Apple has started recruiting (via AppleInsider) a game developer with 3-4 years of game development experience and has shipped at least one AAA title. They specify the candidate needs to be a "passionate gamer" and will be working on "interactive multimedia experiences" on the iPhone and iPod Touch.
Of course, we take "interactive multimedia experiences" to mean games. So, why is Apple hiring an in-house game developer? While Apple did release their own Texas Hold'em game on day 1 of the App Store, they seem to have been happy to let 3rd party developers take the lead since.
Apple does seem to be taking games more seriously, and has even recently hired Graeme Devine a prominent game developer who had major roles in Doom 3 and Halo Wars. The iPod Touch's success has been tied directly to Apple's push of it as a gaming device. The success has attracted a number of developers and has even convinced id Software to wind down their traditional BREW/JAVA mobile games to focus their entire mobile efforts only on the iPhone/iPod Touch.
Resolution Interactive, who brought us the enjoyable iPhone racing titles Dirt Moto Racing and Aqua Moto Racing, has announced that they will soon be bringing the first iPhone snowmobile racer, Snow Moto Racing, to the App Store.
Experience the thrill of high-speed snowmobile racing while carving your path through beautiful winter landscapes.
Perform stunts to trigger speed boosts that will give you the edge when racing against your opponents.
Challenge your friends and race head-to-head for glory in the new multiplayer mode with up to 4 players.
Features listed by the developer:
6 Unique Race Tracks
Easy-To-Use and responsive controls
Dynamic Opponent Difficulty
Local Multiplayer via Bluetooth
14 Achievements to unlock
Hidden Bonus Game Mode
Download directly to iPhone via 3G
See Resolution's preview video for a look at the game in play.
We here at Touch Arcade are fans of Resolution's earlier Moto racing installments and are anxious to get our hands on this upcoming release. We'll take a closer look when the game goes live in the App Store.
Snow Moto Racing has been submitted to Apple for approval and will launch at a price of $0.99.
For the past couple days we have been anxiously anticipating that imminent release of Ravensword: The Fallen King, the thread on our forums has been going crazy, and we even had Ravensword developers Russ Menapace and Josh Presseisen on our last podcast to talk about the game.
I suppose I should start with the good news first, in that I've been playing the 1.0 release of Ravensword most of this week, and the game is absolutely amazing. Similar to recent Elder Scrolls games like Morrowind or Oblivion, Ravensword is an open world roleplaying game with both a main quest line to follow and a considerable amount of side-quests. The developers have quoted anywhere between 6-8 hours of gameplay to complete the initial quest, and from what I've seen so far, that seems fairly accurate without even taking side-quests into account.
The Ravensword game world is surprisingly detailed for an iPhone game, and performs remarkably well for a game that is built in Unity instead of its own optimized engine. Along the way you will equip your character with all kinds of different magical items and slay hordes of enemies as the main quest line slowly reveals your character's mysterious identity. Utilizing familiar touch screen controls, navigating the world of Ravensword is as effortless as playing games like Gameloft's Modern Combat: Sandstorm [$4.99 / Free], which is often used as an example of highly refined touchscreen controls.
Now for the bad news. Not long ago we got word from the developers that Ravensword had been rejected along with a considerable number of other games built using the Unity engine. Unfortunately it seems that Ravensword like many other Unity games have found themselves caught in the crossfire between Apple, Storm8, and API calls which exist inside of all Unity games.
Storm8, developers of iMobsters and Vampires Live were recently accused of harvesting players phone numbers using private API's and uploading them to their servers– A gross violation of the iPhone developer SDK agreement. The Unity engine currently uses the two private API calls that Storm8 allegedly exploited to steal user data, _NSGetEnviron and exc_server. Mantas Puida of Unity Technologies explains these two API's utilized by the Unity engine serve the following functions:
_NSGetEnviron is used by Mono runtime to provide implementation of .NET core API method: Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable().
exc_server is also used by Mono runtime to provide graceful NULL reference exception handling.
According to a thread on the unity forums, a considerable number of games are being rejected for this– even games without any kind of network functionality to transmit any kind of personal data.
On the brighter side of things, Unity has already been updated to fix these problems and a new build of Ravensword which includes the latest Unity engine has already been resubmitted to Apple for approval. Sadly, this does put Ravensword and all the other rejected Unity games at the back of the approval queue, but as I mentioned earlier– Ravensword seems it will be well worth the wait.
Ngmoco's Eliminate Pro has become incredibly popular in the App Store, now sustaining the #1 spot in the Top Free apps. While we covered many details about the game's energy system and strategies, one power-generating feature that we had described in our preview of the game had remained absent: marketing and promotional offers.
If, however, you're not interested in paying for energy (or waiting the [240] minutes), you can alternatively complete marketing offers in-game to earn additional energy. This method of payment system has seen great success in Facebook games, and I will be very interested to see how it does in Eliminate. The various offers you can complete range from completing a simple survey to signing up for a Discover card, and will change over time.
Eliminate Pro launched without this option available, but it appears it's still a possibility. Ngmoco has flipped the switch on the first offer which is pretty painless to complete. It simply requires you to install and launch Epic Pet Wars and when you return to Eliminate Pro, you will have 15 Power Cells.
With Ngmoco's acquisition of the Epic Pet Wars developer, the reason for the cross promotion is obvious, but does pave the way for non-monetary ways to gain energy in Eliminate. While we haven't heard an update on their plans, we expect they will eventually launch more traditional marketing offers beyond this simple cross promotion. But even so, if they stick with these sort of cross-download promotions, with hundreds of thousands of Eliminate Pro downloads a day, they certainly have a massive audience to leverage for their future games.
To take advantage of the offer, you must click on the Gear Up -> Get Energy -> Special Offers button in Eliminate Pro. Once you relaunch Eliminate Pro you still have to "use" the Power Cells to convert them into energy.
Ngmoco announced today that they had acquired iPhone developer Miraphonic, the developer of Epic Pet Wars [App Store].
Epic Pet Wars is one of the Mafia-type MMO games on the App Store that revolves around picking a pet, training and leveling it up for battle. The game is offered for free and makes money based on the sale of add-on pet races and respect points. The game has a loyal following on our forums and seems to fit right in with Ngmoco's recent push into Free + Paid DLC business model with Eliminate Pro and Touch Pets.
We've never provided much coverage to these types of games here on TouchArcade, but they do seem to have a large following amongst App Store customers.
Much to our surprise, StoneLoops! of Jurassica was recently removed from the App Store. This is particularly unfortunate, as we not only gave the game a glowing review, but I would also include it in any listing of really great iPhone games.
Maciej Biedrzycki, co-founder of Codeminion, developers of StoneLoopsexplained on his blog today the reasoning behind the recent removal, which all boils down to a complaint filed by Mumbo Jumbo, developers of Luxor:
About 3 weeks ago we have learned that Mumbo Jumbo supplied Apple with a formal complaint and a request to remove StoneLoops! from the AppStore. The reason? Infringing Luxor copyright, confusing customers, stealing Luxor’s look & feel and even stealing their source code!
Codeminion responded to the complaint, and heard nothing of it for several weeks. After assuming their response was satisfactory, they later discovered that StoneLoops had ultimately been removed from the App Store.
This entire situation has left members of our forums both in both the StoneLoops and Luxor threads scratching their heads. While the original version of Luxor was released about 3 years prior to StoneLoops!, neither game is based on an entirely original concept, as PopCap's Zuma was released in 2003, and Puzz Loop (which is also on the App Store) was released all the way back in 1998. We've yet to receive a response from Mumbo Jumbo to get their side of the story.
Ngmoco has announced that their much anticipated first person shooter Eliminate will be free in light of Apple's announcement that free apps can now offer in-app purchases.
More details are said to be following, but Ngmoco has long announced that Eliminate would carry in-app purchases for energy that allows players to earn additional credits. Every player gets a certain auto-renewable source of energy, but once depleted, to earn more credits the player must either 1) wait a certain amount of time for your energy to recharge or 2) purchase more energy. If you don't care about credits, you may also continue to play but simply be ineligible to earn credits during those games. Credits are used for equipment upgrades and leveling up. We had a hands on with the game earlier this month which explains the system in detail and also gives impressions of the gameplay.
Based on comments by Ngmoco about the "aggressive" pricing of Eliminate, we long suspected that Ngmoco planned on making the bulk of its income in these in-app purchases. The move to a completely free game would expose Eliminate to a much larger audience of potential customers and also remove the issue of having a large enough user base to support an online multiplayer game.
Eliminate has been submitted and is awaiting approval from Apple.
Apple has emailed developers today that they have made a major change in the way they deal with in-app purchases or downloadable content (DLC). When Apple introduced the idea of in-app purchases, they restricted this to applications that cost $0.99 at a minimum.
Now, they have extended it to free applications as well:
In App Purchase is being rapidly adopted by developers in their paid apps. Now you can use In App Purchase in your free apps to sell content, subscriptions, and digital services.
You can also simplify your development by creating a single version of your app that uses In App Purchase to unlock additional functionality, eliminating the need to create Lite versions of your app. Using In App Purchase in your app can also help combat some of the problems of software piracy by allowing you to verify In App Purchases.
Visit the App Store Resource Center for more details about how you can add In App Purchases to your free apps.
This will result in some massive changes to the scenery of the App Store. A number of questions and possibilities arise. Developers could, for example, completely eliminate a Lite version altogether, and simply provide a Free version with the rest of the content as downloadable in-app purchases. This, however, also changes the dynamic of the top 100 lists. Such an app would be ranked only in the Top 100 Free and may never show up in the Top 100 Paid.
After a very long and dramatic legal battle between Mobigame and Tim Langdell over a trademark dispute over the name "Edge", the game has once again appeared on the App Store. EDGE [App Store] is a game where you control a colorful cube through a series of 3D isometric maze-like levels packed with puzzles to solve and obstacles to overcome.
Featuring both touch and accelerometer controls, EDGE requires both quick thinking and fast reactions to progress past the first few levels.
We enjoyed EDGE, and recommend picking the game up now — both because it's a great game and also in case it gets pulled again as it's unclear whether or not EDGE is here to stay. An official statement from Mobigame is said to be coming soon.
If you haven't kept up with the "Edge" dispute which has caused quite a stir on the Internet, EA recently petitioned to get the "Edge" trademark thrown out, and Langdell responded calling the petition a "desperate attempt by EA". For a complete background on the dispute, check out the summary provided by TIGSource. Needless to say, the whole situation is unfortunate, and it's sad to see such a great iPhone game caught in the legal crossfire.
It's been well known that Apple has resisted bringing Adobe's Flash plug-in to the iPhone. As a result, there is no way for iPhone users to play Flash content natively on their iPhone. Many games (such as Canabalt) have been written in Flash, and ports of these applications have been big sellers on the App Store.
Today Adobe announced that they begin allowing Flash developers to export applications directly in "ipa" format to run directly on the iPhone. According to Adobe, these applications are compiled into standard native iPhone executables and will be able to be submitted to the App Store for approval.
Flash Professional CS5 will enable developers to build applications for iPhone that are installed as native applications. Users will be able to access the apps after downloading them from Apple’s App Store and installing them on iPhone or iPod touch
The implications for iPhone gamers and developers is pretty significant, as the porting of Flash content to the iPhone will become much easier. Obviously, changes may still need to be made to suit the iPhone's interface.
Several apps have already been released for the iPhone using an early private version of Adobe's software, but a public beta of Flash Professional CS5 will begin later this year. These early Flash/App Store examples include Chroma Circuit [$0.99], Fickleblox [$0.99] and more.
Apple has started recruiting (via AppleInsider) a game developer with 3-4 years of game development experience and has shipped at least one AAA title. They specify the candidate needs to be a "passionate gamer" and will be working on "interactive multimedia experiences" on the iPhone and iPod Touch. 
Resolution Interactive
For the past couple days we have been anxiously anticipating that imminent release of Ravensword: The Fallen King, the 
Storm8, developers of iMobsters and Vampires Live were 
Much to our surprise, StoneLoops! of Jurassica was recently removed from the App Store. This is particularly unfortunate, as we not only gave the game a 
