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Revision3’s Adam Sessler visits Firaxis Games and chats with Sid Meier, Jake Solomon, and Steve Martin (among others). Firaxis is the development house behind franchises like Civilization and Pirates, and they’re bringing their 2012 hit XCOM: Enemy Unknown to iOS this year.
It’s a good interview (as usual with Sessler’s video content). I like how Firaxis has its own skunkworks to experiment with mobile games for iOS. You can watch the video below.
A few days ago, I remembered a story by TouchArcade from last year that explained how adding iCloud support to games was no easy task for most independent developers:
It’s also obvious to us that iCloud and the implementation of it needs to be easier, and the service itself needs to be more reliable. Almost every studio we talked to had some trepidations or a horror story to share. Browse our message board, and you’ll find even more from users receiving the bad end of an iCloud problem.
Today, Google announced Google Play Game Services, a set of APIs to enable cross-platform gaming features like saved game states, leaderboards with Google+ support, achievements, and automatic player matches with real-time multiplayer. There is a native SDK for iOS and Android, REST APIs and various libraries for the web.
WWDC ‘13 is less than a month away, and it’s safe to assume Apple will show new developer tools for iCloud and Game Center. It’ll be interesting to see if “Sign In with Google+” buttons will start showing up in iOS games in the next few months.
Rovio:
Some of you may have noticed a new feature in your Rovio games called Rovio Account. Our fans have been asking for a way to play their game on different phones or tablets without losing their progress when changing the device. This is exactly what Rovio Account lets you do!
Another developer who ends up shipping an in-house implementation that doesn’t rely on iCloud or Game Center. For Rovio, I guess that cross-platform syncing was also an important factor to consider.
More details are available in the FAQ.
Cool new $0.99 iPhone game designed and developed by Impending for the Ellen DeGeneres Show. The game is, essentially, an iOS version of one of Ellen’s classic games: using your iPhone as a “card” to hold over your head, other players will have to help you guess the name of a celebrity, an accent, and so forth.
There are 18 themed decks in Heads Up!, and the design and interactions look fun and polished. Impending – co-creators of Clear with Realmac – have a history for producing great-looking and delightfully touch-based apps, and Heads Up is no exception. While holding a card over your head, you can tilt the iPhone up to pass, or tilt it down when you answer correctly. As shown in the announcement by Ellen, the app also records videos with the camera to capture funny moments.
It’s great to see Impending collaborating on a mainstream project like Heads Up! while keeping the same attention to detail as always. I can’t wait to play this with my friends this weekend. Check out the video below, and the game’s website here.
Great article by Craig Grannell, who interviewed several game developers.
In particular, this part:
More often, though, you hear about, as Ismail puts it, games specifically designed to be “less fun unless you pay, but just addictive enough that you want to play”. Money and research is poured into analytics, metrics, monetisation and behavioural targeting. “The difficulty for me is you’re then no longer designing the most engaging experience for a player, and are instead designing mechanics around getting people to drop money as often as possible,” says Perrin, who likens this system to the gambling industry.
As a long-time gamer, I still find myself wondering whether In-App Purchases will eventually prove to be a healthy model for the quality and economic viability of games. I like to think that it’s possible to use IAPs without being evil, but that far too many companies are exploiting them. Keep in mind, though, that I’m biased.
Our previous articles on games and IAPs still hold true today: there’s a conflict between economics and goodwill, but I’d argue that, ultimately, value is what truly matters.
Truly great work by Russ Pitts at Polygon. Make sure to watch the video until the very last seconds.
Ridiculous Fishing is my favorite iOS game. It’s good to see Vlambeer is getting the recognition they deserve.
Delightful new Universal game by Snowman, makers of Checkmark.
It’s clear to me that this is a post-Letterpress game: the menus and navigation are reminiscent of Brichter’s word game, and the multiplayer component is based on Game Center. There is, however, a single-player mode as well where you can practice or try to beat the 120 levels. If you have an iPhone and iPad, Circles will sync using iCloud.
I love Circles’ animations, sound effects, music, and overall flow of interactions within the game.
Plus, a percentage of each sale will be donated to help fund Alzheimer’s research and support programs. Buy a great game and support a good cause.
Edge:
This is in no way atypical for some of the more successful game developers, and all of that is done in hopes that the new games get featured on a variety of app stores, causing that oh-so-important spike in early sales.
The post refers to Jessica Lessin’s article on The Wall Street Journal about the launch of ZeptoLab’s latest game:
Overall, ZeptoLab says it will spend around $1 million launching “Cut the Rope: Time Travel,” which traces the adventures of the green monster Om Nom as he meets versions of himself in time periods like the Renaissance and the Middle Ages. On top of that sum, which includes the costs of animation, the company is counting on some free help by promoting the game inside its other titles.
After nearly five years, the App Store is a huge market and game developers are throwing big money at it. In ZeptoLab’s case, add the fact that the game has also launched on Android – it doesn’t always happen, though – and you understand why large companies are capitalizing on the installed base of mobile devices.
There’s another side of the coin: indie developers with great ideas but limited budgets. Take this Polygon article about Ridiculous Fishing as an example:
We did everything…I literally didn’t sleep for three days before the launch, just working and making sure that every reviewer and every website and every person that I could send the game to had the game.
Different games, different needs. Vlambeer doesn’t have the same resources of ZeptoLab and they opted for a different pricing scheme.
Smaller indie developers aren’t “less important” than established, popular game companies: because of the freedom that generally comes with independent creation, indie games tend to explore concepts and game mechanics that larger studios are more skeptical about. With the rise and consolidation of app stores and digital delivery platforms, indie games have become a fundamental piece of any device’s catalogue. Ask Sony. Ask Nintendo. Take a look at Kickstarter, with well-funded game and hardware projects.
On our end of the spectrum, I’d say that Apple is doing a good job overall. The App Store’s front page is skewed towards free-to-play games from large studios and publishers, but, on the flip side, Apple has featured indie titles numerous times in the past, and it also differentiates between “big name publishers” and smaller titles in their curated sections.
And yet, for a successful Ridiculous Fishing, there are hundreds of indie games with solid, original ideas that don’t get the recognition they’d deserve, either for a lack on the developer’s side (poor marketing skills is a common culprit) or an obvious inability to get noticed on the App Store. Other times it’s because the market is simply saturated, but, again, indie games tend to innovate and explore new ideas.
There’s a variety of improvements Apple itself could consider to help indie game (and app) developers, many of which I elaborated upon last year. Let developers offer videos alongside screenshots for those game/experiences that are hard to grasp in a couple of images; give more prominence to human curation and weekly sections; protect game makers against scams and rip-offs that are still far too present on the App Store.
Launching mobile games is expensive, especially for large companies. I hope Apple will keep working on finding the right balance between “big name games” and indie gems on the App Store.
Cool demonstration of the capabilities of OpenEmu for OS X using the iPad as a second monitor. (via)
I’m looking forward to OpenEmu, which is still in private beta (though you can compile the source). I haven’t played my old GameBoy and SNES games in years, but, in the light of recent Nintendo announcements, I’d like to play them on a computer today. OpenEmu is promising:
Open Emu is an open source project to bring game emulation to OS X as a first class citizen, leveraging modern OS X technologies such as Cocoa, Core Animation and Quartz, and 3rd party libraries like Sparkle for auto-updating. Open Emu is based on a modular architecture, allowing for game-engine plugins, this means Open Emu can support a host of different emulation engines and back-ends while retaining a familiar OS X native front-end.
From what I’ve seen so far, OpenEmu will support both hardware controllers (with lots of configuration options) and software solutions like Joypad (which we reviewed).
Matt Gemmell had an excellent article a while back on playing Nintendo games on a Mac, with lots of great photos as well.
Update: In case it wasn’t clear enough, we don’t condone piracy here at MacStories. Either for apps or games, don’t be greedy. Support developers and buy original games. As Matt also says, most second-hand consoles and games are cheap on eBay these days.
