GamePro Arcade

Mobile and casual games are growing in popularity, a trend with no end in sight, and one of the most well received titles has been Aurora Feint. If you've never heard of it, the free iPhone game is part RPG, part puzzler. Most will compare it to Tetris but it's much more than that.

Recently I discussed Aurora Feint with first time game designers Danielle Cassley and Jason Citron. They talked about AF's unique appeal, cleared the air about its brief absence from the iTunes App Store, and exuded a level of excitement that only comes from making your own game.

GP: There are some people who have never heard of Aurora Feint, so give us the skinny. What kind of game is it and where can gamers get it?

Jason: Simply put, Aurora Feint is going to be a puzzle based MMORPG for the iPhone. Our current offering, Aurora Feint: The Beginning is a single player puzzle RPG with community features. The puzzles are based on a match-three mechanic similar to Puzzle League or Tetris Attack. You can imagine The Beginning as if it were the crafting games found in a traditional MMORPG, except waaaaay more fun. We put a spin on crafting that makes it more interesting then collecting resources and simply clicking "craft armor." There are actual skill challenges that you have to complete to successfully craft new gear.

Danielle: The basic gist of Aurora Feint: The Beginning is that there are four locations to explore and each one plays a different role in crafting and leveling your character. You collect resources at The Mine, purchase blueprints and magic books at The Store, and then build those recipes at either The Smith or The Tower to unlock cool new gear and spells. These crafted items then show up in the mining game as special tool blocks or global effects. The beauty of the whole thing is that, while this is a pretty typical game flow for an MMO, each of these mini-games is really, really fun. We've been pretty blown away by the response we've received from our players.

Jason: Yeah. I don't think either of us ever expected to be interviewed by Game Pro! Anyway, I just want to mention two things we're doing with AF - keeping the game sessions short and rewarding players who have skill. I don't have enough time to play an MMO for three months to compete in interesting PvP games. And let me tell you, I really like competing in PvP games. So the idea here is to give extra rewards to players who exhibit skill at the game by allowing them to progress faster even if they play less. We don't have any PvP in The Beginning, but you can be sure that we have some interesting local and networked multiplayer games in the pipe.

Danielle: Definitely. Another facet of The Beginning, and the AF concept in general, is that difficulty ramps gently. This lets people kind of ignore the intricacies of the MMO and approach it as a simple puzzle game if they want. We read a women's blog that said she figured out how to nurse her baby while playing AF one handed! We both got a huge kick out of that.

Danielle: You can pick up a copy of Aurora Feint: The Beginning for free from the iTunes App Store, which is available either on your iPod Touch, iPhone, or through iTunes on your computer.

GP: Where did you come up with the idea for Aurora Feint? Do you both have experience in the industry or was this just an idea you turned into reality?

Jason: AF was born out of the intersection of two different but very similar ideas. I had been working on an MMO prototype and Danielle was putting together a casual gaming community. I remember the day I walked into her office and was just like "Whoa, wait! Why are we both making large-scale multiplayer games for the iPhone?!" Attempting something as ridiculous as that by yourself is, well, ridiculous. So, we decided to join forces and mashed our concepts together. About ten weeks, seven trillion red bulls, and too many nights sleeping under desks, out popped Aurora Feint.

Danielle: I personally do not have experience with the gaming industry. I graduated from UC Berkeley in '07 with a Bachelors in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science. Well before graduating I knew that I was an entrepreneur at heart. I was really interested in starting a company in mobile entertainment. Along came the iPhone and along came Aurora Feint. It is awesome to see this idea of ours come into reality because I have always been an avid gamer. The idea that right now there is a mass of people playing a game that I made is amazing.

Jason: I think I was in middle school when I wrote my first game. It was a little choose-your-own-adventure game based on Final Fantasy 7 written in QBASIC. I used to be quite the Squaresoft fanboy. I remember I had my own variation of Strago's blue magic spells in there, lots of blue circles randomly popping up around the screen. I was definitely giving Square a run for their money. Anyway, this is the first time I've designed and coded a full game that got released in front of so many people. It's really a rush. I guess you could say this is my first attempt at catching the dream! Formally though, I have a B.S. in Game Design in Development from Full Sail and I spent about three years in the console game industry after school. It was great, but nothing compares to starting your own game studio.

GP: What's the process for getting a game on iTunes? What do you go through to create a game and then have it made available to the public?

Danielle: Getting a game on iTunes goes like this: Build a game, get in the iPhone developer program, submit the game to Apple and cross your fingers. Building the game obviously being the involved part.

GP: Recently Apple removed the game from the iTunes App Store. What happened?

Jason: Basically, we decided to leave out some security features due to our initial time constraints in order to make the App Store launch. You know how critical it is to be "on the shelf" on launch day. That was the mantra we lived and coded by. We had no idea if anyone was even going to play AF, so we made a conscious decision to spend our time on gameplay and really nail that. We didn't even have enough power in our web servers when we launched! That first weekend we spent migrating and scaling our backend instead of going out and celebrating. Naturally, it's the nature of creating something like this with such limited resources. If you have forty important things, you prioritize them and do the top ten. Security just happened to be number eleven.

Danielle: Yeah. We had tested the community feature with a few people and no one ever expressed any concern about it. Jason and I viewed it kind of like the "import your contacts" features found on a lot of websites. We both did a lot of social networking coding right before starting these iPhone projects. Anyway, it turns out that people seem to be really nervous about applications using their contact lists from their phones. I think people will become more accustomed to it over time, but we're planning on changing the whole community feature anyway. It's going to be more like Nintendo's friend codes but a little easier to use. We're going to completely take out all automated contact list integration.

Jason: The biggest take away we got from this is that people are really, really, really sensitive about their contact information. In retrospect, we probably should have cut the whole feature and not just the security part of it.

GP: Aurora Feint is now back up and running on iTunes. How did the problem get resolved?

Danielle: The funny thing about all of this is that we had implemented all the security features the weekend before our app was pulled. We knew we needed to get the security features implemented right after we finished taking our servers off of life support.

Jason: We actually submitted the update to Apple the morning before we were taken down. The following day Apple contacted me, and we discussed what their concerns were. It was great to hear that the engineer was a personal fan of the game. I described what we had done with the update and it met all of their requirements. They immediately published it and added us to the "What We're Playing" section! We were back online that night with more great reviews from people playing our game and thousands more downloads.

Danielle: Our fans are really great. They're setting up web pages and creating a whole community around AF on our website forums. This certainly is a dream come true for both of us!

GP: I've heard the new version has some new features and content. What can fans of Aurora Feint expect to see in this version that they didn't see before and why should people who have never tried the game give it a shot?

Danielle: Our latest release adds six tool blocks, twenty new essence mastery levels, an introduction cinematic, and a bunch of other requests from our community via the Aurora Feint forums. Right now, we're cooking up our second update expected to hit the App Store this weekend. It'll have a whole host of bug fixes and frame rate improvements, the new friend codes system we talked about, and some more tasty treats requested by our community.

Jason: Two of those treats we're shooting for are letting people play while listening to their own music and better game balancing. We also have a really special surprise in store for the update after next that we're going to announce at a later time.

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