Jason Rohrer’s excellent game Passage is now also available on the iPhone for the price of 99 cents.

The iPhone version added yesterday is th mobile version of the game that was released last year and generated much attention with game designers. The PC version and source code of the game still remains free on Jason’s game page.

In case you don’t know the game, Passage is an excellent example of an innovative game design packaged in a very little game. It’s actually a game that beautifully allows you to experience how choosing different choices results in different life, and is very interesting to game designers. Read more »

mGBL (mobile Game-Based Learning) is an academic open source project that offer a system for quickly building decision-based games in j2me. The project site is full with academic information and it’s clear the researchers are taking this project very seriously.

The project homepage describe it in these words:

Within the mobile Game-Based Learning project (mGBL) eleven partner organisations from Austria, Croatia, Great Britain, Italy, and Slovenia have joined forces to work on the development of a platform for the presentation of educational content in a playful and emotional way on mobile devices.

The biggest challenge within this project is to engage a diversity of audiences in the fields of career guidance, e-Health and e-Commerce in to the development of decision-making skills for use in critical situations. Building on the latest innovations in the field of m-learning (mobile learning) and on the latest research results from the field of didactics, new approaches to game-based learning are developed for use on mobile phones.

In addition you could also download progress reports and sample games.

(hat tip: Arjan from MGB)

Not purely a Mobile development thing, but probably interesting for all mobile game developers. This article over on GamaSutra talks about the mechanics of a game and that sometimes more is not better then less. The interesting article can be found here.
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Spurred by GPS and JSR-179, a new class of games unique to the mobile world is now possible. Peter Molettiere from Nokia’s SNAP Mobile reviews recent pervasive game implementations that left players clamoring for more, and analyzes how game designers used context aware technologies and networks to enable collaboration between multiple players and get information on the current environment of players. Code examples included.

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During MGF 2006 in London, we have caught Henry Chris, CEO of Danish developer Watagame, for a quick chat about Watagame, their new game Supermodel Milan and the industry in general.
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People will keep inventing new ways to play with mobile phones. Here is one idea coming from Korea called Shoot Me If You Can:

“Shoot me if you can is an urban game inspired by first person shooting online video game. Replace gun with fun, and shoot the opponent team with a cellular phone equipped with a digital camera.

Participants; shooters are given team color and phone number printed on the sticker. Shooters are ought to take a picture of the opponent team. If successful, she/he sends the picture to the opponent team member, via multimedia SMS system.

Different rules exist for variations in game. Tactics is important part as well as team work and understanding of the urban environment. This work is a commentary on abundance of digital image in our culture, desire to photograph and violence of surveillance camera. Active public participation in encouraged through website and the game.”

Hat tip: MocoNews

Spymac’s Kristie Masuda helda short Q&A session with the guys at AwareDreams. You can check it out over here:

What do you think about gamers having to pay subscription fees after paying for the game itself?

This is not true for Rhynn. The game is currently free to download from our website for Nokia Series 60 compatible handsets. The commercial version which is to be released in Q2/Q3 this year will probably charge only for one time download. This is a good thing because you get a game that continues to expand with no extra cost. I hear you saying GPRS traffic will cause the extra cost, but as I said before traffic rates are not high for this game, and data flatrates are in place in several countries already.

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One of the hardest things about being a level designer is trying to explain to people what you do. This sample chapter from the book “Game Level Design” will explain what levels are, where they came from, who makes them, and what “level design” means for the production of a modern video or computer game.
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