Aurora Feint to power new online iPhone games
Indie developers given access to social network features
One of the biggest additions introduced in Aurora Feint 2: The Arena (other than a price tag, natch) were the social networking systems. The game allowed users to chat in real time, challenge each other to matches, generate friend lists, create profiles and read news feeds.
The creators of the game, Jason Citron and Danielle Cassley, have now announced they’ll be making their networking system available to other indie iPhone developers.
"As Indie developers ourselves, we can attest to the sheer amount of work, time, and effort it takes to develop and operate our online social features and servers, so we'd like our friends developing games for the iPhone to be able to skip the headache and gain from our experience," they say.
OpenFeint, as the social networking system is known, will be free for games with a limited number of users, but developers will have to pay if they plan to have larger numbers of players.
Hopefully this will lead to a simple and effective way for iPhone developers to begin building those MMOs we’re so keen on, so we’ll be keeping a very close eye on this story as it evolves.
