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We didn’t think it’d take long for former Infinity Ward creative strategist Robert Bowling to find work after leaving Activision last month, but we didn’t anticipate that he’d be employing himself. In an exclusive with Game Informer digital on Monday, Bowling revealed the formation of his own studio, Robotoki. He also announced that his new digs will be pumping out titles for console and PC, as well as phones and tablets.

“As a developer, our focus is on creating a universe first, experiences second, and game mechanics last, “ Bowling told GI. “With focus being on universe, we aim to create experiences that transcend platforms and genres and allow our players to connect to our world, their characters, and gameplay via any medium: console, PC, or mobile.

“However, how they experience the world is unique to their device. The mobile / tablet experience should not mimic the console or PC experience, it should be additive to it, not supplemental. Allowing them to support their console and PC experience, continue their progression, but by experiencing the world in a meaningful and unique way.”

Bowling’s vision for the mobile space sounds like a dream. We haven’t seen any game with the level of integration that he’s suggesting his titles will have. Also, we don’t see a lot of companion apps functioning as more than a database. This space has a lot of room to grow, so it’ll be interesting to see what Robotoki does.

Robotoki will be funding its own projects, by the way. And we’ll catch a glimpse of its first title by the end of this year. It’s currently slated for next-gen consoles, iOS, and Android.

[via Game Informer]

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The most influential man at hardware and software powerhouse Nintendo has found at least one phone game he enjoys. Visionary Shigeru Miyamoto recently name-dropped Rovio’s Angry Birds in a conversation with Hookshot, Inc, noting that it’s one of the few phone games he can dig. “There aren’t many games that I’ve played recently that have been truly convincing to me,” he said at a Paris event. “That said, I have very much enjoyed Angry Birds — especially the way in which it combines traditional and new game elements in exciting ways.”

Miyamoto later praised the surprising depth of the game’s flinging mechanic and the overall simplicity of its design. “Angry Birds is a very simple idea but it’s one of those games that I immediately appreciated when I first started playing, before wishing that I had been the one to come up with the idea first,” he said.

Nintendo does its best to totally dismiss the App Store and phones in general, so these quotes strike us as a particularly notable. It’s acknowledgment that something great can happen on our platforms of choice, from the mouth of Nintendo’s visionary designer.

In an interview with Edge at the same event, Miyamoto admitted that he keeps tabs on the mobile space, but noted that Nintendo can be just as creative.

“I check up on them sometimes, but I don’t have a lot of time,” he told Edge. “I think we also have a history of having certain fun ideas and making a game out of it, and there’s lots of other people also doing this [now].

“This kind of environment inspires us to try even harder, and create even more unexpected new things.”

Miyamoto is in the middle of some sort of slow (and disputed) stepping down process that’ll see him working on smaller games with smaller teams instead of big, blown-up AAA Mario and Zelda titles.

[via Hookshot Inc, via Edge]

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Go somewhere quiet and you might just hear us screaming “yes” at our monitors. Wizards of the Coast has confirmed that we won’t be waiting long for Duels of the Planeswalkers 2013 iPad. It’s coming this “summer,” and launching alongside the 2013 Core Set of playing cards, which will be featured prominently in the game, too. Ten fresh decks are expected at launch, and more presumably will come down the pipe as downloadable content.

We still don’t know a ton about this version of the game, but a dude at Wizards of the Coast did recently blast out a statement name-dropping one of our platforms of choice, and seemed tickled by the prospect of opening up Magic to a hungry and new base:

“We’re excited to make Magic: The Gathering even more accessible to our growing player base by adding iPad iOS to the suite of platforms that Duels of the Planeswalkers 2013 will be available on this summer,” director of Digital Games for Magic: The Gathering Worth Wollpert said in a statement.

“Given that the original Duels and Duels 2012 have been downloaded well over 2 million times combined since its launch in June 2009, our customers are clearly enjoying what we’ve done with the game to this point, and we’re thrilled to be able to offer both new and existing Magic fans exciting content and gameplay options on a world-class tablet platform that many of our customers have been asking for.”

If you aren’t familiar with Duels, it’s a little like Magic for Babies. It gives you pre-built decks, holds your hand if you aren’t familiar with the rules, and lets you play against AI until you’re good enough to take your game online. The previous two iterations have been fantastic, and we can’t wait to see this new one on iPad.

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PlayGround States logo, as it appears on Facebook.

“It’s been an amazing experience,” Double Fine founder Tim Schafer told fans via a live stream that celebrated the closing moments of Double Fine Adventure’s success on Kickstarter. The project generated over three million dollars worth of donations in a month. Double Fine had asked for $400,000. It wasn’t just amazing. It was magical.

Not every studio sees this kind of outcome. Lead artist and the brains behind Playground State, Barry Collins, is walking us through what his studio looks like, and what has happened to his game, after his project failed to receive funding.

Playground State was founded two years ago by Barry and his brother Brad to explore and express the ideas that Barry has had floating around in his head since childhood. If you look closely at its web site, you’ll notice that there’s no physical address. It’s just a collective “willing people” across the globe coming together to build a series of sci-fi titles called Knights. A PC title called Knights: Spiral Islands was to be the first.

Spiral Island became a known project thanks to Kickstarter and a warm reception by PC enthusiast web site Rock, Paper, Shotgun, which featured it in an editorial in February 2011. Spiral Island is described as an episodic online action-adventure game in which you, as a knight in the game’s sci-fi universe, battle evil across the cosmos. Its hook, outside of its UDK visuals, is its lack of boundaries: in one mission, you’ll be hacking and shooting Vikings, in others space bees, mushroom zombies, robots, and large crabs.

Concept art of a playable Knight. You'll see other Knights in the upcoming preview game.

It has the look and feel of something incredible, especially if it were to be expanded as planned. Spiral Island was pitched to potential donors as game design in motion, as it would have seamlessly integrated new scenarios and enemies in a constant steam.

For whatever reason, it didn’t receive sufficient support. The Kickstarter effort ended with a thud later that April. Playground was looking for $10,000. A hair over $1,500 was pledged across 36 serial donators. One pledger, for example, has backed 48 other projects.

It’s easy to see this as a knockout shot, but to Barry, it’s just a glancing blow, and now the team is looking to iOS and its vast audience to continue.

“The lack of funds was frustrating, but it didn’t really kill our ambitions or desire to make this work,” Barry tells TouchArcade. In the ultimate show of confidence, the studio grew. It picked up an artist, a musician, a sound designer, and a couple of programmers following the failed attempt at funding.

That Playground is reacting in the exact opposite way you’d expect isn’t lost on Barry, and he explains that the reason is tied into how deeply his core team believes in what the studio is trying to accomplish.

“It’s our baby,” Barry tell us. “Amazingly, after maybe an hour or two of rambling with the various team members, they all irrevocably become hooked on the concept and what it has to offer, and slowly but surely begin to own it. Right now we have a team of guys all on the same page and all excited about the small steps as much as the bigger one that will come later — Knights as a whole.”

The crab monster we originally fell in love with, but now fewer polygons for mobile.

While the team grew, so did Knights. It’s now more than a game: it’s a series of mobile titles based in the same universe that spans multiple platforms and genres. Barry has an idea for several projects, some of which are in early stages of development. The most important is an Epic Citadel-like preview title, built specifically for iOS to show off what his team can do.

But even though the team is growing and excited about the games Barry wants to make, it has a horrible issue: it’s hemorrhaging programmers. It can’t keep one on staff, and this is putting a kink in the size and scope of the Knights games Barry wants to make. Barry says they’re in a spiral of simplification, as no one has the expertise to implement complex content into builds. The lack of a revenue stream is undoubtedly one of the culprits here. It’s also the reason why it’s bothering with a showcase project in the first place, and opening its doors for outsourcing work.

“This constant tug of war is what pushed us to our current goals of producing a very basic, free to download visual demo — a means of walking around a crazy environment full of eye candy and talking to basic scripted actors within the world. This will lay the ground work for follow-up episodes to come afterwords,” Barry tells us.

That Knights is blowing up, too, isn’t lost on Barry. He says this game has two goals: to nab exposure and be a launching board. Barry believes it’ll generate new ideas for future Knights games, and argues that the scope in this game is much more manageable than the one he put out there with Spiral Island.

This is how Playground wants to tackle on-screen FPS controls.

Another game is another iPhone and iPad-specific title called Knights: Arena. This is also a victim of the rotunda of programmers cycling through the studio. It’s an FPS that revolves solely around online play: team deathmatch, capture the flag, and so on. Barry, with a lengthy Internet sigh capping off what he tells us about Arena, says the studio’s goal is to establish a revenue stream as quickly as possible. It needs to hire at least one, dedicated programmer. “But that in itself is a Catch 22,” he says. “Need a programmer to make revenue, need revenue to get a programmer.”

Playground State’s ability to keep its legs churning in the mud seems unreal, but it’s a human reaction. With a teeth-gnashing kind of pride, Barry plans to continue marching on beyond his studio’s funding failure. He doesn’t just want to make games — he wants to see his dreams realized.

“I don’t quite know how we managed to grow in quality, strength, and numbers. Faith in Knights among the team is stronger than ever today, despite everything,” he tells us.

“Knights is one of many projects I dream of making. So this is the blood, sweat, tears part of paving the way to eventually being able to produce these with a real budget and fully paid team. This is it. This is what I love. It’s what I want to do for the rest of my life.”

That’s why Barry is up for using Kickstarter again. He has at least two in the works right now. One is for an extensive indie bundle that features developers in the Vancouver area. The other is for Knights: Arena or a single-player variant of that idea, which he wants to launch “at the same time that we launch the free demo, so people can see or play it and discover it that way.”

Barry talks about Knights: Spiral Island in his Kickstarter promo.

Spiral Island’s crowd-funding failure didn’t come without costs in terms of people and revenue. There were lessons learned, though. The first was scalability. “No need to come out of the gate with a massive universe to embark on hundreds of small stories in other universes. A single story is good enough, or if finances and or programming get in the way, as we are discovering, there are still options,” he tells us.

“We did not go into this expecting it to be quick and easy, and it has not been quick or easy either,” he says.

And let’s say these Kickstarters don’t pan out? Barry isn’t worried. “We will keep pushing along until we are earning revenue on our own, find the right investment deal or get the attention of a publisher that wants to work with us.”

“But no matter what, this project will see the light of day, and as a series of mobile games to start.”

Towards the end of our Barry conversation, we pressed “pause” so we could ask what makes him so idealistic. His vision for these Knights games still seems almost too ambitious considering the lack of funding. The risk of what will happen if these ideas die could be monumental to the studio’s future and Barry. These games are the realization of his dreams, after all.

Honu are a species you'll be able to talk to in a preview. Here's one in a warrior outfit.

“Knights in general is an extremely ambitious concept,” he says. “It started big and the scope of the games we want to tell based in this setting have been cut back for the sake of getting something to market sooner. “

“The concept of Knights being so grand just means we always have room to grow. We realize that we may only ever produce the Knights preview or only ever get as far as Knights: Arena because there’s a real possibility that Knights is lame and we are all crazy people working away on an idea nobody else likes. “

“For me this would just be a continuation of exactly what I have done for 11 years, which is to just hire myself out to whatever studio wants to pay me, and doing so in mass with others is old hat. The grind of tracking down clients and deadlines, milestones, massive delays in payment and so on… it’s all a part of the job. But, Knights, to me, is a way out of this, to finally get all the ideas my brother and I have been brewing up for decades. It’s time we produce things we want rather than the things that pay the bills.”

Barry says that he likes to focus on what could happen with some success. He could hire programmers, no more lost time on contract projects, and the people he’s surrounded by could be supported.

“I just really hope people want to play a game about the Knights — the ultimate saviors of all things, the definition of heroic. Not a bad bone in their bodies, watching them take on any bad guy we can dream up and throw at them, across all history in any universe and time. I really want to play that game.”

When a Kickstarter fails, it’s not necessarily a catalyst for disaster. Barry is idealistic, and maybe too ambitious, but he’s not a quitter. He’ll keep creating. The success of Double Fine was magical, but the intensity of at least one man who didn’t win big is special, too.

While Barry’s story stands on its own, we are covering something larger here. This is part one of a two-part series of articles. In the next, we’ll introduce you to three more studios who haven’t had the greatest experience on Kickstarter. We’ll also discuss why we don’t normally cover games on the service and why we’re not certain of the long-term viability of crowd-funding sources like Kickstarter.

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Alright so I just screamed like a teenage girl in the front row of a New Kids on the Block concert. This morning Wizards of the Coast announced that a new installment of their Duels of the Planeswalkers series of Magic: The Gathering games was coming. Granted, this isn’t much of a surprise since Duels has historically been incredibly popular, so much so that quite a few people (myself included) directly attribute the game to the resurgence in interest in the physical Magic: The Gathering card game. What is surprising is that among the announced platforms, Wizards also dropped the bomb that the game will be coming to the iPad.

Details beyond that are basically non-existent, but it’s safe to assume that Duels of the Planeswalkers 2013 will play just like its predecessors, except with the inclusion of new cards from this year’s sets. I’m stoked as hell, not only because I’ve been playing M:TG basically my entire life, but because I think there’s lots of interesting things that can be done on the iPad with the IP. For instance, a Magic Online client for the iPad?

Just take my money Wizards, take it all.

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How refreshing it is to play a game with a down-to-earth plot? Even the most grounded of games usually bear their fair share of swords and sorcery or bombastic battles. Super Lemonade Factory [$1.99] goes a different route, telling a simple story from one particular moment in time. Lisolet and Andre are newly married in the days after World War II. Andre is set to take up his father’s lemonade factory, but first he and Lisolet must tour the premises, meeting the workers and learning about the challenges they face.

It might sound a little dry, but the tale accompanies a clever platformer designed to play on the strengths and weaknesses of its stars. Andre is blessed with physical strength and can break through boxes that bar the couple’s path. Lisolet is agile; she can double jump and reach places Andre can’t, often giving him a foot up with a crate from a higher perch. Isn’t it lovely to see a marriage with partners that complement each other so well?

The journey through the factory is surprisingly perilous—you’d think it had been designed as a deathtrap. Often, either Andre or Lisolet will need rescuing right from the start. You’ll have to direct the other across a pit of spikes, perhaps, over floating platforms and around the surprisingly deadly people of the factory. Once one has saved the other, they can travel together—Andre is happy to give Lisolet a piggyback so you needn’t cover the same ground twice. From there it’s usually a hop, skip and a jump to the level’s exit.

A detour may be necessary on the way. Though it seems like the sort of thing aimed at completionists, you’ll want to collect each level’s bottle cap. These are occasionally well hidden and usually hard to reach, but behind them sits half the game’s content. Collect all the caps in a given area and you’ll unlock the hardcore version of that area, where platforms are smaller and faster and spikes are everywhere. Brushing against a spike is deadly, and Andre and Lisolet only have two lives to work with if you can’t find any bags of sugar to replenish them.

Controlling the couple is simple, with on-screen controls for walking, jumping and dashing. These are responsive and rarely get in the way, but they suffer the usual flaw of being a little too easily mis-tapped. You can swap between Andre and Lisolet with a horizontal swipe; a vertical swipe puts Lisolet on Andre’s back.

Lisolet is blessed with one more ability: a way with words. She can speak with any of the factory’s denizens. The foreman, the chef – these workers open up about their hopes and dreams, both for the company and for themselves. A food inspector waxes poetic on the need for cleanliness, and a General blusters about the misfortune that could befall a company that chose not to meet military requests for supplies.

These bits of flavor are woven into the metagame: Game Center achievements are awarded for speaking with all employees, and your progress is marked on the level select screen. But more than that, the dialogue is rather charming. The foreman is a burgeoning Bolshevik who loves to muse on the meaning of labor; Andre will share stories from his past. Much of it hits a bit heavy-handed, but it’s always a pleasant diversion—you’ll also find the occasional pop-culture reference if you’re paying attention.

In the end, the gameplay suffers for its simplicity. The most puzzling levels aren’t more complicated than pushing a couple boxes in the right order before jumping, and there are only so many spikes one can add to a level before it gets silly. If there’s more to be done with the formula, though, we may yet see it done. The developers offer a system for level creation and plan to add the best of the user-created content to the game. On top of 72 already entertaining levels, that sounds pretty good.

And hey, if you haven’t noticed, Super Lemonade Factory is a looker. If you’re into pixel art, you won’t be disappointed—both the style and the animation are fantastic. On top of that the chiptune soundtrack is pretty great, if a tad overly-aggressive for the content.

So while the game isn’t flawless, it’s still an easy recommendation. There are kinks to be worked out, but they don’t detract much from the good stuff: a solid, fun puzzle platformer with great ideas and outstanding presentation. And, frankly, how often do we get to play a game with such a delightfully low-key premise? For that, Super Lemonade Factory most certainly deserves a look. Still, it’s unlikely to push platformer fans, so know that going in. You might not find a challenge, but you’ll find a lot of charm.

TouchArcade Rating:

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In a universe in which ninja tournaments aren’t just an elaborate excuse to stage a gory multidimensional melee, there’s an adorable little ninja on his way to castle Shimawa on a hill. Hatted and garbed in his finest eentsy weentsy blacks, this little ninja is on his way to the 200th annual ninja tournament. He doesn’t know it until he gets on the stage, but he’s not skilled enough to win, at all.

And thus little ninja’s failure becomes the premise of another game on mobile platforms that revolves around fruit. And while 8-bit Ninja might roll in one of the most dry and tired design elements in today’s market, it does have something to share: simple fun.

At its core, this is a 2D side-scrolling avoidance game. You’ll control little ninja as he dodges an infinite amount of fruit being fired at him from an upset crowd. The more fruit you dodge, the higher your point value at the end of your session. The game ends when a piece of watermelon, cantaloupe, an orange, or a pineapple hits you as you glide from left to right in the cutesy, though strangely not 8-bit, playing area. I doubt that users will ever receive an emotional rise from any of this, but the action model does a decent job of engaging me. Its immediately accessible and blunt, like an everyday simple pleasure.

If this sounds like something you’ve played before, it is. I asked developer DogByte where the idea for 8-bit Ninja came from, and unsurprisingly, it’s a product of its time. DogByte loves Falling Balls and Fruit Ninja and wanted to construct something that took elements from both, but iterated in important, though non-surface, areas.

And that’s the thing about 8-bit Ninja: it does have some interesting points of design buried within its cutesy art direction and simplistic play. For one, you’ll never walk into the game carrying tools that directly interact with enemy fruit. Little ninja can, however, pick up and utilize random items that spawn on the map. Weaponry, like blades or shurikens, act like timed but stationary turrets of fruit-slicing fury. Picking up these items up is a clear choice, and one that adds a light tactical flair to the game’s action. And then there’s the progression system, which is as sweet as chocolate.

“The game features multiple unlockable characters each with unique special powers to unleash, multiple arenas with unique extras and a lot of power-ups,” DogByte tells us. But that’s selling the progression a little short. As you play, you’ll earn EXP for your character, which seems to ramp up his speed and his special ability, which in the case of little ninja, is a shield. There are two other characters to unlock down the line, each of which boasts different abilities.

Also, you’ll collect two forms of in-game currency: gems and eggs. Gems can be used to level up those randomly spawned items so they last longer and have greater effects as you play. You can also buy a nifty one-use hat that acts as armor. Eggs, on the other hand, can be used to buy new characters with new abilities, new levels, or even gems. These constituent parts all feed into each other harmoniously, and really bolster that best-in-class one-more-play kind of tone, similar to, strangely, Call of Duty’s You’ll spend a senseless amount of time powering up my guy and abilities, all in the name of superior stats. This kind of stuff gets in your head in a satisfying way.

Gems and eggs also feed into the game’s free-to-play model, but this title’s brand of functionality appears to be inoffensive. Instead of annoying or nagging, it treats the user as a premium-level consumer from the get-go. The pre-release build of 8-bit Ninja has never made me feel like I need to dip into my wallet to enjoy the progression system and what it offers. Eggs and gems rain freely, though at the cost of ad support. Ads were off in the build I played.

8-bit Ninja might be simple, and the name might be a hair deceiving considering that this plainly isn’t an 8-bit game, but this is definitely something you’ll want to check out later this April when it hits iOS and Android for the price of free.

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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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Sega’s Phantasy Star Online 2 won’t cost you a dollar — unless you’d like an item or two. Sega has announced that the upcoming sequel to the everyone’s favorite “light” MMO, Phantasy Star Online, will roll with the standard MMO free-to-play model, and charge users for select item transactions from its in-game store. Also, an iOS and Android version has been confirmed. Both are slated to hit at some point in “winter 2012,” according to Andriasang.

Keep your expectations in check, though: Sega has said that the phone versions of the game are simpler and will feature “social game elements,” on top of a basic character creation mechanism, and controls. These versions will be able to loosely communicate with the PC and Vita versions of the game, but the experiences won’t had across these platforms won’t be measuring up to each other.

Images via Andriasang.

The available intel on PSO2 still isn’t fantastic, as it seems like Sega is keeping its marketing efforts for the game contained to other regions. However, we do know that PSO2 will continue to offer the franchises’ specific blend of shooter-meets-brawler combat and offer instanced-based content. Oh, and Mags are totally coming back!

Footage of the Vita version.

[via Andriasang]

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In case there’s still a person out there who is shocked by the runaway success of the Angry Birds series, secure your monocle and try this news on for size: According to a recent tweet from Rovio, Angry Birds Space has been downloaded over ten million times in three days. Now, before you go multiplying that ten million by ninety nine cents, consider that Rovio has been historically vague with the platforms their download figures are from. Angry Birds Space launched as a 99¢ iPhone version, a $2.99 iPad version, and a free ad-supported Android version. Free versions of anything seem to be downloaded exponentially more than apps with a price tag, so it doesn’t seem that far out there to assume that a hefty chunk of those downloads came from the Android side of the fence, but still.

If you still haven’t downloaded Angry Birds Space for whatever reason, check out our review. The game is seriously just phenomenal, and as I’ve spent more time with the game I’ve been having an absolute blast attempting to three star the 99¢ IAP “Danger Zone” ultra-difficult levels. If anyone from Rovio is reading this, please keep releasing level packs like this. Heck, make ‘em more difficult, I dare you.

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