhone success, you had a history of working heavily with publishers like EA. Is that in the past for you, now that you have a direct channel to your customers?

Alexandra Peters: We haven’t stopped entirely. We’re still doing a bit of publisher work. We’re not going out and looking for it anymore, so this is the first year you see [at developer shows] where we haven’t had anyone meeting with publishers trying to sign up new work. We’re being asked to do more work than we’re really wanting to do.

I would say we’ve gone from 20 percent doing our own stuff to the other way around. We’re doing 80 percent our own and 20 percent on a few publisher projects. We’ve been able to be more selective about the publisher projects that we do, so if something really interesting comes along that we’re keen to work on, that’s a win-win for everybody.

I’ve heard you have a strategy of developing at least one full-scale game and one smaller, cheaper game simultaneously, so you have acccess to different avenues. Is that an ongoing strategy?

AP: I’m not sure I would call it a strategy. It’s more about wanting to make good games. When we have an idea for a game that we think is going to work really well, we’ll make that game.

There’s nothing to say that we wouldn’t do two casual games at the same time or three hardcore high-end 3D games at the same time. This is why we go for great big long stretches of time not really having much to talk about in terms of what’s coming up.

Having said that, we’ve seen the advantages of what that strategy will do for you. You don’t get pigeonholed for one thing. People know that, yes, we did Flight Control, but we also did Real Racing. Similarly, you’re talking about different audiences and different ways of marketing these games, so it’s always good to have a mix, so you can be quite diversified.

It’s always better to have a few irons in the fire rather than all your eggs in one basket.

As long as you don’t get your eggs in the fire.

AP: Scrambled eggs!

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: firemint, flight control, interview, real racing

Mobile developer Ngmoco has acquired Stumptown Game Machine, developers of its successful iPhone title Touch Pets Dogs, and multiple new games in development.

Andrew Stern is the original creator of the Petz series, which Ubisoft continues to publish (without his input). He is also known for co-creating experimental conversation game Facade before he began work on Touch Pets Dogs.

Stern will now oversee Stumptown’s projects for the San Francisco-headquartered Ngmoco, which will continue to operate the Stumptown Game Machine studio from Portland, Oregon.

Touch Pets Dogs, an iPhone game, was one of the first launches under Ngmoco’s new free-to-play business model. Costing users nothing and supported by in-game purchases, it has been downloaded over 5 million times.

Bob Stevenson, one of Ngmoco’s co-founders, says that the move to release the game for free “worked out really, really well.” The acquisition of Stumptown, he says, reflects the Ngmoco’s management team’s belief that Stern is “a great collaborator” and the realization that “this just has to be a long term relationship. We have a great working relationship that we wanted to solidify.”

This move also allows Stumptown to pursue new projects — on which Stevenson is bullish. “We felt like the combination of some titles, [which] we’re not announcing today, but are being brainstormed and in production, being able to build our resources around Andrew… Given that kind of commitment, it allowed him to queue up some collaborators… really key talent.”

Some of these notable collaborators include Richard Evans (Black & White, The Sims 3) who has joined the Stumptown team. Like Stern, he’s an AI specialist.

Describing the process of meeting with developers after the acquisition of Freeverse as a “warm experience”, Stevenson says that “we’re highly collaborative and try and break new ground.” Stern agrees, saying that the company “is at the forefront of taking risks and trying new things.”

“Ngmoco is very supportive of allowing us to keep our mode of creation, and independent spirit, and give us a lot of freedom to innovate exciting new product directions,” he says.

He also says that the acquisition was an idea that he’d always considered a possibility at some point for the company’s future, and both agree that this timing made sense.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Industry News, interview, ngmoco, touch pets dogs

Corporate statements often categorize layoffs as “business as usual” or just the “nature of the business.” But that rationale doesn’t really lessen the blow when you’re blindsided with a pink slip.

Take, for example, Downsized Games, which appeared on the radar last week. Formed by four recently-laid off workers from Electronic Arts’ now-defunct subsidiary Pandemic Studios, the new studio took its collective frustration (and newly-found free time) and dumped it into a creative work with a humorous premise.

The studio’s first title, BulleTrain is a satirical iPhone game that pokes fun at EA and the dreaded corporate machine. It’s set in 2124, when “bullet trains” are used to deliver goods from point to point. Your small shipping company on planet Glendon-19 was acquired by “Elaborate Acquisitions,” which is in cahoots with powerful railroad barons led by “the dastardly JR.”

The analogy is clear to anyone who follows the games industry: Electronic Arts, under CEO John Riccitiello, acquired Pandemic (headquartered on Glendon Ave. in L.A.) in 2007, along with BioWare. Late last year, EA closed down Pandemic, and the four-person Downsized crew, along with about 200 other workers, were laid off.

With a humorous backdrop that poked fun at megapublisher EA, Downsized was able to cut through the noise created by 25,000 other App Store games. Some might call it a cheap way to get press, but what it amounts to is savvy marketing, even if it’s “marketing” in the loosest sense.

“As far as the backstory is concerned, like all video games it was just an afterthought,” said Downsized artist Manny Vega. He formed the studio with fellow ex-Pandemic employees Andrew Mournian, Zach Haefner and Ariel Tal.

“One day Ariel was asking me if we were going to have a main villain and a backstory for the hero, so I said, ‘why not,’” Vega said. “That was the extent of our evil plan. We tossed a few ideas back and forth and were laughing our asses off, so we went with it.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: bulletrain, downsized games, interview, Upcoming

[Continuing a series of interviews with 2010 IGF Mobile finalists, FingerGaming speaks to Jetro Lauha and Jani Kahrama of developer Secret Exit, whose iPhone game Stair Dismount is competing in the Best Mobile game category, having won the IGF Mobile award for Technical Achievement.]

Before they released Zen Bound, the nearly indescribable puzzle game which remains one of the iPhone’s killer apps, Finnish studio Secret Exit worked on a series of physics centric, stair tumbling computer freeware games in Porrasturvat, or Stair Dismount (“the ultimate stairflight simulator”), and sequel Truck Dismount.

Seeing the player push a hapless Kubrick-alike, Mr. Dismount, down a flight of stairs in order to “inflict massive damage to every weak point!”, the game has more in common with their aforementioned iPhone debut than meets the eye, most noticeably being another technical marvel, the recent iPhone version earning the IGF Mobile Technical Achievement award.

Taking time out from working on their sequel to Zen Bound (“… we’ve been totally tunnel-visioned with getting Zen Bound 2 ready”) Stair Dismount mastermind Jetro Lauha and cohort Jani Kahrama took time out of their busy schedule to speak to FingerGaming about the development of their IGF Mobile finalist sequel, a whole eight years after it first saw release on the PC.

What is Secret Exit’s background in game development?

Jetro Lauha: We have strong background with practically all flavors of mobile games development, from previous companies our people have worked in. Still, all of our coders share interest for various platforms so we do have some insight about desktop and console platforms as well.

Can you tell us what development tools your team used to create Stair Dismount?

JL: We leveraged many open source libraries such as Irrlicht and ODE. The levels are authored with irrEdit accompanied by our own custom-developed plugin and postprocessing tools. The workflow could always be better, but in the end the choices we made have still saved us a huge amount of time. Without getting OpenGL ES port of Irrlicht from the community it could be that we’d never even have made the iPhone version.

How long was the iPhone version in development?

JL: About 3 months in full production leading to first release version. But before that there was many shorter periods of pre-production work which is harder to quantify, especially because the iPhone version codebase was directly based on earlier prototype running on desktop.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: igf mobile, secret exit, star dismount, zen bound

[In the next in a series of Road to the IGF Mobile interviews with 2010 Independent Games Festival Mobile finalists, FingerGaming speaks to Randy Smith of Spider developer Tiger Style, whose game is currently competing in the Best Mobile Game category, having won the IGF Mobile award for Best iPhone Game.]

As pastoral as it is eerie, Tiger Style’s elegant Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor ended 2009 heralded as not only one of the year’s best iPhone games, but one of the best on any platform.

Having recently won the IGF Mobile Best iPhone game award, FingerGaming spoke to industry veteran and Tiger Style head Randy Smith about the studio’s stunning debut heading into the IGF.

What is your background in game development?

I’ve in the games industry for 12 years, primarily as a designer / director. I worked on the Thief series with Looking Glass and ION Storm, and consulted with Arkane Studios, Ubisoft, and others. My most recent gig before starting Tiger Style was a creative director at EA on one of the projects with Steven Spielberg.

Can you tell us what development tools you used to create Spider?

The iPhone SDK, xCode, Photoshop, and various other visual/audio/music creators and editors.

How long was the game in development?

8 months.

How did the initial concept come about?

We solicited the team for short, 1-2 sentence game concepts. Of those, we selected a small handful and did treatments of them – about 20 pages of PowerPoint that got into more depth of what the game would be about and how it would work.

Spider‘s treatment attracted the most attention within the team. Originally we envisioned it as more of a slow-paced spider simulator, but during the pre-production and prototyping phases we refined our movement controls and web-building mechanic which in turn pushed the game into the form you see today.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: hornet smash, randy smith, spider: the secret of bryce manor, tiger style

[In the second in a series of Road to the IGF Mobile interviews with 2010 Independent Games Festival Mobile finalists, FingerGaming speaks to lilt line developer Gordon Midwood, whose game is currently competing in the Best Mobile game category, having won the IGF Mobile award for Audio Achievement.]

Gordon Midwood, developer of “retro rhythm racing beat ‘em up action game with a dubstep flavour” lilt line, has come a long way since FingerGaming spoke to him nearly a year ago. Initially quite cynical about how his rather unique game would perform buried under a storefront filled with tower defense games and… iPhone butts, lilt line has recently seen great success, winning the IGF Mobile Audio Achievement.

Heading into the festival, FingerGaming had the chance to speak to a cheeky Midwood about the evolution of lilt line and his recent good fortunes.

What is your background in game development?

I have more of a background in web games than in traditional development. Online is definitely where I cut my teeth initially. As soon as I stopped trying to eat the cables that soon cleared up though.

I did once have a short stint at Electronic Arts doing the frontend for a well-known racing franchise. The working conditions were a little too crazy for my liking, although to be fair to EA they did tell me in the interview that I would be getting the full Burnout experience.

Independent game development definitely suits me best though, freed from commercial reality and the oppressive opinions of co-workers!

Can you tell us what development tools you used to create lilt line?

Sure, well the iPhone SDK for all the coding obviously, and a level editor in Flash to make things easier there. Marking off beat points in the audio was done using a bit of Mac software called Amadeus. Oh, and I did a fair bit of the coding on a little Dell Mini9 hackintosh on the train on the way to work.

How long was the game in development?

About 5 months in total. To be honest I was unfamiliar with Objective-C and all the iPhone stuff beforehand and it was all done in evenings and weekends. So it would have been a lot quicker if I was on it full time and actually knew what I was doing.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: different cloth, gordon midwood, igf mobile, interview, lilt line