JasonCitron
Latest
OpenFeint developer aims for a hardcore audience with Fates Forever MOBA
Jason Citron is a true veteran of iOS gaming. He was one of the two developers behind Aurora Feint, and later vaulted it up to the huge social network that OpenFeint became. Now, Citron is back to making games with a new company called Hammer & Chisel (formerly Phoenix Guild), and he's just announced today that his upcoming game is called Fates Forever. It'll be a multiplayer online battle arena title, similar to the extremely popular League of Legends, but built from the ground up for iOS and a touchscreen interface. "If you look at games," Citron told TUAW recently, "very rarely do you find one that's generally new, and usually when you do, it's because of the UI change." Citron believes that even hardcore games "could be made materially better by changing them to use a large format touchscreen," and so he's decided to take on the MOBA gametype. Fates Forever will have battling heroes, just like League of Legends, but with a simplified format... at least at first. The map Citron is working on features just two lanes (it will pit three players against an opposing team of three, and matches should take around 15 minutes), and he says a lot of the mechanics around itemization and balance have yet to be determined. His focus right now is building standard touchscreen gestures for the heroes' various abilities. "The skillshots are all these fun little gesture things that you can pull off," says Citron. One champion will do a dash move that's controlled by dragging him around the screen with your finger, for example. "You hit the button on the left, you get a little ring around him and then you can drag the indicator away from him. When you draw out a path from him, he shoots flames on the ground." Citron says the goal is to take gesture mechanics that users know and love, and use those to match the precision and controls that you'd usually need a mouse and a keyboard on a PC for. When Citron began this project, the MOBA genre was very much PC-based. But in the last few months, several companies have thought to bring it to tablets. For example, Gameloft's Heroes of Order and Chaos, and Zynga's forthcoming Solstice Arena. "I figured [MOBAs] would be a trend," says Citron, but adds that "I can't say that I would have expected as much action to be going on tablets." Still, Citron says Zynga's entry will likely be tied down by in-app monetization efforts, and he thinks he can do the game better than Gameloft has. "I think ours looks better, has more innovative controls and it's generally fun to play." The plan for Fates Forever is to have "the core battle game out this summer, with a very light metagame around it." Once the core app is out, Citron and his company (currently about five full-timers and about the same number of contractors) plan to tweak and upgrade it according to the community, and will even build a tool called The Forge, where players will be able to suggest and build their own heroes, with that content possibly even reaching the game. "I very much see this as a marathon, not a sprint," says Citron. "I see this as a long-term thing. I'm starting with a nugget of something, and we're evolving it with the community." Citron's goal with Fates Forever is to "blend deep traditional game design with respectful game mechanics," he says. "It's obviously going to be free-to-play," and supported by in-app purchases for options and customization. But "our game will never force you to stop playing," he adds. "And you can't pay to win." Currently, the project is being put together in Unity, and while it will initially appear on the iPad only, the title may come to Android or other platforms later on. Fates Forever sounds interesting. We'll get a chance to play it later this year. Plenty of other companies have aimed and will continue to target this growing "hardcore" audience on Apple's tablet platform, but that specific audience is finicky to say the least. In the end, Fates Forever will have to stand on its own quality. If it can find the League of Legends-sized audience on tablets that Citron is looking for, then we could be playing this one for a long time to come.
Jason Citron picks up funding with new gaming company Phoenix Guild
Jason Citron was one of the iPhone's first big name developers. He and partner Danielle Cassley created a game called Aurora Feint way back in the early days of the App Store, and while that game didn't do as well as hoped, the duo and their backers eventually catapulted that title into its own social gaming platform called OpenFeint. That platform was later acquired by Japanese social network GREE, and Citron left the company that he originally founded last September. Now, Citron's back with a new venture, called Phoenix Guild. He's working on assembling a team that will, as he says, build "core games for gamers on post-PC devices." Citron's always been a fan of traditional gaming and "really rich, engaging games," and his new company, which was just funded to the tune of $1.1 million by venture capitalists (including his former OpenFeint supporters at YouWeb), is aiming to build those types of core, traditionally console style games for modern mobile devices like Apple's iOS devices and even Microsoft's upcoming Surface console. "It seems obvious to me," Citron says during a chat this week with TUAW, "that core gamers are moving from PCs to other devices and tablets," and Phoenix Guild's goal is to provide great core games on those new platforms. What exactly does Citron mean when he says "core games"? "Mass Effect, Call of Duty, and even Bastion," he says, rattling off a few popular and well-received console titles from the past few years. Citron agrees that you can't just "take what works on an Xbox and put it on an iPad," but he says there's a deeper experience that consoles currently provide that's not yet reflected on a lot of mobile games. Citron's also convinced that free-to-play is the way to go, but he's cautious of doing the model wrong. "You need to do free-to-play in a way that respects players," he says. "Not in a way that makes players feel nickle-and-dimed to death." Citron says on the traditional PC, games like League of Legends and Team Fortress 2 are examples of how to do microtransaction based games correctly, and he wants to bring that generous polish over to tablet-based games as well. Citron can't say anything about what Phoenix Guild's first game is like yet, but he says he's hiring AAA talent (including an artist from id games), and wants to put a solid, very social, very polished free-to-play game together (he even mentions the recent popular Magic: The Gathering iPad app as an example of the kind of game he wants to build, though he says that's not exactly what he's aiming for). So we'll have to wait to see exactly what Citron is building. But he does say that while OpenFeint was a nice success, what he really wants to do is "build a large successful gaming company," not another social gaming platform. OpenFeint came out of the ashes of Aurora Feint, which Citron admits didn't do as well as hoped "because it wasn't free, and because there was no free-to-play at the time." But this time around, while Citron is returning to the original game design ideas he started with, the goal is to aim for what Citron says Blizzard and Valve have built, big game companies founded on quality, classic releases. "I want to have a company like that," he says. It'll be a lot of work for sure, and as much as Citron is convinced there's a large hardcore audience ready to play games like that on mobile devices, he also agrees that it's so far "definitely unproven." And it's possible, he says, that he's wrong, and he's not able to make a company like this. Maybe he'll have to go the way of Aurora Feint, and turn the company he's growing into something else, a separate platform or some other important technology. But he hopes that doesn't happen. "If the universe will permit this sort of game company," Citron says with conviction, "I will build it."
OpenFeint hires new CEO, Jason Citron leaves
It's the end of an era for one of iOS' biggest ventures -- OpenFeint has hired a new CEO, Naoki Aoyagi, which means company founder Jason Citron is leaving the company to head elsewhere. OpenFeint, you'll remember, has its roots in an iPhone game called Aurora Feint, which Citron developed a few years ago with co-founder Danielle Cassley (who left the company fairly early on). After that early title saw some success, the venture was transformed instead into a free platform for developers to share friends' lists and other social networking features across apps, even before Apple's own Game Center was announced. Despite the introduction of that official service, OpenFeint has remained popular, and has expanded out into Android and elsewhere. The company was bought by Japanese social network GREE earlier this year, and it's from that company that Aoyagi comes (he was the 10th employee), taking over Citron's role. Aoyagi reportedly plans to combine the US operations of both GREE and OpenFeint, so it's unclear what this will all mean for developers using the service now. As for Citron, he confirms on Twitter that it's "time for something new." He and his team at OpenFeint did an incredible job of building up that company and network piece by piece, so it'll be interesting to see what he takes on next, as well as what OpenFeint ends up becoming without its founder.
360iDev: Game Jam creations
Tuesday night at the 360iDev conference in San Jose, around 60 developers gathered in a room on the eBay campus around 8pm as security locked them in for the night (one developer joined the group via Skype -- that's him on the big screen above). Their goal? A game jam. Before 8am the next day, they would put together working prototypes of games, either based on their own ideas, or revolving around the night's theme of "Tiny." Not all developers were there to make new games -- a few were there to work on current projects or offer up their help to others. But up until 2am and beyond (that's about when I chickened out and let them work), the room was full of developers punching away on their keyboards, writing code, designing art, and, well, developing. I originally thought that it was just a lark; a fun project that gave everyone an excuse to spend the night on the eBay campus. But no, this was serious stuff -- apparently at least one App Store game has its origins in past game jams at these conferences. So while developers were just testing their skills at putting their ideas into motion, it's possible that we may see some of these prototypes show up on the App Store eventually as working products. After the break, we'll provide a look at what a few developers were up to at Tuesday's game jam.
360iDev: The future of Jason Citron's OpenFeint
OpenFeint's VP of Engineering, Jakob Wilkerson, took the stage here at 360iDev in San Jose to talk about something most people might not have expected: Game Center. Ever since Apple's official social gaming network was announced last week, the question's been in the air about what will happen to all of those unofficial gaming networks, of which OpenFeint is the largest. Wilkerson took the news in stride, however. As CEO Jason Citron told us last week, OpenFeint isn't going anywhere, and as you can see from their chart above, OpenFeint still believes that they can build more social game services, in the form of OpenFeint X, on top of Apple's official offerings. Wilkerson talked about Game Center in terms of potential; he used examples from OpenFeint to explain how implementing leaderboards and friends lists in the right ways can really open up player interest in a game. OpenFeint often talks internally about bringing, both, hardcore and casual game players into the fold, and their different online features target those various audiences. We also got a chance to talk to Citron again regarding his thinking about OpenFeint so far, and what the company plans to do when Apple unveils its official plan. Read on for more.
