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Simogo's new office. Look how busy these guys are!

Simogo doesn’t make games like most studios. It doesn’t do design docs, meetings strike it as silly, and it doesn’t get rattled when something isn’t working as intended or a game needs to be delayed. It can be different because its games are the product of an improvisational style of development that sheds structure when it impedes an organic flow of ideas, analysis, and feedback. Simogo calls this “jazz development.” It’s a good name.

Simon Flesser and Magnus “Gordon” Gardebäck are the two dudes behind Simogo. They’ve been working together for over five years across two different companies. They make mobile games now in Malmö, Sweden. Their office is a lively place with a pine-colored floor, a massive window, a radiator, and rainbow colored throw rugs.

Before, they made XBLA and PSN downloadable titles. Their last one was ilomilo. Simogo’s titles and that game share a lot in common. Simogo builds vibrant worlds with complimentary music, and it aims to keep its games as charming as they are simple.

Simon is the art guy. He handles concepts and music. Gordon is the “one-man army.” He codes and programs. He builds frameworks. He even tackles design concepts. The duo has a fantastic relationship that goes beyond the creative glue that binds them. When Simon talks about Gordon, he’s almost reverential. The mutual respect these two have is also a big reason why Simogo makes games the way it does. They don’t argue. They listen, and then they execute.

Simogo is one of the most fascinating mobile developers out there. It’s a brutally small studio that, somehow, drops some of the most compelling, idealistic, and fulfilling games on iPad and iPhone. Beat Sneak Bandit, a rhythm and stealth mash-up, is loud and launched with a lot of fanfare, but the studio made the most noise with Bumpy Road, a somewhat depressing one-finger side-scrolling game that features an old couple, a car, and a road that can be manipulated with touch or swipe. The development of Beat Sneak went down in the usual Simogo way, which is to say, most of the good stuff happened on the fly.

How The Sausage Is Made

A pre-release "bonus" screen of Beat Sneak Bandit. It was taken to show off the resolution of the iPhone version.

Simogo doesn’t like design documents. It’s also too small for meetings. Gordon and Simon twirl their chairs and talk when something needs to be discussed. If an idea pops up in their heads when they’re not at the office, they call each other.

Simon thinks game design documents are good tools for big teams, but they fail to communicate feel, which is important to Simogo games. Bumpy Road was ponderous with a touch of zany. Beat Sneak Bandit is hyperactive and bombastic. Simon describes game design documents “like watching sheet music and saying you’ve heard the song, but the music is so much more than the composition,” Simon tells me.

“You could say that the way we make games is like jazz music; we improvise and put in new stuff as we go along.”

Simogo begins the actual game development part of production with a prototype just like any other studio. It dreams up an idea, and then it tries to flesh that out with a rudimentary demo. Some studios like to take this process especially slow by isolating experimental mechanics to produce proofs of concept, presumably to show publishers. Simogo goes deeper. It takes its pre-production demos and adds layers of actual production. “A lot of the appeal in our games is the full package, so we want to have that early on to get a feel for it,” Simon says.

The original idea for Beat Sneak came before Simogo released its first title, Kosmo Spin. At that time, Beat Sneak was an endless runner with a musical twist. If it had come out, it would have had you jumping and ducking to the beat, as opposed to sneaking to the beat in a series of interconnected levels.

That idea morphed into something more, yet still different from what Beat Sneak is today, when the studio began working on the game in August 2011. Beat Sneak 2.0 had you swiping the floor of a level to offset the timing of the beat. Simogo called this mechanic “scratch reality.” In this version of the game, you wouldn’t have control of the Bandit directly. Instead, you’d swipe against the beat to open doors and Bandit would follow a path automatically. Simon compares the feel of this version to real-time video editing.

“This idea proved to be as complicated as it sounds, so we had a rough month in which we just simplified and simplified,” Simon explains. “The concept of looping rhythm stages was something that was very cool to look at, we just had to come up with a suitable interface.” At this point, the duo tackled the problem by thinking about the first pure idea for Beat Sneak.

“Then we remembered the old rhythm-tap idea and everything just fell in place. We had two different prototypes after that. You would tap in beat to walk right, and backbeat to go to the left. That proved a little too difficult as backbeat is kind of a hard concept to grasp if you’re not a musician, so we wanted to downplay that.” The other build, which was much closer to the version we’re familiar with, had Bandit flipping when he hit walls. However, backbeat reared its head again. This build had floor security lights you had to jump over by hitting a backbeat.

One of the first Beat Sneak Bandit screens. This is the iPad version.

When Gordon and Simon do have a disagreement, it’s usually about planning. One specific instance that I had to pry out of Simon involves beackbeat, a concept that never made it to the actual game. Simon didn’t want Beat Sneak to be as easy as it is now, so he kept pushing for backbeat. Gordon was adamant that the mechanic need not exist, while Simon stubbornly held his ground maintaining that the game would suffer if it wasn’t included in the package. Gordon’s view that Beat Sneak should be as simple as possible to play eventually saw Simon agreeing with him. And just like that, the debate had a winner, and Beat Sneak Bandit became context-sensitive.

This process of simplification is a hallmark of Simogo’s games, and the source of its most spirited conversations. Gordon presses to make things as simple as possible without killing what makes a product special. Simon seems to have a hard time letting features go. He doesn’t want the users to get bored. He also knows that simple is best when it comes to touch devices, though, so these disagreements get ironed out without getting bitter.

“The thing we focus early on in all our projects is definitely the controls,” Simon tells me about production in general. Beat Sneak’s controls were a huge priority. The interface was, too. In the end, Simogo made an extraordinarily easy to play music game. Put a finger to the screen and Bandit moves. Hitting specific spots in the environment alters his direction.

This is Simogo's old office. Seems… smaller.

Simon describes the way Simogo works as a “publisher’s nightmare.” It sounds like it. Publishers want design documents. They want to checkpoint developers. They want meetings. Basically, they want to make sure their investments are being used and that a game is hitting every milestone and well on its way to releasing when agreed.

Roving deadlines, however, are a big part of the Simogo experience. Bumpy Road, its last game, released on May 19. After some contract work and work on a huge Bumpy Road update, Simogo started on Beat Sneak in August. The original release date was December. It hit this February, a couple of months past its original due date. This allowed Simogo to create more levels and that boss fight, as well as a few other features.

After the backbeat change, Simogo stopped long enough to produce a ten-level vertical slice to submit to the Independent Games Festival. That November, it revealed the game with a fun little teaser that betrayed just two things: the rhythm and sneaking. “Around then we realized we were making something special, so we wanted to do it justice and expand it a little. We added new elements, like the vacuum buster, the time stopper, the shadow stages, the phone calls from Herbie and the Duke, and then decided to skip our deadline in December.” Not competing during the Christmas rush was smart. The App Store freezes in late December. During this period, no new games are released, but the store is more vibrant than ever because developers basically dogpile it the week prior to the freeze. Games get forgotten, passed over.

Behind the Bandit

One of the coolest spots of design that Simon let me in on during our talks about the creation of Beat Sneak was origin of the game’s central figure, the Bandit. Bandit as we know him wasn’t a part of Beat Sneak at first. His final design came from a game concept called Mustache Bandits. That game’s tagline: “Every revolution starts with mustache doodles.”

Simon tells me not to ask about Mustache Bandits, but I have to press. It was a drawing game influenced by, of all things, Fruit Ninja. If it had actually seen the light of day, players would have been painting mustaches on posters guerrilla style and rewarded for factors like accuracy and speed. One of its big features would have been prompts like “UNI-BROW BONUS!”

“We wanted to wrap this in a story of a gang of bandits starting a revolution against the mayor by painting mustaches, and they’d all have their own strengths and special attacks. Silly stuff,” Simon says. I don’t think he understands how bad I want to play this game now.

We’ve got quite an assortment of concept art of Bandit and his revolution, er, evolution over the development.

This is from Rhythm Bear, which was the game that ended up being the core idea behind Beat Sneak. Notice how the hairstyle managed to make it over, as well as the expressiveness of the avatar. The little blocks, not so much.

Enlarge this one to see it in all its glory. The original bandit doodles all had one thing in common: a funky, defining hairstyle. This is, technically, a 3D project but Simogo uses 2D images.

This isn’t directly related, but I wanted to share it. This is a style test sheet that helped solidify the tone of Beat Sneak.

And those give you a good example of how many iterations everything – including the game’s name — had to go through. At one point, the game was called “Backbeat Bandit” or “Beat Bandit.” You can tell the backbeat discussion was still going on while Simon was working on the game’s branding.

The Release

This was the second teaser image released.

Figuring out when Beat Sneak was “finished” wasn’t hard. Its external testers and Simon’s girlfriend pretty much made the decision. “The response from our testers was absolutely phenomenal, and you know when people actually want to continue playing not because you’re watching, but because they just want to.”

“There was a much greater initial response to this one than Bumpy Road, actually, from people we showed early. But, personally for me it was when my girlfriend told me it was the best thing we’ve made. Creatively, I trust her 100 percent.”

In February, after it was submitted to certification, Gordon and Simon celebrated with beer, vague celebratory tweets with pictures of wine glasses, and a few days off. When it actually hit the App Store a week later, Simon and Gordon spent a few days telling the press and any one who would listen that it was out. “We speak to fans, to media and just focus on trying to get the word out, which is very hard when you’re this small.” It’s true. Even a site like ours misses big titles from established indie developers.

Beat Sneak is a great game bolstered by tons of high scores in the press, but its first week didn’t bust the mark that Bumpy Road set in its first days of release. In Simon’s mind, the numbers aren’t matching up to the hype press stirred up.

The fact that busted Pokemon rip-offs are able to take second place on the charts while Beat Sneak can’t crack the top ten is also frustrating. “In a week where an app that was a copyright infringing picture of a Pokémon took the second spot in the charts, that is especially heart-breaking,” says Simon. “But in the end, what matters is sales in the long run, and if we can keep steady sales, that’s good.” Simon takes the high road, always.

“We do understand that this is a bit more niche than Bumpy Road, more of a gamers game, though. Also, Bumpy Road was iPhone game of the week and Beat Sneak Bandit was iPad game of the week so I guess that comes into play too.”

The End

Thousands of words and not one mention of clocks. Well, until now.

Simogo isn’t a typical iOS developer. As cash-strapped as it might be, it still spends more than a single month on a game. It tests. It iterates. It builds the kinds of prototypes that are representative of more than just a clever mechanic.

Gordon and Simon are a strong tandem because they check their egos at the door; they’re hugely talented, but they operate as a unit without the baggage. They disagree at times, but they also find answers.

“Much like a recording artist we want our games to feel Simogo. It should feel like something that only we could make. So it’s hard to put a finger on what that is. Maybe it’s how everything produces a sound when you interact with it, how it feels tactile, the level of ‘polishness,’ or the art… I don’t know.

“I say this a lot, but there is no single aspect in a game that is more important than the other. Gameplay is not more important than presentation, art is not more important than sound. Everything plays together to create something bigger than the sum of its parts.”

Of note, Simogo develops on a special platform that gives indie developers a chance to take the risks that Simogo does with each release. You’ll never see Beat Sneak Bandit on XBLA or PSN. It’s too unusual, too unique. Maybe too small, as well.

This game deserves your attention if you haven’t bothered with it yet. It’s one of the best games on the App Store, and one of the most creative to boot. Its flavor, tone, and rhythm mechanic are all completely unique and fun.

Simogo is moving on, by the way. The studio has just now started talking about “Game 4,” and it isn’t quite sure if it’ll follow a similar development path. Simon describes this title as totally different from Simogo’s previous games, but it’s so early it might just end up as just another title that influences its next project, like Mustache Bandits.

“I’m excited about bringing in some new blood in to this project, to help out on bits we can’t make ourselves. We’d really like to have it out by this year, but you know — jazz development, you know where you’re going with it, but you never know how long the improvisations will last.”

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We haven’t been covering the tsunami of rumors surrounding the impending launch of the iPad 3 as our sister-site MacRumors completely has that on lockdown. Regardless of what of these rumors you personally believe are true, we’ll all find out what’s coming on March 7th. The press conference is being held at the normal 10:00 AM Pacific time at the Yerba Buena Center for Arts. Curiously enough, this is practically across the street from GDC, which we’ll be in town for anyway! Convenient!

Word on the street is that the iPad 3 is going to have a Retina Display sporting a 2048×1536 resolution. That’s higher than what we consider HD in 1080p, and really, a resolution that’s challenging for a desktop GPU’s to push in 3D games, much less mobile GPU’s. The iPad 3 is going to need to sport some serious horsepower under the hood, and finding out what kind of mobile processor technology Apple is implementing to drive this screen is what I’m most looking forward to next week.

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It begins with something out of a fairy tale. A little girl, Lumi, arrives at her grandfather’s house, but the door is locked, all the lights are out and her grandfather is missing. And it looks like something out of a storybook, with the environment expertly built out of paper and cardboard. But Lume [$1.99 / HD] gives us a tale for the modern era, a story of conservation and do-it-yourself ingenuity.

State of Play Games launched Lume on PC nearly a year ago, and now the game makes the move to iOS. The porting process has introduced a few frustrations, but for the most part this lovely little puzzle adventure has made the journey intact. Be warned, though—it’s a bite-sized experience, with less than an hour’s content at most. That span is charming, with a handful of intricate puzzles to work through. You’ll have to decide for yourself if that’s enough to make it worthwhile. It was just enough for me.

Lumi isn’t one to let a little thing like a power outage get in her way. She’s a resourceful heroine, and players are invited to be adventurous with her. The game plays like a classic point-and-click adventure, but on the small scale, across only seven screens. Tapping around moves Lumi to new places, investigates the environment, picks up tools and opens up puzzles. All of this tapping is done in the name of bringing back the light.

Tapping is also the biggest issue with this iOS port. While the PC version marks interactive areas by changing the cursor to a hand, there’s no such indication here. You’ll never know quite where to tap, and some of the interactive bits are small enough you might pass them by. This is one area where the game’s small stature is an advantage—it won’t take that much patience to find everything. There are two other hitches: the game ought to be locked to landscape orientation, as it’s not really possible to play in the tiny screen in portrait mode, and it ought not rely on manual saving. Replaying previously solved puzzles is terribly dull, so save often.

As Lumi works towards powering up the lights, she runs into several locks that bar her way, and each can be opened by solving a puzzle. The puzzles are clever, and each is unique. One is based on music, another involves rotating panels, and a couple more require cracking codes. They feel – they really do – like the sort of thing an eccentric grandfather might leave a curious granddaughter to challenge her. By opening locks, you’re not breaking into his private rooms, you’re proving that his faith in Lumi (and beyond it, State of Play’s faith in you) is well-placed.

I’ve mentioned that the game is gorgeous, and here’s why: the entire set is handcrafted. Movable elements, like Lumi and the puzzle screens, are animated separately, but everything else has been built with paper and cardboard and then filmed. This gives Lume a dreamlike quality, with deep vignetting and the sorts of pans and filmic scene transitions rarely seen in games. The soundtrack is just as beautiful, and deserves to be heard through headphones.

All of this builds up into a feeling of sincerity rarely encountered in games. There is no hint of irony in Lume’s message, and that makes it hard to disagree: self-sufficiency is admirable, and why shouldn’t it be? The game encourages conservation, but not by shaming or frightening its audience. Instead, it looks to make us proud of doing our best by the world and ourselves. It’s a nice feeling, to be honest, and it adds to the game’s already considerable charm. Lume may not be a lengthy experience, but it is most definitely a rewarding one. State of Play is working toward Part 2 now, and I, for one, can’t wait.

TouchArcade Rating:

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Last month we reported that an iOS remake of Barbarian – The Ultimate Warrior, aka Death Sword, was in the works courtesy of developer Microids and publisher Anuman Interactive, and after a couple of false starts in the past week, the game does appear to officially be available in the App Store.

Renamed Barbarian – The Death Sword [$1.99/HD] for iOS, the game is a one-on-one fighting game that originally released in 1987 for the Commodore 64 and most of the other popular computers at the time. Gamers lauded the competitive gameplay of Barbarian in the burgeoning fighting game genre, but most of its widespread notoriety was due to some racy packaging and the ability to lop off your opponents head in a shower of blood during battle.

The iOS version of Barbarian is completely redone with 3D visuals, several new modes and unlockables, and cross-platform local multiplayer. I’ve spent a few minutes with the game on my iPhone, and although I never played the original, it seems like it might be kind of cool. It’s certainly got raciness and gore in spades, but I’m not so sure about the gameplay. It feels very basic and clunky, but it also feels like there might be some underlying depth to the whole thing that I have yet to figure out.

We’ll be spending much more time with Barbarian – The Death Sword in the coming days to adequately get a feel for it, and there’s currently a discussion of the game and further impressions in our forums.

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There’s nothing like a freak ice storm to make me crave a tropical vacation. Warm, sandy beaches, gentle ukulele music, streaming sunlight, being fired from a slingshot in an attempt to rescue a captured princess—there’s really no substitute. I guess the closest I’m going to get for now is playing Brave Beak [Free], a tropical adventure with an island soundtrack that just might help me forget that I’m a hollow shell of a person waiting for the barren landscape to crack and bring even a glimpse of the glorious spring that is to come.

In Brave Beak, you control a cranky little parrot on a mission. You must direct him through a tropical paradise knocking down obstacles, freeing prisoners, collecting treasure and gobbling up fish, rainbows and even bits of the moon to keep his energy up and save a captured princess. I’m not sure why the bird is so very, very cranky (perhaps the pressure of being a parrot forced to fly through space itself and rescue a princess single-wingedly got to him), but during the course of the game a lot of valuable island real estate is damaged, ships are sunk, and (in a move sure to…ruffle a few feathers) local wildlife get unceremoniously slapped out of the way.

At first glance, Brave Beak kind of looks like an Angry Birds/Tiny Wings hybrid. You’re fired from a slingshot, knock down precariously stacked structures, and tap the screen to keep your bird aloft. When playing, however, it doesn’t feel like either of those games. In a way, it feels almost like a Super Mario game, right down to the coin collecting aspect…if Mario was, uh, actually a bird, flew around instead of jumped, and ate fish all day long.

The controls are incredibly simple. Tap the screen to send your bird higher through the clouds, let go to plummet towards the ground. The higher you fly, the more energy you use, and if you run out completely you fall unceremoniously to the ground and the level is over. You can replenish your energy throughout the level by eating fish, coconuts, rainbows (yes, really) and more. Additionally, you can make your energy last longer through the judicious use of elements the game gives you, such as kites, ramps, and hammocks to catapult you further through the levels while giving your wings a rest.

In a page out of Jetpack Joyride’s book, each level has a set of objectives that you must complete in order to move on. These objectives range from “collect x amount of x” to subtle introductions to game mechanics such as “taste the rainbow,” alerting you to ways of better playing the game without boring, obtrusive tutorials. And since it’s unlikely that you’ll complete each objective your first run (flight?) through a level, the replay value is high, with minimum frustrations.

In addition to the story-progressing objectives, there are other challenges you can undertake too. Each level has five gold coins to collect, and there are various items with different properties to help extend gameplay, add points, and otherwise enhance the game. There’s a feature that enables you to send messages in bottles to other friends playing the game, which they pick up during the course of their own adventures. It’s kind of a fun way to interact with friends over the game (on top of the standard “I’m pwning u on the leaderboards” way), and it’s these touches that kept me replaying levels despite having already beaten them.

Overall, the game quality is so high and the gameplay so fun that it was well worth the download for me. Now, if only future updates could somehow make one of those fruity drinks with all the umbrellas appear next to me (preferably in a coconut bowl with a Krazy Straw), it would be pretty much near perfection.

TouchArcade Rating:

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Ticket To Ride Pocket [$1.99] has received a little more loving by way of content today. In a fresh update, Days of Wonder has dropped 1910 as an expansion for $.99. 1910 adds three modes, all of which seem to offer unique ways to engage with the classic board game. Classic mode rewards players with the largest number of tickets. Mega mode expands destinations from 35 to 69. And Cities keeps it simple by only offering a few cities to work with.

Days of Wonder is doing a crazy good job with its mobile ports, which is proving to be an awesome thing for the board game’s sales, too. We’d supplement our digital Ticket to Ride addiction with a slice of physical like a lot of other people, too, but we’re not that into cleaning up after ourselves. You don’t even want to know what our tower looks like. Seriously. We’d shock the Hoarders TV crew.

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Besides Illusion Labs’ Touchgrind [$4.99/HD] and a fairly solid port of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 [99¢], the skateboarding genre hasn’t seen a whole lot of love on the App Store. Don’t get me wrong, there have been some decent skateboarding games released, but nothing that ever felt like it gave you a full on experience like what you would be able to get on a home console. Jet Car Stunts [$1.99/Lite] developer True Axis is hoping to change that with there just-announced True Skate game which is heading to the App Store soon. Check out the first rendered artwork for True Skate below.

There aren’t a lot of details for True Skate just yet, but True Axis explains that the game is similar to Touchgrind but uses a pulled back perspective so you can actually see where you’re going. I love Touchgrind a lot, but its strictly top-down perspective made it pretty awkward to effectively put together strings of tricks or adequately aim for the various obstacles in the skate park. True Skate is also said to boast more realistic physics, and should be “much easier” to pull off lots of different tricks, according to True Axis.

True Skate will launch with the one level which you can see in the screens above, presumably with more planned for future updates. It will be coming out later this year for “cheap” on the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. We’re extremely eager to check it out and will have some more details soon, and until then you can check out some discussion of True Skate in our forums.

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Last week, TouchArcade hooked up with Fluttermind’s Dene Carter to talk about his studio and its first release, Incoboto. If you’ve been following the production of the 2D side-scrolling puzzle, er, experience on our forums, you’ve seen enough to make one of those purchasing gut checks. You’ve noticed how good it looks. You’ve got a sense of its scope and scale and tasted its tone. If you’ve been reading especially closely, you might have even been infected by Dene’s quirk and enthusiasm. He got us, at least.

This isn’t an easy game to talk about off-handedly. It’s not as derivative as most mash ups, and it’s also really strange. We asked Dene for his elevator pitch, which revealed something vital about the project as a cohesive whole: it’s about embracing the odd or the irrational.

iTunes Link: The TouchArcade Show
Zune Marketplace: TouchArcade.com Podcasts
RSS Feed: The TouchArcade Show
Direct Link: TouchArcadeShow-Bonus-033.mp3, 20MB

“I kind of gave up doing all of that,” Dene told us. “While you’re developing a game, of course, what you’re trying to do the whole time is try to emphasize the fundamental thing that makes your game, your game, and not a game. It’s so easy to describe your game as other games, with bits of this and bits of that or whatever else, as soon as you start doing that it’s very easy to get distracted.”

“After literally a year doing that and just kind of going ‘god, this is ridiculous, this is turning to Nethack, this is turning to god-knows-what-else. How the hell did we get here?’ And my wife literally beating on my ass for about three weeks, I just said you know what, this is a strange, strange game and I will just make sure everything that I do with this game from now on reflects that.”

You’ll see what he’s talking if you give the game’s trailer, which is embedded below, some of your time. Incoboto’s look is bent, yet whimsical. Its devilishly constructed puzzles are, too.

In our minds, Incoboto has the most in common in Super Mario Galaxy. It revolves around similar physics-based hooks and trickery. Also, its moment-to-moment play, boiled down, is all about traversing and progressing through a series of interconnected “planets” with stars to collect.

When we brought this up, Dene was cool with the comparison. He added, however, that his title departs quickly with its difficulty and puzzles. He’s right. Within an hour of play, you’ll realize that difficulty spikes define the experience. This is a game that isn’t afraid to throw you under the bus with new, unexplored mechanics and puzzles.

In fact, getting you stuck and frustrated in its odd world is kind of the point. Dene told us that he realizes that, in this age of in-game guides and hand-holding, this is a crazy plan. He called it suicide, actually, but he likes the idea of people having to talk to each other about solutions, or having to come back to the game later when their heads are clearer.

“I’m doing things with this game that’s kind of suicide from a business point of view. I kind of decided I didn’t care. One of the things I will not be doing — this is not a game that is ever going to be free. I’m not going to suddenly whack the price down as it nears Christmas. This game is going to come out and be one price, so I already know I’m not going to make any money,” Dene said.

“The difficulty level is another part of that really. I want people to discuss it. If you make it so people are kind of tourists through the entire experience, then it’s literally basically like putting someone in a shopping cart and drag them all the way past everything in the game as quickly as possible so they can move on to the next thing.”

“I want people to get stuck. But because it’s not a game that where get stuck by dying the whole time — I mean there’s no death in there — you get stuck because you haven’t really understood the implications of everything around you. I think that’s a lovely position to be in, when you know that all you have to do is pick up the game again and have another go, and you probably find that it’s something you missed the last time. There’s usually clues around, some kind of hint as to what’s there.”

“If it’s not there, then hell, go out and discuss it with your friends. Please, talk about it. Tell people where you go stuck. That’s part of the fun of the game really. There are no people to talk to in this world, they’re all dead, so go talk to some real ones.”

We’ll have much, much more on Incoboto later this week so we’re going to hold back on the game’s nitty-gritty for the moment. If you’d like to learn more about the game from the guy who made it, however, give this week’s interview podcast a listen. Sound issues aside, it was easily one of our smoothest, most informative we’ve done.

Other topics we cover include Dene’s past relationship with Lionhead, his future with a new studio composed of a few key Lionhead members, acorns, and his thoughts on iOS as a whole.

We’ll be back next week with another bonus podcast.

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More classic arcade action is coming to iPhone and iPad soon. Earlier this week, THQ sneakily announced WWE WrestleFest, a modern re-imagining of the 1990s arcade classic, which alongside other co-op greats like X-Men, dominated a big chunk of our quarter-pumping days. Its vivid colors, silky smooth animation, and belligerent play could be described as mildly hypnotic, to say the least.

Alongside smoother, more impressive graphics, expect to see a mixed cast of new and old characters. Legends like Jake the Snake Roberts, Macho Man, and The Undertaker have been confirmed as playable characters alongside guys like CM Punk, John Cena, The Rock, and the “Apex Predator” Randy Orton.

[via Kotaku, pastapadre, and sescoops]

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