Twitch

With a press release (via Joystiq), Gameloft today announced that an update to Asphalt 8: Airborne will be one of the first iOS games to support livestreaming through Twitch on iPhones and iPads.

Earlier this month, Twitch announced a mobile SDK to allow developers of smartphone and tablet games to add native broadcasting functionalities to their apps. By partnering with Twitch, Gameloft will showcase features enabled by the Twitch SDK in Asphalt 8, which include live streaming, stream archiving, as well as the possibility to capture player audio and video through the front-facing camera in real-time. In pre-release screenshots shared by Gameloft today, Twitch integration is shown as a separate screen with settings for stream quality (low, medium, high), video and audio capture, and chat logs; during gameplay, chat messages will be displayed at the bottom of the screen in an animated ticker, with picture-in-picture support for live broadcaster commentary. It’s possible that the more powerful CPU and GPU found in the latest iPhone and iPad models will be required to render this kind of video enhancements for iOS games in real-time.

Live broadcasting represents one of the most important shifts in the way people play games,“ said Matthew DiPietro, VP of Marketing, Twitch. ”Twitch has quickly found a home on consoles, so by partnering with Gameloft to launch the first streaming-enabled mobile game brings us one step closer to being everywhere that gamers are. Also, being integrated into Asphalt 8: Airborne, one of the highest rated mobile games, should ensure it resonates with our community.

Twitch integration in Asphalt 8 will also come with discovery features to let players browse other streams from the same game directly within the app, an interesting move that could increase usage of Twitch as a social platform for gamers and not just a video broadcasting service.

The third update to Asphalt 8 will be released “soon” according to Gameloft, and it’ll be optimized for the iPhone 5s, iPad Air, and iPad mini with Retina display. For the Game Developers Conference this week, Gameloft will host a 24-hour livestream on Twitch to showcase Twitch support in Asphalt 8.

Following last week’s news that the Angry Birds franchise will get an RPG spin-off with turn-based gameplay for birds fighting pigs, Rovio has posted an official gameplay trailer of Angry Birds Epic. The video shows various characters engaged in fights with a classic RPG battle perspective; there’s a glimpse of the crafting system, which will allow players to create items and weapons. The game seems to borrow heavily from the tradition of turn-based RPGs: there’s a job system with classes such as Knight and Mage, a world map to explore, and stats to upgrade to make characters more powerful.

Angry Birds Epic has also received a new website, which confirms that the game will be a free RPG; Rovio hasn’t indicated how a possible In-App Purchase system will fit in the gameplay yet. While the Finnish game maker’s first hit and subsequent games used a paid model with unlockable extras, Rovio adopted a free-to-play strategy with last year’s Angry Birds Go, a racing-themed spin-off. The annoyance of several In-App Purchases through the game was mentioned in reviews, with The Verge noting that its design was “hampered by its free-to-play structure”.

Angry Birds Epic launches today in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand for iOS, with more countries to follow soon.

Videogame broadcasting service Twitch has today launched version 3.0 of its iOS app, which includes a new, cleaner UI for iOS 7, improvements to search and broadcaster profiles, and a new player layout on the iPad.

In terms of discovering content on Twitch, the changes to the search interface now enable the Twitch app to filter results by channels, people, and games. When tapping on a username in search, the app will reveal the updated design for broadcaster profiles, which display more information about a channel even if it’s currently offline.

Thanks to the iPad’s larger screen, Twitch can now show a live stream and chat panel side-by-side for an experience that’s consistent with Twitch’s offerings on PC and Xbox One. Live video is automatically resized when the chat is visualized in landscape mode, and new moderation and emoticon tools have been added to the chat to make it more consistent with the Twitch website.

Last week, Twitch announced a mobile SDK that will allow developers of mobile games to add live streaming features to their smartphone and tablet games, although no further details on platform availability and first compatible games were disclosed by the company. Twitch 3.0 is available on the App Store.

Today, Hand Circus announced their new iOS game, Seabeard. Those who have been playing on iOS for a few years may remember Hand Circus for Rolando, one of the first big hits in iOS gaming (heavily inspired by LocoRoco). Seabeard will be published by Backflip Studios – another popular name in the scene (Ninjump, Paper Toss).

There aren’t many details on Seabeard yet, but it looks intriguing from a visual standpoint and it’s nice to see Hand Circus back with new material for iOS after ngmoco (the old publisher of Rolando) switched to a freemium model, which led to the cancelation of Rolando 3.

Seabeard’s first trailer (embedded above) shows a mix of Animal Crossing-style elements (build villages, manage population, go fishing) but also gives off a Wind Waker vibe with a focus on ocean exploration and boat mini games (not the first time Wind Waker has inspired an iOS game). In terms of character style, Seabeard is a continuation of Hand Circus’ PS3 game, Okabu.

From Hand Circus’ description:

Revive your trading empire - Set sail to discover lucrative trading routes and source rare and valuable items. Rebuild the legendary trading capital, Accordia and hire the finest market traders.

Conquer the seas - Set sail to encounter the challenges of the ocean, from feeding whales and rescuing shipwrecked passengers to battling with menacing sea monsters.

Further details on Seabeard’s gameplay aren’t available at this point, but Hand Circus is going to demo Seabeard at the GDC in San Francisco next week. From the trailer, it appears that the game will be Universal with iPhone and iPad support; it’s also not clear whether the game will be a paid download or if there will be freemium mechanics with In-App Purchases. According to Hand Circus, Seabeard is “coming soon” to the App Store.

In November 2012, Shaun Inman, Rusty Moyher, and Matt Grimm launched a Kickstarter campaign for Retro Game Crunch, a project to develop and release six games in six months. As we wrote when the campaign was launched:

Each month backers (of $15 or more) will submit and vote on a theme and Shaun and his team will build the game that gets the most votes… in 3 days. Based on player feedback and Shaun and his team’s original aspirations, they will then polish and perfect the game for thirty days. Backers will then get to download a complete version of the game. This will happen each month for 6 months.

For each thirty days, or each game being developed, the Retro Game Crunch team will document the game process and progress with posts, screenshots and podcasts. Backers that contribute $25 or more will also get to download the entire Super Clew Land, which is a great game, when this project ends.

This week, the Retro Game Crunch team released their first official collection, made of 7 games created during the course of the initiative and based on feedback and input from the Kickstarter backer community. The games, heavily inspired by the 8-bit videogame era and chiptune music style, are Super Crew Land (the game that started Retro Game Crunch), End of Line, GAIAttack, Paradox Lost, Wub-Wub Wescue, Brains & Hearts, and Shūten. While the games were released separately during Retro Game Crunch, the new unified release brings smaller file sizes, a single download for all games, an app launcher to easily switch between games, and support for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 4 controllers.

The Retro Game Crunch Collection is available now for $11.99 (20% off) on the Humble Store and through the Retro Game Crunch website, it’s DRM-free, and made for both Mac and Windows (a Steam Greenlight campaign has also been launched to help make the collection available on Steam). For those who didn’t follow the original Retro Game Crunch initiative, a journal with details on the development of the games is publicly available here.

Twitch

Video game live streaming service Twitch has announced a mobile SDK, which will allow developers of smartphone and tablet games to add gameplay recording and broadcasting functionalities to their games, taking advantage of many of the features that Twitch supports on the web and home consoles. As reported by Polygon, the mobile SDK hasn’t been released yet, and Twitch’s official press release doesn’t clarify whether or not it’ll be available for both leading mobile platforms, iOS and Android.

Twitch, which passed 45 million unique monthly viewers at the end of 2013 and 10 million installs for its official mobile app, is seeking to expand on as many platforms as possible, building a platform that lets players easily record and broadcast gameplay, while allowing viewers to watch streams and chat through various community features. Launched in June 2011 as a subsidiary of Justin.tv, Twitch now comes pre-installed on Sony’s PlayStation 4; on March 11, a Twitch app will officially launch on Microsoft’s Xbox One with more functionalities than the PlayStation’s counterpart such as video archiving, a split layout for streaming and text chats, and media achievements for spectating games.

According to details shared by Twitch so far, the initial version of the mobile SDK will more closely resemble the experience offered on PC and Xbox One: besides the ability to record gameplay video and audio, Twitch will allow players to capture video from the front-facing camera, capture audio from an internal or external microphone, and archive videos for immediate streaming on Twitch. The SDK will come with settings to control brodcast quality, and there will be chat integration and discovery features to browse and follow live streams from other gamers.

“Facilitating the ability to ‘broadcast anywhere’ by bringing live streaming functionality to mobile has the potential to convert millions of Twitch’s passive viewers into active broadcasters,” said Michael Pachter, video game analyst, Wedbush Securities. “Now that Twitch has cornered the PC and console markets with turnkey broadcast integrations, given the proliferation of gaming due to the massive penetration of mobile devices, they are in a unique position to change the game once again.

The addition of mobile games is interesting for Twitch: the service isn’t available on the 3DS and PS Vita portable consoles, and Twitch has typically been associated with longer, more articulated gameplay experiences granted by dedicated home consoles and PCs. While new console-quality games can be found on Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store and ports of older console games are common at this point, it’ll be interesting to see if developers of mobile games that are usually played in short bursts of time will consider adding Twitch streaming functionalities to their games.

On mobile devices, Twitch will also have to take into account technical aspects such as cellular and WiFi streaming, battery life, and hardware fragmentation. On iOS, Apple has traditionally been against solutions to record videos of the device’s screen, although it’s possible that, by leveraging streaming rather than local video archiving, Twitch has figured out ways to enable this sort of functionality.

Details on release date and platform availability of the Twitch mobile SDK aren’t available at this point. You can read Twitch’s press release here, and wait for updates on the Twitch developer website.