Ngmoco is currently working hard on a few promising iPhone and iPod Touch projects such as Rolando, Dr. Awesome and Dropship. Today Neil Young from Ngmoco gave a small hint about the releasedate via Twitter:
Dr.Awesome will be out in the next week, Dropship soon after that and Rolando just after that
Shortly after the above Twitter message, Ngmoco announced that Dr. Awesome will come out December 4th.
Neil Young, an former Electronic Arts game producer who started his own iPhone development studio called ngmoco, gave an interesting keynote at iPhoneDevCamp 2 in San Francisco. Young tells why he quit EA to start his own iPhone development studio and what his plans for the future are.
The keynote is definitely worth watching, but here’s what he basically said about the iPhone and the plans of ngmoco. He thinks that the iPhone should try to do what the Nintendo DS is doing. As an example he told about Dr. Kawashima’s Brain Training, a game that cost $300,000 to develop and brought in $300 million. Small developers need to use the soft- and hardware they have just like Nintendo does with its not so powerful Nintendo DS. He says the iPhone has a lot of potential to beat both the PlayStation Portable and the Nintendo DS because it combines the best of the two.
Now it’s up to the small developers, he wants their ideas. He launched nglabs, a new part of ngmoco that gives the developers of 10 applications the opportunity to develop their own game. ngmoco will help them with the funding, each will receive $10,000 and ngmoco will publish the game. The developers can keep all the rights on their game.
Time has a really interesting article about the future of gaming for Apple’s iPhone. In their article they give a nice overview of some of the upcoming games for the iPhone and some of the pro’s and contra’s of the iPhone as a gaming device. Here’s an interesting quote of Greg Yardley of Pinc Media, a studio that builds free tools for the iPhone:
“The iPhone has excellent hardware in it. It is as capable as the DS or PSP”
Neil Young, former Electronic Arts (EA) executive who found the San Francisco–based startup ngmoco, said the same thing Carmack mentioned a couple of days ago:
“You have a DS and you have a telephone. Why not buy just one?”
