Hero Academy wins DICE 2013 “Best Mobile Game”
Congratulations to all the team at Robot Entertainment as Hero Academy wins the “Best Mobile Game” at the 16th annual DICE awards. This is a prestigious awards for developers and Robot Entertainment was up against 3 other games in the mobile category including Fairway Solitaire, Horn and Rayman Jungle Run. Its fantastic to see Robot’s hard work recognised with this brilliant award. Read more
Bruce Shelley joins Zynga as consultant – also part of a keynote panel at D.I.C.E 2011
Just when you thought enough ex-Ensemblers have joined Zynga, a press release from the D.I.C.E Summit has revealed that Bruce Shelley is now acting as consultant for Zynga having recently finished a consulting role at UbiSoft studio, Blue Byte where he worked advising the team on the Settlers 7 game. It is currently not known what type of internal studio Bruce is working with at Zynga, however my guesses would be that he is working with Brian Reynolds on the FrontierVille game. Bruce had previously worked with Brian Reynolds at Microprose. Read more
Bruce Shelley discussing the studios closure – LIVE Blog + Video
Brian Leahy is blogging LIVE from the DICE summit where Bruce Shelley is on stage right now discussing the Ensemble closure. You can read the blog here:
The blog brings to light more information as to why Microsoft could close down such a great studio. Some of these reasons being that the studio became too fragmented as there were more teams working on different ideas and that maybe they lost communication with Microsoft.
WATCH BRUCE:
IGN have video footage of Bruce’s DICE talk here: http://video.ign.com/streaming/dice-2009/index.html Unfortunately at the time of writing the player is down but hopefully it will be up soon. Remember to skip to 4pm as that was the time Mr Shelley was presenting.
GAMASUTRA:
Gamastura’s report of Bruce’s speech can be read here: http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=22402.
It would seem that Ensemble had problems diversifying and that it created separate teams too late in the process. Bruce Shelley believes that this lead to the studio being out of sync with Microsoft. A sad speech. Though, Bruce speaks positively of new Ensemble start up studios. Robot and Bonfire.
