Interview: Bringing 'Tower Offense' To iPad With Anomaly: Warzone Earth

With the App Store rife with tower defense games, a genre that has arguably been needing a pick-me-up for some time, Warsaw, Poland-based 11 Bit Studios has added its own, unique spin into the mix after releasing Anomaly: Warzone Earth, turning the tower defense concept on its head. "There's obviously over-saturation in tower defense games on the App Store and other platforms," said Pawel Miechowski, senior writer at 11 bit Studios. "Anomaly turned tower defense upside down and created something new -- a 'tower offense' game...I think this game has shown that there are a lot of opportunities ahead for the genre and a lot of space to fill with new ideas." In the game, instead of buying and placing defensive towers around a map as in traditional tower defense games, Anomaly pits players against alien towers that try to keep player-controlled military units away from a goal point. Players are able to adjust the path of their units and use power ups After originally releasing on PC and Mac in April, Anomaly's iOS release was far from a reactionary move or a cash-grab. 11 Bit was very satisfied with the PC original, which garnered uniform high review scores and won the Apple Design Award at June's World Wide Developer's Conference in San Francisco. But the studio intended to do an iOS version all along. "Our development tool -- Liquid Engine -- was made for multi-platform development, and doing [games] for many platforms was actually one of the founding ideas of 11 Bit Studios. So when the PC/Mac version was getting close to finished, we'd started to develop the iOS version. The game was planned for iOS from the first scratch." Despite this concurrent development, the iOS verison of Anomaly isn't just a port. "The entire gameplay system on iOS, although based on the same principle mechanics as PC, is completely adjusted to touch screen devices," said Miechowski. As such it has new levels, features, achievements and modes. The technical limitations of iOS devices didn't hold 11 Bit Studios back either, as they were able to find workarounds for many issues that came up. For example, "Working on the PC version, we assumed that all shadows and lighting would be completely dynamic. In the iOS version we had to recompute some things in the development stage and code them again, such as the lightmaps. iOS devices do not have enough memory bandwidth or GPU power to run extensive full-screen post-processing so that had to be limited too." This may be the case for older iOS devices, but Miechowski says that the power of the iPad 2 allows them to do much more than they thought was possible. "Mobile devices develop quickly and, for example, the iPad 2 can compute much more than devices of previous generations. Currently we're working on an update that will squeeze as much as possible from the iPad 2 and will allow to us run some effects that are currently only possible on powerful PCs." The value proposition for iOS games is always a hot topic, with the often-used 99 cent price point working for some developers, but not others. While the PC/Mac version of Anomaly sells for $9.99, the game can be found on the App Store for only $1.99 on iPhone, or $4.99 on iPad, a price point that was determined mutually between 11 Bit and the games publisher, Electronic Arts-owned Chillingo. This pricing decision came from a realistic view of comparative products on the iOS market. "We believe that when you look at the quality - and I'm not boasting here, let the reviews be done by press and players, I just mean how we polished the look and graphics - this is a very fair price." Now that the game's been out for a month, 11 Bit is working hard on the game's first update which they hope will be available very soon. It will address several bugs that have popped up since release and add some new content, in addition to making the HD version universal for iPad and iPhone. DLC is also being worked on for the PC/Mac version, but given the studio's limited size, Miechowski isn't able to narrow down a timeframe. Moving forward, 11 Bit hopes to use the momentum of Anomaly: Warzone Earth's success to propel themselves further. "Having had such great support from the gaming community, we feel that the path we chose was right and all those efforts were worthy. Hopefully, we're going to keep that level in our future games and upcoming new content for Anomaly."