Tag: Hammer & Chisel »

Jason Citron is something of a Founding Father for the App Store when you think about it; what with the work on OpenFeint that popularized achievements on iOS and arguably resulted in Apple creating Game Center. He's since founded a new company, Hammer & Chisel, and has begun work on a new Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) game made specifically for the iPad called Fates Forever. And this AAA vision has just received some major financial backing.

It was announced today that Hammer & Chisel has completed an $8.2 million funding round, with none other than Riot Games/League of Legends top investor Mitch Lasky doing his thing (investing lots of money) again. Lasky will also be joining Citron and Silicon Valley Alum Peter Relan on the development company's board of directors. If ever there were a clear indication that Fates Forever will definitely be amazing, this is it.

With the release of iOS 7 upon us and a whole plethora of juicy new features for consumers and developers alike to enjoy, we took the time to ask some popular game developers just how they feel about it and what features they're looking forward to getting more intimate with.

Look and Design of iOS 7

The look of iOS 7 is a huge change for many, which explains why so many pivotal apps are changing their appearance; to make sure it ties into the new style of doing things. How about with games, though? And do game developers appreciate such a significant change?

For the most part, it's been considered a positive change from those we questioned. Andrew Smith of AppyNation and Spilt Milk Studios explained, "I like it! I’m a fan of refreshes – and although when I first saw the new look I wasn’t completely sold, since using it in studio on the betas it’s won me over." Stephen Morris of Greenfly Studios reinforced that view, emphasizing that the "redefining of the experience... it certainly feels fresh and more efficient."

Some apprehension was felt, though. As Richard Brooks of Rodeo Games explained, "a veteran iOS user may find it a little jarring at first," pointing out that, "the new look will split the room," from his personal experience of showing it to others. Ben Britten of Tin Man Games felt the same, pointing out that some people will love it and others will, predictably, hate it.

It's not all plain sailing though, as Martin Linklater of Curly Rocket explained, "to be honest the colours are a little garish for my tastes. Maybe in iOS 8 Apple will tone it down a little. It's not quite got the subtlety that Apple is known for." Aaron Fothergill of Strange Flavour felt the same, diplomatically pointing out that he's "getting used to it."

Even those who weren't a fan had to admit that they, for the most part, appreciated the cleaner interface.

Issues

More positively, few issues have been encountered thus far. For the majority of the people we asked, covering developers such as Hello Games, Hammer & Chisel, AppyNation, Spilt Milk Studios, Strange Flavour, and Green Fly Studios, hardly any issues were reported. The only few problems that did occur related to third-party tools, although noticeably Ben Britten of Tin Man Games found no issues with Unity3D. There were some early day problems with Rodeo Games's Warhammer Quest as explained by Richard Brooks, "The devices we were testing with were crashing a lot and it was very difficult to get anything working. Warhammer Quest didn't work at first due to some bugs in the iOS 7 main libraries, so we just had to sit back and wait. After about 4-6 weeks these were dealt with and are mostly good now."

It's a pretty positive sign for developers that iOS 7 should prove quite beneficial in the long run, given the limited issues that have been encountered so far.

Controller Support

Arguably most significant of all for many game developers is the introduction of official controller support. How do they feel about it?

"For us, this is the biggest new feature of iOS 7." explained Aaron Fothergill, "The fact that they’re a standard is the important bit as we can actually design them into our game with the standard features in mind, so we can do it properly. We’ve already got test code in SlotZ Racer, Any Landing, and Apple Dash and we’re just waiting on controllers being available for us to actually test with and perfect the controls before we release games with them in and then we’ll be considering MFI controller as integral design parts of all our games."

Simon Renshaw, of PUK fame, has similar thoughts. " I love that its possible to play iPhone games on the big screen with Apple TV mirroring, latency is an issue though, as is battery life, so I kinda hope we'll see a controller bundled with a magical iPhone-charging HDMI cable!" Martin Linklater also thinks that the controller could be the "real killer feature," at least once adopted more frequently.

Hello Games' Sean Murray explained that "touchscreens are great for lots of games - like, I’m really proud of what we managed to do with the touchscreen design with Joe Danger Touch. There are some games that just benefit from buttons and thumbsticks though, and as a gamer, my thumb just feels comfortable sat on a nice analog button. Having officially supported controllers could be fantastic for broadening gaming on iPhones even further than it is today, bringing in the controller snobs like me! We're working on making something of all this right now, something that makes use of both touch and controller. We're throwing ourselves into it completely... I think people will be surprised how well it works."

Consider us fascinated as to what this will mean for Joe Danger on iOS!

Andrew Smith is keen, but as he points out "[it's] hardly going to sell the games to more people. The vast majority of iPhone users and gamers are perfectly happy with good touchscreen interfaces, so we’ll be happy to continue to provide those!" Greenfly Studios feels the same way, with Stephen Morris explaining "our mobile games are currently more focused on the casual consumer but it doesn't mean we're not open to exploring the new niche!".

Richard Brooks also found such support less than essential, pointing out that Rodeo Games' titles are "designed entirely for mobile and tablet devices with touch screens and implementing controller support would make them worse." A fair point indeed. Jason Citron expressed similar views, explaining how Hammer & Chisel is "laser focused on building original high-quality games for tablets. A big part of that is taking advantage of the unique interaction a large touch screen affords."

With so many of the best developers doing a great job of providing touch-based interfaces, is there really a need for controllers after five years of perfecting touch controls? Perhaps not, but it'll be fascinating to see how things develop.

Revamped Game Center

For the most part, the revamped Game Center has been quite appreciated by those we asked. Andrew Smith puts it well, "it's really neat!" although does admit, while inventing a new word, that the icon is a little un-game-y. Stephen Morris particularly loves that there's a way to combat cheaters at last, which means "we can focus on providing consumers fun and realistic challenges." Like any self-respecting iOS gamer, Sean Murray explained "Seeing insane hacked scores on any game makes me sad. I’m... going to really appreciate the added security for score and achievement data, because it’ll hopefully mean there isn’t so much leaderboard hacking."

Richard Brooks points out what we've all been thinking in terms of old Game Center's looks, "I'm glad they've gotten rid of the horrible green felt style though!" because as Simon Renshaw says while describing the old interface as archaic looking, "what young person recognizes the connection between a black jack table and their favorite shooter?".

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So, it's a fairly positive change for iOS 7 and some of its finest game developers. Understandably, there's some apprehension as is always the way with such a significant change, but the future is looking pretty bright. In particular, it'll be fascinating to see what comes of controller support, as well as the new and extra shiny Game Center.

Thanks to Curly Rocket's Martin Linklater, Strange Flavour's Aaron Fothergill, AppyNation/Spilt Milk Studios's Andrew Smith, Greenfly Studios's Stephen Morris, Rodeo Games's Richard Brooks, Laserdog Games's Simon Renshaw, Hammer & Chisel's Jason Citron, Tin Man Games's Ben Britten, and Hello Games's Sean Murray for taking the time to answer our questions.

It's been a while since we got a status update from Jason Citron on his new game Fates Forever. Today at an event in San Francisco, Jason revealed the first gameplay footage from the game and we've embedded it below.

The game looks like it's coming along nicely and we should see the release of this free to play, tablet-only MOBA later this year.

Jason Citron is, without a doubt, a visionary when it comes to the App Store. His first game, along with then business partner Danielle Cassley, Aurora Feint launched with the App Store on July 10, 2008. It was, at the time, a quite ambitious game with graphics and compelling gameplay that outclassed many of the so-called larger games released at the time. Aurora Feint was the first review we posted here on 148Apps, and an early consumer favorite, reaching over one million users in the first nine months.

Aurora Feint integrated game-wide top player lists and some social interaction, also unseen at the time. Other developers were clamoring for those social gaming network features included in the game, simple as they were initially. That led to the launch of OpenFeint in early 2009. During it's three year run under Jason Citron, OpenFeint reached a total of 120 million players through integration with 7,000 games. OpenFeint was sold to Japan-based mobile gaming giant GREE in 2011 for $104 million. Jason left the company shortly after that. GREE closed down OpenFeint in 2012 when the company changed direction.

Jason Citron has taken all of his experience and his wish of creating a core gaming audience on the iPad and recently founded his next company Hammer & Chisel. Developing a MOBA type game, Fates Forever for the iPad is their first announced game.

Let's talk a bit to Jason about his experience in these past five years with the App Store.

148Apps: How has the App Store changed your professional life?

Jason Citron, Founder of Open Feint, Hammer & Chisel: Entirely! The year before the App Store was a really pivotal year in my life. I had quit the console games industry to attempt to start my own company. This was the time of "Web 2.0" sites. Facebook had just opened up their application platform. So I was working on these various website ideas that had elements of games in them. Fortunately, they weren't doing so well and I switched to building an iPhone game. That project shipped and eventually morphed into OpenFeint, which was a success beyond my wildest dreams. Having the opportunity to build and run a company that employed 100 people and had such a big market footprint was incredibly humbling and educational. I compare the experience to a trial by fire Business School. Now, I'm taking all those learnings and applying them to start Hammer & Chisel, my new gaming company.

They say that luck is when preparation meets opportunity. I suppose I was prepared to start a company and the App Store turned out to be the perfect opportunity. Lucky :-)

148Apps: You were first on the App Store with the original Aurora Feint. What was it like developing for the App Store back then?

Jason Citron: I actually started developing for iPhone before the official SDK was even announced. It was using this unofficial iPhone OS programming toolchain. I worked on some prototypes for a couple of months. One was a multiplayer fighting game that used the wolverine character sprite from Marvel Vs. Capcom! When Apple released the real SDK I had this hunch that the App Store would be like a new console launch: the few games "on the shelf" on day 1 would get a ton of customers. So I got a bit more serious and teamed up with my cofounder to start on Aurora Feint. We ended up building that game in just under 3 months. It involved a lot of all nighters, sleeping in the corners of the office, and general insanity. We submitted to Apple the day before the App Store opened and got approved as one of 400 launch apps.

I actually have a distinct memory of waking up the morning the App Store opened. At 10am it was supposed to "turn on" so people could start downloading apps. I had our database open and kept hitting refresh to see if any players had launched the game. I was expected to get like 100 users in the first week. We ended up with something like 1,000 in the first hour. It was shocking. So began the crazy ride of the App Store.

148Apps: In the five years since launch, the App Store has gone through considerable changes. The number of users has skyrocketed along with downloads, prices for paid apps has stabilized way lower than many expected, free to play has dominated the top grossing charts. If, knowing what you know about the App Store now, you could go back and influence your path five years ago, what would you say?

Jason Citron: Honestly, the whole last five years was so rewarding for me that I don't think I would change anything. But, I suppose if I had to pick something, I think we should have made Aurora Feint use a respectful free to play monetization scheme. We had priced the first game at free and got a LOT of players. The second one we priced at $7.99 hoping to "upsell" people. We found out that first Christmas that $0.99 was the most successful price point for paid games. That failure led us to quickly pivot the company to the OpenFeint idea.

Like I said, not sure I would really change anything :-) 

148Apps: What have you seen on the App Store, outside of apps published by
you, that has surprised you most?

Jason Citron: I expected very different kinds of applications to be popular on the iPhone, as opposed to say the PC Web. It turns out that almost every successful iPhone App has been a reinterpretation or straight up clone of a PC product but with a modern twist. For example, instagram is really just "flickr on the iPhone." The popular F2P sim games are all mostly the same as the Facebook games that came before them. Etc. This isn't to be disrespectful to any of those apps. Many of them are awesome. But I was surprised at this. I've since long changed my opinion on what that means for starting new businesses on new platforms.

 

148Apps: Any predictions on what the App Store will be like five years from now?

Jason Citron: Ahh predictions. Five years is a long time. Honestly I have no idea. If I had to wager a guess, not much will change. There will be many more customers. The economy will be bigger. There will be new waves of apps that have come and gone. Tablets will be much more significant then they are now. You'll have human beings who literally don't know what corded phone is. Who've never used a normal PC. Their expectations of what apps do for them will most certainly be different. 

These days we tend to overestimate how much technology will change in 3 years but underestimate how much it will change in 10. Five years is comfortably in the middle.

Thanks very much to Jason Citron for his time.

In the conversations I've had with Jason Citron over the past five years, one thing has always been very clear, Jason Citron is a very talented young man. But lately it's like he is a whole new man. Excited, proud, and full of ideas. Could partially be because his newly renamed games company, Hammer & Chisel is showing off an early version of their first game, Fates Forever, a massively online battle arena game (MOBA) for tablets only.

Fates Forever is a MOBA game and yeah, we've heard a lot about MOBA on iOS in the past few months. For those not familiar with MOBA, see Wikipedia an MOBA. But Fates Forever shows some real promise in ways others we've seen have yet to.

The fact that we are seeing more MOBA on iOS seems logical as for many months it was a genre that was conspicuously missing on iOS. League of Legends has been very popular on the desktop; why can't we have a mobile MOBA?

Jason and his team at Hammer & Chisel are taking a bit of a different angle that what we've seen so far on MOBA for iOS. They are building out a lushly detailed, large scale MOBA game that closely resembles the depth and length of gameplay of League of Legends, but updated for tablet. In my short time with the game I found it, incomplete, yes and that's to be expected, but also amazingly easy to get into and really hard to put down. The unique characters, their voice overs, their special moves, gameplay aspects--all combine for an interesting and promising game.

Some of the interesting changes to the MOBA formula seen in Fates Forever, and remember it's still early, are that minions constantly regenerate when killed, they won't keep running back to the base to heal. The only power ups are to the three special powers each player has, and those reset between matches. Everyone starts out even, every match.

Hammer & Chisel have a lot of work ahead of them to finalize Fates Forever, but the progress so far is amazing. It is certainly one of my most anticipated games. We'll keep you up to date on the progress as it moves toward launch.