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This morning Subatomic Studios unveiled that it has been doing something other than pounding out updates for Fieldrunners on iPhone and iPad. It’s been working on a big budget sequel to that 2008 original. In fact, Subatomic has been building Fieldrunners 2 since Fieldrunner’s initial release, carefully toying around with new concepts while also playing around with other prototypes. So, yeah, this one did take awhile.

It’s true that this sequel ushers in the usual, not-so-exciting follow-up fare: new enemies, new towers, new modes, new progression systems, and new maps. But it’s also doing something great and pure. It’s introducing new mechanics that change up the core experience. These tweaks and changes are radical enough that they had Subatomic floating the idea of calling the game something else.

Jamie Gotch, the CEO of Subatomic Studios, chatted with us this afternoon about some of the game’s biggest changes. He also gave us a brief history lesson on how Subatomic got its start, and how important Fieldrunners is to the studio.

“We formed back in 2008. When we first established, we were virtual. We were just some dudes who were working on this game part-time on the side,” Gotch says. “We saw an opportunity on the iPhone and we went for it. We had this game idea, which was Fieldrunners, and we figured that — this was before any games were released when the iPhone was in its beta phase and we thought tower defense game would be great to put on a mobile device. There wasn’t much of that out at the time. I don’t know if there were any games that were in that genre. We saw it as a great opportunity. We worked really hard and got the game out and it did really, really well.”

Gotch paints an overall picture that has us thinking that Subatomic wouldn’t exist in its current full-time staffed form without Fieldrunners. Subatomic almost … owes that game, and it needs to produce a sequel that feels as honest and hip, but also just as new as Fieldrunners felt at the time.

“We were really fortunate,” Gotch tell us when we ask about how many people were buying into the original. “As you know, there’s so many iPhone games out there. It’s very hard to release a game on a huge budget because it’s a huge risk. Fieldrunners has done well and it allowed us the ability to build this team and the game we wanted to build.”

One of the things the studio wanted to build for Fieldrunners 2 is better AI. It did, and it’s a game-changer. It’s smarter. It’s now aware of itself and the world it inhabits. Enemies can bump into each other at choke points and push to find safer pathways. They can also scramble over and under each other. The original game was as mechanical as other tower defense games. Enemies just plowed straight ahead, totally oblivious to everything around them — no behaviors, no awareness, no brains.

“In Fieldrunners 2 what we did, we actually have this very elaborate swarming behavior,” Gotch says. “Units behave like they would on a real battlefield. If you were to throw hundreds of units on-screen they would all swarm in and take control of the battlefield. Like an army you would see in Braveheart … They actually influence one another. You can build mazes and congest the [pipes you build]. And the guys behind [other enemies] are affected by the guys in the forefront.

Gotch excitedly tells us about other new stuff. Bridges and tunnels are being introduced in addition to environmental hazards and mini-bosses. A really neat sounding collectible card mini-game is in the works, too. As you earn achievements in the game’s modes, you receive cards.

Several of you noted earlier today that the game looks great. It does, and that’s thanks to Fieldrunner 2’s re-written engine, which is what makes all of the game’s new, much more unpredictable action possible. We’ve got a couple of new screens in the article, so give the game a look as you’re reading.

The new engine and the new AI behaviors combine to make a pretty different game, which is what prompted the debate Subatomic had about the Fieldrunner 2’s name. In the App Store world, putting a number instead of a subtitle in a sequel’s name is often said to be sales suicide because people quit buying the original game. Subatomic doesn’t care about this. It thinks it created a better game and if it loses sales, whatever. It wants this to stand proudly on its own.

Fieldrunners 2 is due out this June on iPhone and an iPad version will then follow. We talked with Gotch and the game’s lead designer Sergei Gourski on this week’s episode of our bonus podcast. We’ll blast the audio to your earholes tomorrow.

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We all saw some sort of legal drama incoming, right? The creator of Dragon Shout [Free], a brilliant map app for Bethesda’s radical open world RPG The Elder Scrolls 5: Sykrim, has received a copyright infringement notice from ZeniMax Media. In an e-mail to us, Blalock says that Apple isn’t making him remove the app, as “ZeniMax didn’t specify what the app is specifically violating.” Blalock hasn’t received a C&D yet and notes that he’s e-mailed ZeniMax several times to try to clarify what the app is violating.

“I did my best to ensure the app was not violating anything,” creator Blalock tells TouchArcade. “I looked up US trademarks and copyrights for ‘Dragon Shout’ and at the time there wasn’t any. I had the map hand drawn. I intentionally didn’t use any graphics or wording that would possibly be owned by Bethesda. So, I’m still not sure what they say the app violates.”

And it’s hard to tell from what Blalock says he’s received so far. But, ZeniMax does its best to protect its brands. Earlier last year, the publisher squabbled with Mojang over the name “Scrolls.” This April, ZeniMax filed trademarks for the phrase “Fus Ro Dah,” Skyrim’s most Internet-popular dragon shout.

In much lighter news, Dragon Shout is now freer. In version 1.5 , the social add-on — which includes database searching, marker sharing and chat — is available free of charge.

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Any gamer who has been at it for as many years as myself certainly has a shortlist of particular standout favorites that set themselves apart for one reason or another, having indelibly left their mark upon his or her twitchy gamer brain. One such game that can be found on my list / burned into my brain is the Apple II title Wings of Fury, written by Steve Waldo and published by Broderbund in 1987. It’s a side-scrolling, carrier based aerial shooter set in the Pacific during World War II. The mission of the game is to use your Hellcat’s canons, bombs, rockets, and torpedoes to wipe out island installations, enemy ships, and defend your carrier against aerial attacks. It’s a lot of fun and is particularly challenging due to the somewhat realistic flight mechanics and the need to delicately land on the carrier to refuel / rearm.

Others out there who, reading this, fondly recall Wings of Fury (it also made it to the Amiga [video], C64, DOS, etc.) will be pleased to know that a rather well-done iOS remake has been put together by Korean studio Idea Spoon Games and released into the App Store.

Wings of Valor [App Store] is an iPhone title that pretty much captures the experience of the original — it looks like it’s all there, with simple, clean graphics. Of course, for a game like this, the onscreen analog stick is no match for the real-world, analog Apple II joystick with which I piloted my Hellcat in decades past, but the Wings of Valor controls work well enough.

In a chat this afternoon, author JY Kim of Idea Spoon explained that he is a huge fan of the original game and, lamenting the lack of App Store titles of the particular sort, decided seven months ago to bring the game, himself. Kim is a one-man operation and, as such, has rolled everything on his own, including the 2000 images that were drawn to bring the game together, the physics and particle system, and the camera / zoom system. He takes particular pride in the last, which he felt needed to be close to perfect in order to make the game work. He plans to soon bring improved visuals, better dogfight AI, and iPad support to the title.

Folks in our forums are having a pretty good time with Wings of Valor, so far.

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One of the great indie success stories on the App Store was last year’s mega hit Tiny Wings [ $0.99 ] from lone developer Andreas Illiger. While the core gameplay hook wasn’t entirely unique, it was executed to perfection, and literally anybody who was capable of tapping a touch screen could pick up Tiny Wings and get hooked. Beyond just the gameplay though, Tiny Wings had that special, indescribable “something” that allowed players to connect with it on an emotional level, something we noted in our review of the game.

The kind of overnight success that Tiny Wings saw must have come as a pretty big surprise to Andreas Illiger, who seemed to shy away from all the newfound attention. He released several updates for Tiny Wings during the course of the year, but remained mostly silent about any future development plans.

Recently during the A Maze Festival in Berlin last month, Andreas chatted candidly with fellow developer Flow Studio in an interview the company has posted on their blog. In it, Andreas talks about some of the inspiration behind the creation of Tiny Wings, how its sudden rise to the top was actually very scary, and how becoming an overnight sensation hasn’t really changed him. Andreas sounds like a very humble, artistic individual.

Also mentioned in this interview is that Andreas has been hard at work for the last 10 months on his Tiny Wings follow-up, and that it is just a few weeks from being finished. It will again be an iOS title and again he’s developing the game all on his own, but beyond that he isn’t divulging any details about what the game is.

We’ll be waiting anxiously for any more news regarding Andreas Illiger’s latest release, which sounds like it will hopefully be soon, but in the meantime check out the short interview for some insight into one of iOS’s most beloved titles Tiny Wings.

[Via Flow Studio Blog]

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We’ve been following F5 Games’ upcoming social RPG Pocket Heroes since we first saw it back at last year’s E3. The idea behind Pocket Heroes is to let players around the world build up a party online and play through an RPG-style game, taking turns asynchronously. For simplicity’s sake it’s been described as Dungeons & Dragons meets Words With Friends, which sounds like an exciting proposition.

In early April we got an update on the progress of Pocket Heroes which pegged the release date as May 10th for a price of $1.99. Well, in a new post on the developer’s website we get a bit of a good news/bad news scenario. The bad news is that Pocket Heroes won’t be hitting its intended May 10th launch date, but on the bright side the team feels confident that they will still see a release sometime during May or shortly after.

The good news is that the extra time has gone into making some significant improvements to where Pocket Heroes was previously at. First off is a huge overhaul of the UI, including getting rid of the placeholder font seen in the game’s preview trailer, which was a point of contention from some. As you can see in the following screens, the new UI is much more visually appealing while also allowing you to do more. It will also change dynamically to display the pertinent information to whatever you’re currently focused on.

Also seen in the screens above is the new chat interface in Pocket Heroes. It drives me nuts when online multiplayer games – especially turn-based ones – don’t have some sort of chat functionality. In an RPG however, discussing situations and strategizing with your party members will likely be a crucial component of success, so it’s nice to see it being handled well here.

Besides the new chat and UI work, the team has also been endlessly tweaking, balancing, and fleshing out the many details in Pocket Heroes to make sure it’s the best it can be. They sound confident that the game will be launching in May, and we look forward to checking out the full version then. Be sure to hit up our forums for even more discussion on Pocket Heroes.

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Penny Arcade On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness Episode Three, the long-awaited follow-up by Cthulu Saves The World developer Zeboyd Games, is coming to the iPhone and iPad, according to a recent Joystiq preview. This version will hit this summer alongside the PC, Mac, Xbox Live Indie Games, and Android versions of the game. These guys have all their bases covered, right?

If you’re not in the loop, Episode 3 is a… change of pace. It has the look, and what seems to be the feel, of an old-school RPG. In a chat with Joystiq, Zeboyd said that its major influencers were Final Fantasy V and Grandia, so go figure.

Zeboyd says this will continue the story Hothead Games and Penny Arcade set out to tell before things didn’t pan out, but it’ll also operate as a stand-alone title, which is a great thing for us. I mean, we didn’t even see the previous two games on our tablet and phones of choice.

We’ll definitely keep our eyes on this as it nears release, but you should definitely go read what Joystiq has to say. Episode Three sounds pretty hip.

[via Joystiq]

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Well, that didn’t take long. There’s been rumblings over on TechCrunch for a few days now that Zynga was in acquisition talks with OMGPOP as a result of the smash hit Draw Something [$0.99 / Free ]. The original suggestions were that the purchase price would be somewhere in the neighborhood of $150m to $250m, as OMGPOP itself is a company that’s already fueled by $17m worth of investor cash as is.

Zynga scheduled a call at 3:00 PM Eastern today to discuss a “news announcement,” but the guys over at All Things D have the scoop early: Zynga has picked up OMGPOP for a cool $200m, which isn’t too shabby considering two years ago they doled out $53m to buy Words With Friends creator Newtoy.

I’ve got mixed feelings about this news. On one hand, I’m glad that OMGPOP is reaping the rewards of creating a fantastically successful game. Zynga has proven in the past that they talk acquisitions first, but if you turn them down, they have no problem ruthlessly cloning your game instead. On the other, I really like Draw Something as it is now, and I’m really not looking forward to Zynga, well, Zynga-ing it up. But, I suppose Word With Friends is still a fun game, so, whatever.

I imagine the guys at OMGPOP will be popping some champagne bottles this afternoon, if they haven’t already.

UPDATE: It’s official. OMGPOP is now a part of Zynga. Also noted in the call: picture saving and chat as possible updates, people don’t like the word “latrine,” and over 1 billion drawings have been created since the game’s launch. The more you know!

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Two games were featured in the recent Apple keynote, and as of a few moments ago, one of them is now available. We’re still on the lookout for Infinity Blade: Dungeons, but right now Sky Gamblers: Air Supremacy [$4.99] is a quick mash of the “Buy App” button away from being in your hot little hands.

We’re downloading it now, but I feel like for the true experience we’re going to have to wait for FedEx to drop off our new iPads tomorrow. I’ve already bartered a deal with my FedEx delivery dude, and I should have mine bright and early.

If you want to chat Sky Gamblers on our forums, guess what, we’ve got a thread for that.

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We were lucky enough to piggy back on the back of the tiny press event at GDC for Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater HD, which is this really fabulous remake with a conglomeration of content from the first two Tony Hawk Pro Skater games set to be released sometime this summer as a downloadable title for both the Xbox 360 and PS3. Jared and I are massive fans of both Tony Hawk and the Tony Hawk series of games, so we totally fanned out. How hard did we fan out? This hard:

We had a great chat with Tony, and learned that it was actually him that pushed through the iOS port of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 [$1.99] after seeing the original fan video we posted which turned out to be totally real. He’s really excited to potentially see the rest of the Tony Hawk series on iOS devices, but openly admits that at the end of the day it all comes down to Activision. With the success Sega saw with the similar fan-made Sonic CD [$4.99] we’re hoping Activision wakes up and smells the coffee sooner or later that there’s a whole group of gamers out there hungry for these classic THPS games on our iPhones.

And if Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater HD ever got ported? Jared and I would be in heaven.

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