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OpenFeint: Coming to an iPhone game near you!

By Matt Dunn, USA
for www.touchgen.com

Published: February 17, 2009

OpenFeint: Coming to an iPhone game near you! thumbnail

Jason Citron and Danielle Cassley aren’t satisfied with just developing one of best games on the App Store; they are looking to help improve other indie games out there by providing the community power of Aurora Feint 2 to the world of iPhone game developers! Check out the official “OpenFeint” press release below. I’m heading down to San Francisco tonight to shoot a video interview of Jason and Danielle, so if you have any questions you would like me to throw their way, leave them here.

Check out www.OpenFeint.com for more info.

***PRESS RELEASE***PRESS RELEASE***PRESS RELEASE***

Aurora Feint Announces OpenFeint: Social Platform for Indie iPhone Game Developers
– Top Rated, Award Winning Game Offers Easy Integration of Proven and Popular Social Features in Aurora Feint II: The Beginning, including Real Time Chat, Profiles, Freinds List, Walls and Newsfeeds

Viewing community updates in Aurora Feint II: The Arena

Burlingame, CA Feb 17, 2008 - Aurora Feint Inc., the company that launched the highly acclaimed RPG puzzle game for the iPhone, announced that the company is making available its hugely popular social and community features as an open platform available to any iPhone game. OpenFeint allows any iPhone game to add player profiles, buddy lists, walls, newsfeeds and real-time chat rooms allowing the game to build a real community around itself with ZERO operations overhead and minimal development time. OpenFeint consists of a server and a client. The OpenFeint Server is fully compatible with Google’s OpenSocial REST API and will be accessible through the OpenFeint client code library and sample UI code from Aurora Feint Inc. Indie developers do not have to operate the servers, which will be hosted Aurora Feint’s data center.

In a first for iPhone games, iPhone game developers will have the ability to reduce over 2 months of development work to 1 day, and completely eliminate back-end server operations, while offering their players an extensive set of customizable social and community building features:

* Profiles: Players can upload an avatar photo or take one with their iPhone camera.
* Walls: Each player gets a wall where other players can leave comments and view wall-to-wall conversations
* Asynchronous Real Time Chat Rooms for meeting other players, sharing tips, strategies and experiences within each game community
* Buddy List: Players can friend other players within their community or across the iPhone gaming community
* Newsfeeds: Players can keep in touch with all of their friends’ activities (wall comments, actions in games, befriending people)
* Global Community Chat Rooms for players to discuss recommendations, tips, and reviews of other games on the iPhone

“We added our social features into both our single player game and our multi-player game and it’s been wildly popular,” said Jason Citron and Danielle Cassley, the 23-year-old entrepreneurs who developed Aurora Feint in 10 weeks flat and launched on July 11 on the AppStore. “As an Indie developer ourselves, we can attest to the sheer amount of work, time, and effort it takes to develop and run our social features and back-end, so we’d like our friends developing games for the iPhone to be able to skip the headache and gain from our experience. We’re excited that several developers have already approached us to integrate OpenFeint into their games”.

OpenFeint will be free to integrate for a limited number of concurrent players. Pricing for larger numbers of players will be announced upon availability of the Beta code in March.

“OpenFeint is a major step in the evolution of the iPhone as a gaming platform. Aurora Feint has always been an innovator: first with a dazzling console quality free game and then with the first Asynchronous MMO for the iPhone. With OpenFeint, Danielle and Jason are again leading the way towards a better social gaming experience for iPhone games,” said Peter Relan, Chairman of Aurora Feint Inc. and serial entrepreneur.
Interested developers should visit openfeint.com to request more information and enroll in the Private Beta program. A Public Beta program will begin in March.

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Review disclosure: Any games reviewed on this page may have been provided to us by the developer for the purposes of this review. Note: the resulting review score is never impeded by this fact, all opinions are that of the TouchGen reviewer and not the developer. This is in keeping with our O.A.T.S oath. Read more about O.A.T.S here

OpenFeint: Coming to an iPhone game near you!

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