ITWire

Born from the ashes of Blue Tongue Entertainment, Three Phase Interactive is turning its attention to mobile development

“Development costs of console games have increased in order to achieve the quality players demand.” Says Paul Baker, one of the studio founders “This is part of the usual console generation cycle, but amplified by the huge amount of content and technology required these days. This combined with the economic downturn has affected developers globally, but the strong Australian dollar has made this situation worse locally.”

“The good news is,” continues Baker “while that has been going on, the mobile and social game industry has been expanding. Local development studios like Firemint, Iron Monkey [Now combined into FireMonkeys] and Halfbrick have shown newly unemployed devs that developing smaller scope games for mobile and social platforms can be fun and profitable. These sort of games are attractive to work on due to their broad potential audience, their shorter development times and the variety of tasks individual developers work on. A big console game will take hundreds of developers three or more years to make. A mobile game might take three developers a year or less.”

With Stunt Star: the Hollywood Years the team shared a mutual love of cars and motorcycles and wanted players to relive the life of a Hollywood stuntman as it flashes before his eyes. Crash, explode, catch on fire, crash and crash again before finally you succeed... then it’s on to the next stunt until at last you come to his final leap. Failure is just as glorious as success as you flip, fly, crash and succeed.

“When developing the idea for our debut game, we decided to start thinking about games that can make use of smart phone unique features and how users play mobile games. Stunt Star makes use of the touch interface to draw the jump ramp and bite-sized gameplay that can be enjoyed on the go or on the couch. It’s fast, fun and addictive!” says Baker.

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