Finally the deadly Assassin has been revealed! We’re really excited to see our first Gamebook Adventures title hit the App Store today! It’s been in absolute pleasure getting this gamebook finished and big kudos goes to S.P. Osborne for his exciting and compelling story, as well as Pirkka Harvala for his beautiful illustrations. Not forgetting too, Dan Maxwell for his memorable cover art!

To find out more about An Assassin in Orlandes click here! It costs $4.99 (US), £2.99 (UK), 3,99 € (Europe) and $5.99 (Australia).

To download from iTunes follow this link:

http://itunes.apple.com/au/app/gamebook-adventures-1-an-assassin/id352871101?mt=8

With An Assassin in Orlandes just days away from release we wanted to give readers an insight into the author of the gamebook! So we posed some questions to S.P. Osborne about his background in gamebooks, where the idea of Assassin came from and how he sees the genre in the future.

Read it here!

We’re chuffed to bits to have been recently mentioned in the latest issue of Fighting Fantazine! It’s a fanzine generally aimed at the Fighting Fantasy series of gamebooks, so being included especially as we’re non FF gamebooks is great privilege!

If you’re into fantasy gamebooks then I would definately recommend downloading this especially as it is created by fans for fans so contains lots of juicy articles and even free mini adventures. To find out more check it out here!

After many months of hard toil we’ve finally submitted Book 1 in our Gamebook Adventures series, An Assassin in Orlandes. Assuming submission goes through smoothly it will be available to buy next week from the App Store! We’re really excited in unleashing the assassin but there is no rest for the wicked and we are now busy working on GA Book 2: The Siege of the Necromancer!

To celebrate Australia Day we’ve made both Frootrees and Frootrees Halloween FREE for the day!

Have a great day all and don’t eat too many snags!

We’ve just had our first preview of An Assassin in Orlandes on the brilliant Games On Net site! Click on over there to find excerpts of an interview conducted by Mitch Vleeskens with Neil Rennison, our gamebook producer, writer and editor.

Games On Net An Assassin in Orlandes preview

As an update, we’re just coming to the end of beta testing and hope to submit to Apple next week! We’ll let you know more when we do!

The finish line is in sight! We’ve just started our beta testing on An Assassin in Orlandes and all being well we will be submitting to Apple very soon. It’s strange entering this stage of a development cycle especially when it’s for a project that you hold very close to your heart and has been a dream to produce for a long-time.

We’ve already encountered a few hiccups especially when the coder sends out a beta build to the testers which doesn’t actually feature the actual gamebook in it and then promptly (and understandably) collapses after a few days with little sleep! I’m looking at you Ben!

Testing is always an interesting prospect. It’s the opportunity to squeeze out any nasty bugs and gameplay issues as well as, in our case, making sure every aspect of the gamebook narrative works correctly and flows smoothly making it compelling and fun to read. We’ve already had to change a key part of the narrative as I realised that one specific story arc which is integral to the story just was never revealed to reader if they took a certain path through the book. It’s kinda like reading Lord of the Rings and missing the “we have to destroy the ring” part and just thinking all the characters are just simply on a nice stroll through the countryside to get a bit of exercise and let their dinner go down.

So who is testing? Well we’ve had a small team of pre-beta testers playing recent builds to hammer the major stuff and have recruited some keen Touch Arcade forum posters who have been supporting our thread to help us polish. Through this combination of peeps we hope to refine Assassin so that we create a kick-ass first Gamebook Adventures experience and hope to submit soon. We’ve heard rumours that submission times have reduced significantly too  so expect to see it on the App Store very soon.

We’ll obviously keep you posted…. all hail Orlandes!

Most people who follow us are well aware that we’re a new developer and that we’ve been working hard during 2009 getting our own games projects up and running. But what most people don’t know is that we’re also involved in other projects from time to time, and do a lot of work with our comrades at Fraction Studios in the UK.

Well we thought we’d just like to beat our chests a little and mention that we were involved in two of the most successful games to hit the iPhone last year, namely Need For Speed Undercover and Sims 3!

Working with IronMonkey Studios we helped contribute art for both these titles, and in the case of Need For Speed designed and built a proportion of the racing environments which were widely heralded by the games press at the time. So while we battle away trying to make a name for ourselves we will continue to offer our services to larger companies and hopefully have as big a hit of our own one day!

We’ve just finished adding the final touches to our map of Orlandes, the location for our upcoming first Gamebook Adventures titles. (click map image for a bigger version)

The first book, An Assassin in Orlandes will begin in Orlandes City, situated to the East of the country and your adventure will take you north into the “Montes Del Fuego”. Our second book, The Siege of the Necromancer is based on the West coast of Orlandes in the township of Myr, where a mysterious dark presence has the Emery Lands in the grip of fear.

We’re busy as Goblyn-folk getting these finished and will release more info as and when we have it! We can’t wait for people to start reading and playing these books. For now I hope you like the map! Enjoy.

We feel very humbled as Frootrees has been included as one of ten finalists in 148Apps’ Best Family Game category of their 2009 Best App Ever Awards! We’re up against some big family titles, Monopoly and The Game of Life from EA, as well as some iPhone favourites like Crayon Physics and Toki Tori. Never thought I’d ever be competing directly with a classic like Monopoly – feels slightly surreal!

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We’d love Frootrees to win this category and so would be honoured if you would help us achieve this! Please click the “Vote” button above and fingers crossed we make an impact at the end of January!