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Aurora Feint's Danielle Cassley to return with Avengees
Danielle Cassley is a name we haven't heard in a while. She, along with Jason Citron, was one of the original founders of Aurora Feint, the game that turned into a social gaming service called OpenFeint that was eventually sold off to a Japanese social network (and will soon be closed). Citron was with the service for quite a while, even after the acquisition, but Cassley left soon after OpenFeint's first successes. Now the creator is returning to iOS, with a studio called Red Bird Studios, and a new game called Avengees. There's not much information about the game just yet, other than the trailer below, but Cassley says it's a physics-based puzzle game, where players will play single player levels to then unlock items to use in an asynchronous multiplayer set of battles. The look is fairly unique, but we'll have to wait and see how it all comes together -- the game's set for release in the next few weeks. It's unlikely that a game like this will blow up into a project as big as the one the initial Aurora Feint game became (not to mention that the App Store is a very different place than it was when Aurora Feint first appeared). But even before Aurora Feint became a gigantic social network, it was a solid quality game, so it's good to see Cassley back making a new title.
Two different services offering plans to developers for push, microtransactions
With iPhone OS 3.0 only having been released yesterday, two big companies are already angling to be developers' go-to for setting up push notifications and other online services for the new apps. OpenFeint was the first service we've heard about -- they have been offering social networking connections to developers for a while, but with the new firmware release, they tell us that they're also hosting options for both push notifications and microtransactions to their stable of app developers. That stable includes apps like Pocket God and Aurora Feint (Danielle Cassley of both Aurora Feint and OpenFeint told us a while back that she was very excited at the prospect of microtransactions with 3.0), and both of those games, as well as others on the service, are planning to include push notifications with "social challenges" -- you'll challenge a friend to complete a certain goal in game, and then get notified when they meet that goal. Look for those new features in an OpenFeint app near you.And OpenFeint isn't the only service jockeying for developers' attention -- Urban Airship is also making a bid to host push notifications for iPhone game developers. They've landed one of the first push-enabled games, Tap Tap Revenge, and are looking to offer push to more devs, along with in-app purchase support as well. They don't quite have the library together that OpenFeint already does, but their service integrates, they say, in just a matter of hours, and their aim is to make it "brain dead easy" for developers.The floodgates are open, and we're sure to see more and more companies jump in on hosting plans like this in the future. Prepare to be pushed.
OpenFeint announces iPromote, readies to take over iPhone gaming
During our interview with Danielle Cassley of Aurora Feint, I talked with her about OpenFeint, the code backbone for a social network that iPhone developers can use in their apps. Since then, a number of developers have added the interface to their apps, perhaps most notably Pocket God, which has used the tool only to create the barest of online leaderboards so far. Now the crafty folks at Aurora Feint are revealing another trick up their sleeve: something they're calling iPromote. It sounds like more or less a crosspromotion deal for various apps and games in the OpenFeint system -- certain apps will give their users a chance to pick up other paid apps under the OpenFeint umbrella. While the press release is fairly vague about exactly how it works (they say there will be "a revenue sharing model for sales that occur through OpenFeint"), it'll probably show up in the user's interface as links or promotions for other apps.There are quite a few of those apps -- Aurora Feint lists over 20 apps that have already integrated OpenFeint, and there are more on the way, including some high-profile apps from Chillingo. Even our friend Steve Demeter, who was working on his own community platform called Onyx, has abandoned work on that to join up with OpenFeint. There are at least a few other such platforms like this that were vying for widespread acceptance on the iPhone, but it looks like OpenFeint is primed to take the top spot. Which means we'll probably be seeing lots of it in applications near you very soon.
TUAW Interview: Danielle Cassley of Aurora Feint
Danielle Cassley took one of the strangest paths you might find to game designer -- just out of a computer science degree at Berkeley, she was trying to get a job as a babysitter when she met Peter Relan of the YouWeb Incubator. And rather than have her take care of his kids, he decided instead to put her in an idea farm and see what happened.Aurora Feint was what happened -- she and Jason Citron, full of ideas, created a game in just ten weeks that took over the App Store out of nowhere in its infancy. The game originally released for free, and while it promised to be an MMO, it started out as a puzzle/RPG game -- people didn't quite understand what it was, but they liked it anyway.Almost a year later, Aurora Feint has spawned four different versions and even a social platform, and Danielle and Jason are still full of ideas. In this exclusive interview with TUAW, she talks about how Aurora Feint came to be, what she thinks of the App Store so far (and if developers will ever be able to charge the prices they want), and what's next for the Aurora Feint series (they've just released a new version of The Arena called Daemons) and the iPhone platform. Click the link below to read on.
