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No matter what iteration of Apple’s tablet you have, Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition will work on it. In our conversation with Beamdog’s Cameron Tofer this afternoon, the COO confirmed that no iPad will be left behind. He also said that an iPhone port is a possibility, too. “We’re going to have to make that decision of can we do it, is it really worth it,” Tofer told us. “If we can’t do it, if we get it on there and its just not playable, we can’t make a product of it. I’m going to give it my best because I’d love to see it on [the iPhone], but I can’t really make any promises right now.” The license agreement that Beamdog signed that makes this edition of the game possible includes the iPhone.

Downloadable content seems considerably less iffy. While Tofer didn’t specifically state that Beamdog will be churning out content outside of the new adventure and character, he teased that Beamdog isn’t going to bail on the game post-release. “This isn’t just something where we’re going to ship the game and move on. We’ve got big plans,” Tofer told us.

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Tofer described Beamdog’s relationship with rights holder Wizards of the Coast as good, and the studios work together daily.

If you’d like to hear more of our conversation, feel free to tune in via the links above. On top of a weekly podcast, we frequently discuss topics with developers on bonus shows like these. Get them while they’re hot! They tend to get cold fast.

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Simon Oliver of Rolando fame is coming back to mobile with a new Okabu game, The Guardian is reporting. Oliver released the original Okabu on PS3 back in 2011. It took a slugging from critics for its overly dry and simplistic design, but Oliver and his studio Handcircus Games has since been working on a free-to-play take in preparation for a release this year across iOS and Android. He didn’t comment on what this one will do differently.

He did, however, describe the original Okabu as a first step. He and his studio built a universe, and they’ll continue to work within it. “We wanted to retain ownership of the IP so we could build something that we knew would work across different platforms,” Oliver said. “That’s been our focus since October, working on a prototype for a new free-to-play game set in the Okabu universe, for iOS and Android,” he continued, hopefully with a flourish.

A screen of the PS3 version of the game.

The entire interview, by the way, is a fascinating read. Oliver has been around since the beginning of the App Store and, with help from Rolando, he became one of the first App Store success stories. The Guardian quizzed him about all sorts of currents topics, including the Triple Town controversy, IP ownership, and the new and more vibrant App Store landscape. His answers carry a different weight.

[via The Guardian]

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Here’s a story that has multiple layers of coolness, or, as Shrek would say (Yeah, I’m going there.) it’s like an onion. It all started back in September of last year at the 360iDev conference. 360iDev, in case you haven’t heard of it, is a great get-together for iOS developers because it’s still small enough that you can attend it and actually have a pretty good chance of meeting everyone there instead of just falling into the sea of people that show up for a massive convention like GDC. One of the things they seem to do at every 360iDev is a game jam, or, a marathon game development session where developers crank out workable games from start to finish overnight.

TUAW’s Mike Schramm attended the last one, but, instead of covering it for the site he decided to jump right in and build his own game. He blogged the whole thing, which I’ve found to be incredibly interesting to see what it’s like when a blogger jumps to the other side of the fence, so to speak. At events like these, we’re used to just showing up, hanging out, pestering whoever we can, and saying peace out… Not actually slogging through the whole gam jam process and coming out with an workable product entitled Antithesis [ ].

Original concept sketch on the left, final screenshot on the right.

The concept for the game is cool too. It’s a Pong battle, so to speak, where you control a black paddle and defend against a stream of black balls, while an AI-controlled white paddle does the same. The line in the middle shifts back and forth between both sides depending on who is playing better in a series of waves. Like most game jam titles, it isn’t the deepest game in the world, but it’s really cool reading the whole process and seeing the game in various stages of development then finally playing the end product.

Game Jam photo courtesy of RetroDreamer.

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This is a promo image for Solipskier, which was used when Mikengreg revealed the game to people.

When a game developer creates an awesome game, we expect its next release to be just as good. This works both ways. Greg Wohlwend and Michael Boxleiter of Mikengreg fame have told me what it feels like to have to work on something new with the expectation of past success in the background. It isn’t just noise — it’s having an effect on the development on its new title, Gasketball. From ideas to coding, the shadow of the success of an arcade skiing game called Solipskier [$.99] looms. It makes decisions harder. It ramps up the scope and quality. It’s making the stakes higher at a time when the studio is looking to do something totally different.

We discussed two kinds of pressure: external and internal. Mike and Greg said that they don’t feel any external heat as they build Gasketball. Solipskier got into a lot of hands, but that hasn’t given the studio the kind ravenous base that other great independent developers, like Team Meat of Super Meat Boy fame, enjoy. There aren’t throngs of people  expecting mastery in the follow-up from Mikengreg, in other words, so the bar feels low.

The pressure comes from inside, they expressed. Solipskier’s sales were the best Mikengreg has ever experienced, and the studio desperately wants Gasketball to outperform it in revenue, quality, and audience. Success is mutating their goals, as if the magic of Solipskier could ever be repeated.

“We really want our next game to seem like a step up, which is not actually very different from our early development days, every game we’ve made has been more interesting, more polished and more successful than the last,” Mike told us in an e-mail exchange. “The difference, now, is that we are trying to succeed in terms of a million players willing to pay us, which sets the quality bar dauntingly high for a two-man outfit.”

Gasketball's logo and the placeholder image for the game's web site.

Greg keeps asking himself if it’s even possible to have another Solipskier, and that seems like a fair question to ask. Its development, from idea to prototyping to final release, happened in brilliant flashes of creativity. Gasketball, on the other hand, hasn’t had that sort of conceptual magic. The conceit took longer to come along, and the studio had to throw out a lot of stuff in order to find this game.

“We had to resolve to getting down in the muck and doing the hard work of prototyping, testing, and scrapping everything for yet another prototype that felt like it had promise,” Greg told us. “For a game to really strike all the chords for us it has to be pretty specific.” Solipkier was initially designed as a Flash game. A lot of its systems and mechanics are designed around that platform. Gasketball is a departure, so it took longer to design as the studio learned new tricks.

The idea for Solipskier came from a brainstorming session that revolved around parallax scrolling. Speed and parallax seemed to gel well, so Mike and Greg started prototyping. In a blog post, the duo described the idea for the landscape painting component came as a watershed, “oh my god” moment. With wide-eyes, they went to work. In the end, the Mikengreg created an exhilarating skiing game unlike any other. Instead of focusing on tricks, jumps, and speed, Solipskier leverages style and the emotion that bursts from your chest when you feel like your acceleration is spiraling out of control.

Version ".01" of Solipskier

This wasn’t the duo’s first rodeo. Solipskier was created first and foremost as a flash game, just like Mike’s other titles as a part of Intuition Games. It was, however, the first game of either developer to grab major mainstream appeal. Mike tells me that he realized that this was a truly special project after publishers had entered into a bidding war for the game. An iOS version wasn’t in the picture at the time, but the reality of Flash development changed the tone of the porting conversation going forward.

“We were always looking for the next step out of the Flash world and into a more sustainable market that allowed for us to make larger, more fully formed games,” Greg told us. “The Flash market is great and gave us a way to become better developers while getting paid for it; however, it wasn’t a sustainable business.”

Mike and Greg were working “crazy hours,” and fretting over paychecks when they developed for Flash. Living by the seats of their pants did have its moments. “It was exciting in some ways for sure, but it couldn’t last,” Greg said. “We were lucky to have such success with Solipskier, as it’s allowing us to fully commit to iOS and downloadable titles in future.”

Within the first two months, the iOS version of Solipskier made a little over $70,000, while the sponsored Flash version generated $15,000. On Metacritic, it’s sitting at a 79 average across five positive reviews. Greg tells us that this success “changed the scope” of what it could do with its next game. The duo continued to pay themselves the same amount of money, but Solipskier gave them consistency and the ability to screw up.

Version "0.5." Can you spot the differences!?

“Since Solipskier, we’ve made six or so fairly polished prototypes and scrapped all of them,” Greg tells us. “We could have taken any one of those further but we’d rather call it a failure early and often than find ourselves with a less than stellar finished game that never found that magic we always look for.”

Solipskier’s success and design are weighing heavily on Mike’s mind as he executes concepts on Gasketball. He second guesses a lot and he’s finding it hard to accept praise from friends. “We’ve always seen the flaws in our work first and foremost, but even worse on this project I see things that aren’t there.” Mike elaborated: “My brain is constantly convinced that there are more features I need to discover before the game will be good, but they’re always just out of reach or vision. Every time I implement an idea and it doesn’t make the game instantly better I feel a crush of defeat. I feel a bit like I’m going crazy.”

They’re not alone in this, though.

The Other Guys

Other studios go through the similar issues. Some deliver greatness quickly. After Chair Entertainment released a brilliant Meteroid-style game called Shadow Complex on XBLA, it was able to stoke a similar sort of fanfare and praise with the launch of Infinity Blade. After Simogo released Bumpy Road, it followed it up with an equally charming rhythm and stealth game called Beat Sneak Bandit.

Some studios deliver late. Mobigame released its puzzle game Edge a couple of years ago to insane levels of acclaim and drama. The app was pulled because of a bogus trademark violation just as it was hitting critical mass, and the studio had to fight for the game to get back onto the App Store. Its follow-up, Cross Fingers, released 11 months after Edge. Mobigame’s David Papazian tells us that Cross Fingers is picking up steam. Edge has since been re-released.

Edge on MacOS

“We were very happy with this second game because it is really innovative and completely unique on the App Store. While I am writing, I can see that Cross Fingers is 5th in the Top Free in the US App Store with more than 8 million downloads. However, the game works a lot better now than it did at the start, because we evolved with the market. We added more levels and in-app purchases. Also, the fans are not the same as Edge fans, a lot of women and men from any ages love Cross Fingers, when Edge is more for gamers.”

Papazian says Edge, and its awards, gave his studio legs. The popularity led him to meeting a lot of people, and gave him a good “in” when introducing his work to press. His studio’s pressure was internal, too.

“But you have some pressure, you must do it again and you polish the new game as much as you can, maybe too much. Luckily we did it again, but we did not receive any awards and Apple never featured Cross Fingers on the US store. We had to fight for this success, by updating the game until it finally worked.”

Tiger Styles grabbed a lot of attention with its puzzle game Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor. While working on the follow-up, a Metroid-style game called Waking Mars, Tiger Styles’ David Kalina said he felt a subconscious kind of pressure to one-up Spider. It’s a similar feeling that Mike and Greg feel as they create Gasketball. “When you make a game that gets game of the year nods,” Kalina told us, “there is definitely this feeling that EVERY game needs to live up to that standard, which is sort of an impossible bar to try and meet every time out.”

Waking Mars is more about exploration than anything else.

The development of Spider had a sense of urgency to it. He needed the game to succeed so his studio could exist. With Waking Mars, Kalina said that urgency was replaced with the desire to blow everything up in its second game, which again, is something Mikengreg is similarly struggling with. “When you start approaching game development that way, the cost of everything goes up, and the more you spend, the more risky it is to fail,” he admitted.

Waking Mars, in the end, will keep his studio alive. However, Kalina said he wouldn’t pour so much time and so many resources into Tiger Style’s next game. Kalina wants to be able to fail and experiment and do bold things.

“I’d like to release two or three games in the next year and have them all be surprising in some way, and if they don’t happen to set the world on fire, we can be cool with that because we’re at least trying to push in new directions,” Kalina told us. “The worst thing we could do now is to say ‘we have to do something just like Spider or Waking Mars BUT BIGGER…’ If we go down that path, you may never hear from us again!”

On Gasketball

Gasketball has a chance to be stellar. It’s a basketball game that has its users matching their opponents’ last shots. It’s like a digital version of HORSE, except rendered on a fantastical 2D plane that lets you freely move the hoop and shot placement around. It also has special balls and barriers that you can set up to make your shot more Byzantine and advanced. There’s a plan in place to continually update the game as it lives on the App Store.

Surprisingly, nothing mechanically in Solipskier informed Gasketball’s creative direction, Mike and Greg said. In fact, Greg argued that there wasn’t one to begin with. He said Mike came up with the idea for a playful and fun basketball game that was “a bit more skill-based than just a slingshot or pre-mapped trajectory control scheme” game. Moving in a new direction entirely, Gasketball eschews the stark contrasts of Solipskier in favor of a more playful and fun art direction.

Mike walking people through their first look at Gasketball.

Our expectations got the best of us when we first saw Gasketball. It’s just not the game you envision this studio doing at first glance. Solipkier was speedy and sharp, and it had a very specific and awesome rhythm, tone, and style. You’d figure the next game from this studio would incorporate some of these elements. This game is exceedingly friendlier in look and behavior. It’s also more thoughtful and maybe even a shade or two less impressive from a conceptual standpoint.

The stakes are just higher now. But there’s also another reason this project is especially different for the studio. Like with Mobigames and Cross Fingers, Mikengreg see Gasketball as an opportunity to grab an entirely new audience.

“We’re both getting older and want to do more with our lives than spend a hundred hours a week in a dark office,” Mike tells us. “When you start working independently you tend to hold your breath and accept sacrifices to your happiness in the short term for long term gains and we’ve yet to really succeed in a way that really gives us the security to let go and look to the future.  It can get very nerve wracking to think that you only have one shot at releasing each game, and every time you fail to reach your goals you get one step closer to having to quit trying.”

It’s a strange world right now for Mikengreg, as the studio struggles with the success of Solipskier and thinks about a studio-wide transition. But it’s confident about Gasketball and its eventual quality. We are are, too. We’ve seen the game in action, watched the videos, and have even fiddled with a build. The title threw us off at first, sure, but now that we’re comfortable with the fact that Mikengreg are switching focus, we’ve been able to move past our expectations. It’s figuring out a way to do that, too.

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One of my favorite aspects about iOS gaming is being able to check out games that are so outlandish in design that they probably wouldn’t be made on any other platform. Dreamy Goat [$0.99] is one such game, telling the tale of Goat as he wanders from dream to dream eating random items and jumping on dream entities.

With trippy visuals and catchy tunes, Dreamy Goat is a short but intense experience for gamers willing to forego traditional gameplay for something different.

Let’s get one thing clear: Dreamy Goat is less of a game and more of a visual experience. Players can embark on seven different levels each with their own visual and auditory styles along with their own items for Goat to eat and jump on. Goat walks on his own through each level with your only control being a tap that causes him to jump as much as you want.

Each level is fixed in length, and when you’re finished you go on a wild ride on top of a space whale that eats stars while teleporting you to the next dream (I swear I’m not making this up). Players are free to simply play each level in succession, moving to the next for as long as you wish.

Dreamy Goat defaults to ‘Zen’ mode, which allows you to do whatever you want in each level without repercussion. Switching to ‘Sun’ mode turns on a scoring mechanic that forces the player to pay attention to collectibles, as the level will end if you don’t eat enough items. While Sun mode actually provides a goal and challenge to gamers, it really doesn’t add much to the actual gameplay.

For that matter, there’s very little in terms of any gameplay. There are no achievements, or leaderboards for the ‘Sun’ mode. There’s also no additional mechanics other than being able to make Goat (and the space whale) jump. This really shouldn’t be a surprise for anyone familiar with artistic games such as this, but deserves mentioning nonetheless.

Where Dreamy Goat is intriguing, however, is in its visual presentation. The graphics are simultaneously its most striking feature as well as the element that’s hardest to describe. Many portions of the graphics are simplistic hand-drawn pieces. Yet, all the visuals tie together and simply look and feel right together.

I don’t know if it’s the fact that everything is just so bizarre or if the developers have conjured up some magical spell of fascination involving goats. Regardless, when you combine the visuals with the musical scores (which range from serendipitous to heavy metal), it all just melds together into an interesting experience.

As many other similar games have shown, that sort of experience is only as much as the player makes of it. I also have no doubt that a lot of gamers will simply glance over this game for its lack of gameplay. However, the sheer psychedelic nature of the game is worth noting and at least struck a chord with me. If this sounds appealing, then I encourage you to partake in Dreamy Goat.

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Back in mid-2010 iOS 4 had just hit the streets and brought with it a ton of new features and a host of new APIs that would allow developers to integrate with core iOS elements more easily. One of these new APIs let developers pull music that was stored on the device for use within an app, and as gamers we immediately thought of the possibility of seeing something like Audiosurf coming to the App Store.

Sadly that never did happen, although there have been a number of rhythm games since then that have attempted to create gameplay directly from your music library. But none of them have come close to being able to integrate the two as well as Audiosurf did on PC back in 2008. Well today, Audiosurf creator Dylan Fitterer sent word that a new game in the series is on its way called Audiosurf Air, and that he’s already got it up and running on iOS.

This new Audiosurf is built using Unity, so as Dylan puts it “it runs pretty much everywhere”, including iOS. The trick now is to decide exactly what platforms he’ll actually be releasing the game on and when, but I think iOS is a pretty safe bet. He notes that even these first screens of Audiosurf Air don’t represent final graphics and there is still a ton of work left to do in the game, but still, new Audiosurf! The plan is to have the game come out sometime in 2012, and we’ll keep you posted on any new details concerning the upcoming Audiosurf Air.

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The new iPad and its gorgeous high-definition display has been in our lives for over a week. Game developers have had one for the same stretch of time. Undoubtedly, you’re into new iPad, but what about the guys who make the media you consume on it?

Over the last few days, we’ve been asking a smattering of the highest profile iOS developers out there what they think of the new device now that they’ve had the time to use the thing. We’ve also been inquiring about commitment: will these major players support the Retina screen in updates and future releases?

Below is a list of who we’ve been talking to so far and their responses. As you’d suspect, everyone is still excited about the possibilities of the new iPad’s beefier hardware. Also, many updates are on the way.

Halfbrick chief marketing officer, Phil Larsen:

“We’ve had the new iPad and it goes without saying that it rocks. This screen is astonishing and we already have our guys hard at work making sure our current titles are up to speed. Imminent Jetpack Joyride and Fruit Ninja updates will definitely address this. We’ll also be optimizing all of our new games from launch, and with the higher download limits we’ll be getting a bit more funky and adding some extra visual splendor. Barry Steakfries will be looking his best!”

We can't wait to see Om Nom in high resolution.

ZeptoLabs co-Founder and creative director, Semyon Voinov

“New iPad is a great device and we will of course make sure that our current and upcoming games will support it — because their look will benefit from the new high-res screen. There are some challenges from the development side like the increase of the app size and a wider fragmentation of the platform, but those are all manageable.”

Semi-Secret co-Founder Eric Johnson

“The screen on the new iPad is amazing. I use the iPad regularly for reading, and have already taken for granted the clarity of text rendered on the new display. I can’t wait to update our games with updated artwork to take full advantage of the retina display.”

Robot Entertainment lead designer Marcin Szymanski

“Everyone in the office just got the new iPad, and we’re very excited about it. It feels like it will be a transformative experience for many kinds of games, where players will forget that they’re looking at a computer display, but instead feel like they’re looking at a real scene. Robot won’t be immediately developing Hero Academy to the new specs since most of our iPad work was completed before the announcement, but it’s certainly something we’d consider for future development.”

Imangi designer Keith Shepherd

“We love it!  The screen is beautiful, and it’s wicked fast. We’re already working on an iPad Retina optimized version of Temple Run and it looks incredible. The graphics horsepower is fantastic as well. We have Temple Run optimized and running on the new iPad at retina resolution using MSAA and high resolution textures all at 60fps without any hiccups.  Everything is so crisp and sharp that you don’t even notice the screen, it’s like a window into another world –perfect for games and immersive experiences such as Temple Run.”

So, retina updates for Cut the Rope, Temple Run, Fruit Ninja, Jetpack Joyride, and possibly Hero Academy iPad are all coming? Our hearts are about to burst with joy. We’ll keep asking devs what they think, by the way, but it sure feels like everyone just adores the new iPad and can’t wait to do something new with it.

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Work with me for a second. Forget that The Hunger Games: Girl on Fire has a connection to the Hunger Games fiction. Instead, let’s just look at is as if it is a normal, everyday product that isn’t being bankrolled by a major movie studio. Let’s do this because, even in this vacuum, it impresses. Provided the final build is as good as the one we’ve been paying, it’s the kind of game we’d recommend without pause: it’s conceptually solid, it has a fantastic look, and it brings some new ideas to a genre that’s hopelessly clotted.

You could argue that Girl on Fire is a spiritual successor to Canabalt [$2.99]. It’s an endless runner that revolves around a daring escape, but it boasts some key points of iteration that change up the play in strong ways. For one, Girl on Fire boasts a regenerating health system. If you take a hit, you lose your momentum, but not the game. As a result, you get get married to sessions, and the overall runner experience doesn’t feel as hollow as it usually does.

More interestingly, Girl on Fire allows you to act on blockades. When one of the game’s huge human-sized hornets buzz into the picture, you can shoot it. There’s also an avoidance mechanic, too, that allows you to jump between the jungle world’s upper and lower tiers. Choosing when to kill and when to jump is a cool tactical layer, which brings choice to conflict. Do you jump when a conga line of hornets fly hurdle towards you, or do you stand your ground and pluck them off? When they fire back at you with their purple balls of doom-y doom, do you jump and take care of them or do you just try to avoid the confrontation altogether?

Solid controls compliment this action. Swipe to move between planes, press to aim your projectile bow weapon and fire. It’s all sharp, simple, and responsive, just like the 16-bit games that the art style and tone of the game have been modeled around. Playing this is like step back into a portal where gaming was purer and simpler.

Semi-Secret’s Adam Saltsman is one of the big independent developers attached to this project, so that’s probably why we feel the connection to Canabalt so strongly. Even if we could stop ourselves from the comparison, we’d still be high on Girl on Fire after our hour or so with it. We’ll be taking a much longer look at the final build when it hits iPhone and iPad tomorrow, so stay tuned.

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It’s been a long week (Well, a little more than a week.) of waiting since the new iPad was announced. But, if you were in the initial batch of preorders or are ambitious enough to head to an Apple Store today, you should have a new iPad in your hot little hands right now. I just got done unboxing and syncing mine, and I’m sort of at a loss as to what to post about it, as I really think the new iPad is what everyone expected it to be.

The screen is incredible, and inspires that same sense of awe the first time you see it that the original Retina Display of the iPhone 4 did. No photos, screenshots, or videos will do the display of the new iPad justice. You simply must see it for yourself to truly appreciate just how ridiculously high resolution it is.

I’ve run through the list of the few games that are Retina-ready, and am totally impressed that the new iPad can actually pull off running all these games with performance levels that seem on par with the iPad 2, only at double the resolution. The GPU Apple packed in this thing doesn’t mess around.

Remember how non-Retina apps on the iPhone 4 looked like total trash comparatively during that awkward transition where not very much was Retina-ready? Well, oddly enough, non-Retina apps and games on the new iPad actually don’t look all that bad at all. There’s obviously a huge contrast between things running at 1024×768 and 2048×1536, but it doesn’t seem to induce that same jarring “Oh wow, this looks bad” that non-Retina iPhone apps did. Maybe it’s just me.

Just like the iPhone 4 to the iPhone 4S, the new iPad is a solid upgrade over the iPad 2. In my opinion, the screen is worth the cost of admission alone, but again, like the iPhone 4 to the 4S, the iPad 2 still is as capable of a device as it ever was. What I’m anxious to see is what sort of apps and games developers are going to start churning out developed from the ground up specifically with the new iPad in mind instead of just resolution-boosting updates.

But enough of my rambling, those of you who braved the Apple store or waited for FedEx to show up today, tell us your first impressions of the new iPad in the comments here. Is it everything you wanted and more? A worthy upgrade? A little disappointing? Let’s have it!

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