Graeme Devine leaves Apple to start his own game development studio
Ensemblite spotters all over the world may remember that after Ensemble Studios closed, passionate game developer Graeme Devine who was part Lead Designer / Lead Writer on Halo Wars went on to work on a mystery project at Apple. Details about Graeme’s work at Apple has been scarce and it still very much remains a mystery. Read more
NewToy’s “We Rule” iPhone game website goes live and in review at Apple
NewToy have announced the launch of the official We Rule website for their upcoming iPhone game over at the Ngmoco community. http://werule.ngmoco.com/ The website has a bunch of screenshots for the upcoming game, here are some examples:
Your kingdom. Your rules. Take charge of a living kingdom. Farm, build and expand your realm. Check back at anytime, anywhere.
Looking forward to seeing this game go live and enjoying the success of previous NewToy titles!
Halo Wars fatality system – new blog
Once upon a time there was an idea at Ensemble to include a fatality kills system into Halo Wars (think Mortal Combat, Street Fighter). Charles Tinney an animator on Halo Wars talks about what these might of looked like and includes some animation drawings and video. Surprisingly the videos are in Quicktime format, despite the Halo Wars website being a Microsoft owned site!
Heres an extract and a link below:
There are two animations I want to focus on in this production diary. I want to highlight these because I took time to thumbnail and choreograph them; which is typically something I don’t have time to do at a video game studio. So, I really tried to get it right. Both of these are exploratory animations developed to have a loose visual guideline for what the fatality system would look like. Fatalities in Halo Wars happen when one awesome melee powerhouse, such as the Arbiter, kills one of the other infantry units.
http://www.halowars.com/news/devblog/archive/2009/06/12/Animation-Exploration.aspx
Graeme Devine working at Apple’s iPhone group on mystery project
Graeme Devine who was Ensemble’s Lead Designer and Lead Writer for Halo Wars has now confirmed that he is working for Apple in the companies iPhone group. It seems yet another ex-Microsoft employee is working for products on Apple’s iPhone along with the Bettner brothers (NewToy) and FuzzyCube software.
What is Graeme working on at Apple? Well we wont have much longer to wait to find out as he is currently preparing for the WWDC on Monday. Perhaps he will be leading a new in house Apple games unit? Who knows, but hes certainly someone to be looking out for at the WWDC.
More news tomorrow when we should find out what hes up to! Good luck at the WWDC Graeme!
Link: http://kotaku.com/5281682/halo-wars-7th-guest-dev-lands-job-at-apple
