Hideo Kojima is on board. John Carmack is on board. Yoot Saito is on board. And though many will note his historic opposition to gaming, Steve Jobs himself is on board too. What do these individuals and companies like Electronic Arts, Sega, Gameloft, Namco Bandai, Konami and more have in common? The notion that with a skyrocketing installbase and a collection of intriguing new technology, the Apple iPhone/iPod Touch is becoming a valid handheld gaming platform -- and one that just might be able to compete with the Nintendo DS and Sony PSP.
But believe it or not, the most exciting games on iPhone currently come from none of the parties named above. No, thanks to the democratizing process that is the iTunes App Store, the big players in this new market are start-ups and indie developers -- and in Eyeing the Phone, a new GameCyte feature, we will bring you interviews with those who demonstrate the potential to create the touch-sensitive, accelerometer-powered, location-aware, network-connected, graphically driven experiences we've wanted since the iPhone was first announced.
First up? The developers of the first asynchronous mobile MMO -- Aurora Feint.
Aurora Feint's basic concept will immediately be familiar to most gamers -- like Bejeweled, it's a match three sliding tile game. Like Puzzle Quest, you accumulate resources for matching elemental magicks, which can be used to trigger abilities. Like Tetris, additional blocks fill the playing field if not quickly removed, inevitably leading to the end of your session. Like all three, it's a solid, polished puzzle game. But the original version of Aurora Feint didn't cost iPhone owners a cent -- and The Arena, the game's $10 sequel, is a modern marvel that allows you to battle friends online by recording ghost data, and socialize with other players via in-game chat and community features.
It's hard to believe that these games are the work of just two developers, Jason Citron and Danielle Cassley, who joined forces not for the express purpose of building games, but rather because a college roommate -- and a babysitter job ad -- respectively led them to entrepreneur Peter Relan, their current business partner.
Here, we speak with Jason, Danielle and Peter about how the game first came together, the state of iPhone gaming, and where they believe both will go next.
GameCyte: Aurora Feint – how did that concept come together? What had you played and been interested in that led to the game?
JC: I'll take this one. So the idea for Aurora Feint came about from loving MMOs. I was an avid MMO player – World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy XI, Guild Wars – and now that I'm an adult and working I don't have the free time to spend playing an MMO all day. I kind of had this need to play an MMO and feel like I could participate in it enough to not get left behind by my friends, even though I had a job. And a lot of my friends who are game developers had the same kind of sentiment.
So this is floating around in my head, and then when the iPhone came about, it occurred to me that it would be a perfect platform for an MMO that you only engage in a little bit every day. So if you imagine you spend like 15-20 minutes a day, or maybe half an hour, in 5-minute-increments throughout your day playing, and it's enough to keep up and progress through the game. I would play that; and after chatting with some friends, they all seemed like they would play it, so the idea for Aurora Feint was to make an MMO on the iPhone that you can play casually, in those small doses.
GameCyte: From the beginning then, the idea was to build an MMO? You weren't starting with the Puzzle Quest line of thought?
DC: Yeah.
JC: Yep, exactly. It just so happens that the first version looked kind of like Puzzle Quest. The Arena looks less like Puzzle Quest, and as we move forward with our flagship products, it's going to look less and less like Puzzle Quest. (chuckles)
If you want to compare it to a game, I think it's going to end up looking more like Puzzle Pirates, even though we're trying to go asynchronous as a whole spin on the thing. You want to play with your friends when you play games, it's just more fun; and if you're only playing half an hour a day, in little bits and pieces, it's going to be really hard to match up with your friends. And if you're playing in increments, like walking to the grocery store or standing in line at Starbucks, or if your phone rings, you're going to need to be able to stop playing without pissing people off.
GameCyte: The question wasn't to accuse you of copying Puzzle Quest or anything like that – I just wanted to clarify, it was the incremental, asynchronous idea that hit you first, and it just so happened that that didn't make it into the first version of the game?
JC: Yes.
DC: No way we were building an MMO in ten weeks. We knew we could build something and it would be awesome and amazing, but it was not going to be the massively-multiplayer thing that we had planned out in our heads. I think the real reason it ended up going towards Puzzle Quest is like Jason said, he played a lot of MMOs, and I played a lot of RPGs and was really into puzzle games. I have a really really strong math background, and that kind of strategy really entices me. I think with his kind of background and my kind of background, we ended up finding the kind of strategy game that was easy to learn and relatively familiar to people... and could potentially be made into a really cool multiplayer experience in the long run.
GameCyte: Was there a conscious decision towards Puzzle Quest, or were there any other games that inspired you to go this particular route?
JC: Well, I'm not sure really, but Puzzle Quest wasn't really on our radar even when we were designing the game – we had a particular theme set in our heads, we wanted to make a game around that theme, and we settled on puzzles because it was accessible. Since we couldn't build an MMO, we made it single player, and it just happened that it ended up looking like Puzzle Quest. It wasn't an inspiration really.
DC: Neither of us are the biggest fans. We think it has some interesting ideas, but it's not really that entertaining.
GameCyte: So you have played it since then, but said, “meh.”
JC: It's a good game, I definitely see its appeal, but I'm not a fan of Bejeweled actually, and Puzzle Quest is all Bejeweled so it kind of killed it for me.
GameCyte: I love what you've done with the accelerometer, tilting everything from the outside – it's brilliant.
But can I ask why you chose the iPhone for Aurora Feint?
DC: So actually, I had been really into mobile stuff, and some of the projects I'd been working on before Jason and I started working on Aurora Feint had been focused on making a cool mobile experience. I had been working on some social network-y stuff that didn't end up working out, and so I kind of went on this little trek of trying to figure out where the next big thing in mobile was. I looked into distribution, the different phone platforms, whether or not to go with Java phones or Android or iPhone, and after talking to a lot of people in the industry, we decided that the iPhone was probably our best bet with the particular timing we had of going for a project.
I mean it's an amazing phone, fun to play with, great tech specs and just really great for games – so we just went for it.
GameCyte: So you say it had something to do with the timing of the release. The iPhone launch was kicking off, and it made sense to go with them because it would get you that hyped-up audience? Or was it something else about the phone that was the prime driver?
JC: It's kind of two-pronged. One is that whenever a new platform launches, it's a level playing field – Peter likes to call it “the wild, wild west” – because there aren't big behemoth companies that have the distribution channels all tied up. So it gives us room to put out a product and get equal viewing space in the mindshare of people. That was really the point of our first product, The Beginning. “Get it out there on launch day, and make sure people know that we're here, and establish our brand,” basically. Then I guess the other half of the decision was that I really wanted to make a game for my iPhone.
(all laugh)
JC: I bought one when it launched, and was like “Oh my god, I want to play games on this,” and as soon as we had identified that the iPhone was going to be a viable platform to sell a product on, long-term, I had downloaded the “hacked” SDK and started mucking around with games, back in January.
PR: The first game that Jason built on the iPhone was like Mortal Kombat...
JC: Yes... the first experiment we did on the iPhone that I built was a Wi-Fi local multiplayer Street Fighter clone using Wolverine sprites from Marvel vs. Capcom.
GameCyte: Oh, I know what those sprites look like. All too well.
JC: And it was fun, but we decided rather quickly that it wasn't going to scale and work out as a massively multiplayer product.
DC: Basically, Jason and I had been doing some prototyping with the hacked SDK, just goofing around and figuring out what was possible with the iPhone, and that's probably one of the reasons we settled on the game we did. He'd prototyped the Mortal Kombat-y thing, and I'd prototyped a souped-up Hexic and a souped-up Panel De Pon game.
GameCyte: How did they run? You say local multiplayer over Wi-Fi – how did it run in that context? In terms of speed, synchronization... was this playable?
JC: Yeah, it was playable. Actually, the weirdest thing about it was the controls. Not having tactile buttons makes it really hard to play certain types of games, which I'm sure you've found. Funky Punch is an example of a game on the iPhone that is a fighting game, and I just don't find it that entertaining because it's kind of like you have to look... not having tactile buttons makes it hard to play a fighting game.
GameCyte: Oh no, I understand – not having mouse and keyboard makes it hard to play a first-person shooter, on the Xbox, for instance. But they do it anyhow, so I was wondering if it worked.
JC: It worked, but I think our biggest issue, and why we ended up not going with it, was we were trying to make a game that would eventually work in a massively multiplayer setting over the internet, and a fighting game over Wi-Fi barely worked – a fighting game over the internet wouldn't work at all.
Over an EDGE network, playing Street Fighter multiplayer is just, you know...
GameCyte: So I was going to ask, very quickly, there's this term you're using, AMMMO...
DC: (laughs) or “ammo”!
GameCyte: (chuckles) I was going to ask if you called it “ammo” in the office.
PR: No, not really...
JC: It's marketing. (laughs) We usually say asynchronous MMO.
PR: We just throw it out there to see if hey, maybe we could come up with a term that everyone would start using, but I don't think anyone's using it.
DC: Sounds cool though, right?
GameCyte: It's a good idea, especially if you get them to start pronouncing it “ammo.”
JC: We were debating between AMMMO and CAMMO, for Casual, but we...
GameCyte: Casual... oooh, watch out for that casual word.
So working with the iPhone then... how is it developing for the iPhone? Just generally – I've got a few specific questions, but generally how is it getting into iPhone game development, just building the kinds of things you've been building?
You say it took ten weeks from scratch to make The Beginning turn into something that lots of people love already, but how easy was it to get into that?
JC: It was very easy. Developing for the iPhone is very much like developing for Windows – I've never done OSX development, but I imagine it's similar to that. If you were to compare it to game console development, it's similar to Xbox 360 and Xbox development – they have a very nice, integrated development environment that works with the hardware, and it's really easy to prototype and run things on your phone. They have a little bit of weirdness around the certificate signing processes to make sure you're only running on approved phones, which at times is a little annoying...
DC: We've spent many an hour debugging applications to put on our devices.
JC: One of our guys just dropped his phone and it unplugged from the USB port while it was copying code over, and we had to restore the phone because it gets in some weird state. So it has a little bit of weirdness, but unless you throw the phone across the room while you're building on it...
GameCyte: So I'd like to ask about the iPhone as a gaming platform. Plenty of people are building little bitty games for the iPhone, and plenty of companies are making ports of games they put on other mobile phones, or their home computers on the iPhone, but you have built a game that which stands on its own; something you might see on a Nintendo DS or a PSP or something like that. But is the platform a viable competitor?
In your eyes, is the iPhone a games platform? Or is it a phone that plays games?
PR: There's a technical part of it, there's the usability part, and a business and pricing part. Which do you want to talk about?
GameCyte: I'd like to hear a little bit about all three, but let's start with the technical.
JC: Sure. In short, yes.
DC: In long...
JC: In long, yes as well. Technically, from a development standpoint, it stands up just like any other handheld device. It has its quirks, but there's nothing...
DC: Keeping it from happening.
JC: Yes, there's nothing keeping it from being a viable gaming platform. About the only things that I would say concern me about it being a gaming platform are the battery life – if you compare it to a DS or a PSP it's not that spectacular – and the sort of running environment.
Most consoles don't have complicated operating systems running behind them, so you have a consistent environment to run your game in. Whereas on the iPhone, even across different peoples' configurations, you have very different performance characteristics. You're running the push email in the background, you're playing music, and then you launch our game – and let's say just before that you were browsing the web in Safari – the amount of memory you have available is kind of variable, and the number of processing cycles you have changes. As you receive a text message, as the phone syncs with the cell towers, as it checks your push email, you get these weird framerate spikes and memory thresholds that change – which is totally unheard of on consoles.
You have a constant kernel on the DS which is really small, and it almost does nothing.
DC: We spent two or three weeks at the end right before releasing Arena just building a really complex memory management system. That would be unheard of on the DS.
GameCyte: I see. And how much extra effort was that? You say it was a few weeks' worth?
JC: Yeah, we probably spent about two and a half weeks of one of our programmer's time building this system that basically responds to conditions when the memory ceiling lowers, throws out assets that haven't been used recently, and streams them back in when needed so the game doesn't crash due to low memory conditions.
GameCyte: On the Xbox 360, you can have background downloads running, but when you start a game they just shut off. Can you have something like that in place, or are you not able to do that because it would take away the user's freedom with their device?
JC: Exactly. We can't turn off the cell phone, for instance, when you launch the game.
DC: On my phone, I have push email running; on Jason's phone, he doesn't – and the way that the game reacts is totally different. You can tell when my email starts coming in.
JC: The framerate takes a hit, for sure. The whole software environment is more like a desktop computer than a console.
GameCyte: So as far as all the components that make up the phone, would you say that they are conducive to good games?
DC: When we first sat down to build our game, before we even thought about what we wanted to build, we made a list of everything that was in the iPhone – wireless access, an accelerometer, location awareness, all of this stuff – and asked ourselves how we can exploit it to make an entertaining game. Not as gimmick, but to actually add something to the game, and I think that's where our tilt functionality came in and ended up working out really well. Obviously the wireless is really going to play into our MMO idea, and in the future I'm sure we'll come out with something for location-based stuff too.
GameCyte: And then you were going to talk about the business side of the iPhone...?
JC: I think the biggest thing on the iPhone from a business perspective is the distribution channel and the way you can push products to the user. It's a very short pathway from create a game – submit it – and then users get to see it, whereas if you compare it to something like Xbox LIVE Arcade, which is probably the closest thing in the gaming world to this, there's a year backlog to get your game out unless you are buddies with Bill Gates or something.
There's just so much attention and demand from developers to put their stuff on the platform that in order to keep the marketplace nice they have a different strategy for releasing product – whereas Apple right now is in this free-fall mode where if you send the game and it's not violating their terms, they put it out. It's almost kind of a Digg-like environment, where every time you download a product it gets a thumbs-up and things bubble to the top. It gives new product the opportunity to shine if they're good and they can get a bit of a ground swell to kickstart the download.
PR: We we lucky enough-- we made such a big splash with The Beginning – that just the other day, I think MacLife just published the top 101 iPhone apps, and we are third of all apps.
GameCyte: (laughs)
DC: It was like the remote control...
JC: The iTunes Remote was number one, Shazam was number two...
DC: And we were number three.
PR: That kind of recognition for an indie is almost impossible on traditional platforms.
But not only can you get your product out fast, like Jason was saying, but you can also interact with your user community while the product is being developed, modified, updated – whereas if you look at the console business, you work for a year to really build a great game, and then when you ship you're done.
GameCyte: There are some console developers that are currently trying to change that, but I know what you're talking about for sure.
PR: Here, we just put out updates when we see people saying we should have this or that, we just launched The Arena, we're actually working on new games... that would be not possible in the traditional model.
The other thing that's kind of interesting is you have to design games a little more intelligently for the platform. We're learning that the consumption model from a user pricing perspective... before the iTunes store, there were CDs, priced anywhere from $7.99 to $19.99, right? Then, when 99 cent songs came along, now, almost no one buys CDs. You just buy the songs you want. The iTunes music model has changed how you package content into more discrete chunks at lower prices. You could never sell even a $30 game on the iPhone, let alone a $60 title. You just couldn't do it. The price point at which people buy and consume content is in the $1 to $10 range, and a lot of it set at 99 cents, and so you actually have to redesign your content into smaller chunks.
GameCyte: I was going to ask about that. It sounds like you're going the episodic route – and by episodic, I don't mean narrative, of course – with Aurora Feint. You've got The Beginning, you've got The Arena, and I'm guessing a third...
DC: We're hoping at some point to add narrative to this too.
JC: Yeah, our long-term ambitions for the product – the environment and the brand and all that – is more like a large multiplayer world, quote-unquote, with story and the whole shebang... but go ahead.
GameCyte: I was going to say in addition to the packaging, you mention interacting with your audience on an ongoing basis during development and so on – is that required of you in order to succeed, or is that simply an optional benefit as an iPhone developer?
JC: I think it's one of those things were we saw the opportunity to interact with our users in this way; and we went for it because people like it. I guess it's an optional thing, developers don't have to do it, but I think those developers who embrace their users and create communities around their product will see greater success.
DC: I actually think that with the model Apple has set up for how you are to test your devices – we had to test it in-house – I think that you're going to run into a lot of issues. If you don't contact your community, you're not going to know where your bugs are at. All kinds of shit happens that you never even thought of.
PR: You can actually do beta cycles with your community before you ship, which is kind of cool.
JC: Since we're an indie team, we're leveraging this ability to use adhoc distribution to kind of recruit our top fifty users to kind of be our QA team before we ship games. It makes it cheaper for us to do QA on our products.
PR: And they like it because they say “Oh, cool, I get to see the product before anyone else?”
JC: They get to feel like they're really part of the process, and they love it.
DC: They get their names on the screenshots that get published on websites... (laughs)
GameCyte: Is the ability to recruit your users a product of your own popularity here, or...
JC: I think it is. When we first launched the game, obviously nobody knew about us, and very quickly people saw Aurora Feint and were like “holy crap, this is great,” and we had a place for them to go to create this community, and I think because of that initial attention we got we were able to leverage our community to do things for us.
PR: We created this website aurorafeint.com, and soon we had thousands of people joining it, talking about the game and trying to figure out who the developers were, and a lot of them were saying “Open up a PayPal account, we want to pay you,” and it's pretty neat to just listen to these people – and they give us strategy tips on how they expect an MMORPG to work in the long term... and actually with Aurora Feint II we've brought that community into the game now.
There's a chat room, it's asynchronous but it feels real-time, and any time you're in the game there's a little fifteen-pixel ticker at the bottom where people's comments and chats and duels are going on, and if you click on that you can start talking. And Danielle and I will get on there and just jump into the conversation, and people are like “Woah, it's the developers! They're in the chatroom!”
(all laugh)
JC: It's pretty cool – like on my character's wall, I have a bunch of posts from users suggesting new game mechanics and stuff, and they really like engaging with us. It's pretty cool.
DC: It's pretty fun. A lot of people have my instant messenger, and now every day I hear from people playing Aurora Feint.
GameCyte: What I was getting at though, is that you guys had a phenomenal launch, timed as you were with Apple's hardware launch, and now you've got the second version and you're the first asynchronous mobile MMO – but are others going to be able to emulate that kind of success with their own games? Or is this something you think will fizzle out as the app store becomes more popular and more mainstream?
DC: I think that's exactly what we were trying to say about getting in there early. I think over the long run, it will get harder and harder for people to put out new games and get seen and have that sort of branding, which is why we were lucky to get out at the beginning. Aurora Feint definitely has a brand at this point and a following, and when we release a game people are going to know about it.
At this point in time, it may be a little bit harder than at launch day, but I think you could still release a game and kind of rise to the top and do everything, but as time passes it's going to get harder and harder.
PR: I think by the end of the year, early next year... you know about ngmoco, right? Certainly people are going to try to build a distribution platform on top of this platform, and if you're just another indie developer, unless you have contacts and connections and marketing prowess or budget, you're going to have to go to publishers.
In the absence of a viable competitor to the iPhone – even now, with Android, as it's still very immature – the platform is maturing fast, because it's basically a monopoly in this space. All developers are writing for this one platform, which just crossed 10,000 apps and three hundred million downloads. Once you start to see that kind of maturity, I think it gets really hard to break in. As anything matures, distribution sets in, certain players get brands and the “wild west” becomes the developed west. Then you have to pay for housing instead of just squat and hope your land is valuable.
GameCyte: Well this leads to three last questions before we hit the bell. First, your success: can you tell me how you guys are doing in terms of sales? You've got an app that makes money now – I hope!
PR: So yes, Arena makes money. The value's very simple. When we got out there, we said “Let's just establish two things. A brand; and two, a high bar for games on the iPhone.” A lot of people still believe that for a free game, we are double, triple in terms of the high bar for quality of any other free game.
So then we introduced the paid game. We brought asynchronous, we brought the chat idea... basically, it's selling well enough that even with added developers, the company is...
DC: Sustaining.
PR: ...sustaining itself, and I think by the end of the month we'll be a pretty profitable company. We have a little bit of marketing budget, and our office space now and all that.
GameCyte: Are you going to be a general iPhone publisher, perhaps – in that you publish games from other iPhone developers? Where do you plan to take this?
PR: We have not made that leap yet – we still believe that our core competence is game design and development, and not distribution yet, though I think we'll get there. For now, what you can expect from us is under the Aurora Feint brand, casual single-player or multiplayer and MMO or RPG type games, all kinds of variants of Aurora Feint, in the 99 cent to $9.99 price range. Almost a price point for every pocket. There are a lot of audiences this device brings, because it's not a console – it's a consumer appliance.
The expectation is next year there will be a hundred million iPhones, so we believe that Aurora Feint games of various kinds have a lot of legs. When we run out of game ideas, which right now we don't feel like we have, we do believe that the company may mature because of our early lead in establishing a brand and distribution, and that other developers will want to leverage that.
GameCyte: You called Android “immature.” Are there no plans to go to Android with Aurora Feint?
PR: Long term, yes; but short term, sort of...
JC: No.
PR: Not really. It's not in our released road map. We have a road map through March, and an Android port is... I mean, they sold 200,000 devices, and we have had close to one million downloads of just the first game – we'd make 200,000 of any game we produce now.
DC: I think the biggest problem with Android is that although they have Google behind them making probably what's going to be a relatively good platform for developers, they don't have Apple making their phones. From a hardware perspective, I think that there has not been a phone released yet that is on par with the iPhone, and because of that it's just going to be a while.
PR: That's well said. They don't have Steve Jobs. Until they can learn to produce a great consumer appliance, I don't see the volume coming.
DC: But I have done some Android development, and I think Android as a development platform will end up being pretty good in the long run.
GameCyte: You think so?
PR: I see Android more competing against Blackberry than the iPhone. I think that there's a bigger likelihood that business phones will be built on Android...
But that's our perspective. If I were today – by let's say March – a new app developer for mobile, I might be eying Android like we were eying the iPhone a year ago. Because if you want to get in early, it's too late to be early on the iPhone. It's gone.
GameCyte: (laughs) Don't want to have to compete with Aurora Feint, right?
(all laugh)
Can I ask what you would suggest for Android and for iPhone to improve, that they would reasonably be able to improve, in order to make them both more viable game platforms?
JC: The first thing that jumps to mind, which would be cool, is if the two iPhones had a way to communicate with one another without needing a Wi-Fi network, like the DS does. That could be interesting. Like Bluetooth or something.
PR: Power and battery.
JC: The battery life is a big issue.
I'm not a hardware developer or a phone developer, but from a games perspective I would really like it if the phone had buttons, because there are a lot of games that you could make that would be really cool in a mobile environment with a D-pad, but as an end user I don't really want a D-pad on my phone, so I don't think they should add it...
GameCyte: What about from the software side?
JC: MMS.
GameCyte: What about MMS?
JC: It's not about gaming, but I want to be able to send picture messages on my phone.
GameCyte: (guffaw)
DC: I think the App Store and iTunes could really use some help. We put out our games, and one of the ways we make them visible is through our other games, but for somebody else who puts a game out that's really really good, you have to be like the top download of that day to be visible. The distribution platform needs to be seriously tuned, because it's not necessarily the good games that show up.
GameCyte: What could be done in particular?
DC: If they were on the phone, assorted by some sort of rating...
PR: They don't have a “rated by number of reviews/stars” for top games. Otherwise Aurora Feint would be pretty close to the top.
JC: All of the top categories are based on daily downloads. The benefit of it is it does provide users with new content often, but the downside is that the real good, engaging content can get lost.
There's no way for you to figure out on the iPhone which applications are engaging and good. All you can find out is what a lot of people downloaded. Though people may have spent hours and hours and hours playing Aurora Feint, the Ocarina is the number one app because everybody downloads it and spends five minutes goofing off with it.
GameCyte: (laughs) Indeed. They just brought out a cowbell for the G1. You know that's going to be there forever.
JC: It's a novel app, the Ocarina, and it's cool, but I played it for three minutes and I was done with it. Whereas our average user spends an hour and a half playing Aurora Feint, which is a long time to engage with an application on the iPhone.
GameCyte: Lastly, what could Google improve to entice you into Android?
PR: The phone.
JC: Honestly, I haven't seen a hardware and software integration such as the iPhone that makes a compelling product. I was on the whole iPhone train when they announced it like two and half years ago, and I was like “OMG iPhone!” and when it came out, it was as great as they said it was going to be, and is by far one of the best consumer purchases I've made in my life. And until there's a phone that has that same kind of satisfaction level for the consumer, I don't think it's going to appeal to the same market.
PR: You know what boggles my mind? Why these companies that make phones for Android don't just copy the iPhone. They feel like they need to innovate, but they innovate badly and come out with these bastard phones that just don't look good or feel good.
Thanks to Jason, Danielle and Peter for the interview.
December 20th, 2008 at 3:24 am
Is today "Make Brendon wish he could afford an iPhone" day and I just missed the memo or something? Stop tempting me with such awesome sounding games, iPhone!