aaron-fothergill
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Strange Flavour previews new iOS games
Strange Flavour is an iOS app developer (founded back in 2000) with a long history behind it. Coder Aaron Fothergill used to program games for Mac and consoles, until he switched over to iOS, and made apps for the old dev/publisher Freeverse. Freeverse was later bought by Ngmoco, and now Fothergill is on his own, getting a few games together under the banner of Strange Flavour (the "u" needs to be there: he's English). In this video from WWDC over at iMore, Fothergill talks about a few of the games the company is working on. There's a new version of Slotz Racer, which will send the game over to your Apple TV via AirPlay. The company is also getting into publishing, and Fothergill seems excited to work with other developers. There's a game called Apple Bash coming soon that's sort of a Donkey Kong-style platforming challenge with a cool parallax background trick, and another game called Any Landing, which lets you crash airplanes. Fothergill seems excited about his work lately, and he's certainly got the developer creds to make some great games. We'll look forward to seeing what Strange Flavour puts out in the future.
Creator of Flick Fishing interviewed
Freeverse's Flick Fishing, which we took a look at last week, has shot to the top of the charts in the App Store, and OSX Reality sent us a note about an interview with the game's designer, Aaron Fothergill. His brother Adam put together the graphics and sound, and Aaron did the actual coding and design. Aaron says it's a tough racket putting iPhone games together -- you've got to balance quality (especially production values, something that we could probably use way more of on the App Store) with time and cost. Since iPhone games sell cheap, it's not an easy job making sure you don't go overboard investing way more than you'll get back on return. But of course, if you put in too little time and charge too much, users will call you out for selling high-priced junk.He also talks about Mac gaming in general, and immersion on the iPhone specifically -- casual games are doing well on the App Store, and some developers are saying that you just can't make an extremely immersive game on a platform where people are constantly being called, texting, and on the move. I have to agree with Aaron -- it's not that you can't be immersive, it's that you have to do it the right way. There's nothing wrong with short bursts of gameplay, but you have to realize from the beginning that that's what your users will be doing.And finally, he gives out some information about a Flick Fishing update that's incoming: the recently released 1.1 patch consisted of bug fixes, but the upcoming 1.2 update will add some new features, maybe even 8 player networked play.
