Danielle Cassley and Jason Citron are the folks with their names on Aurora Feint, but as Danielle told us in an interview a while ago, Peter Relan is the real mastermind behind the growing Feint empire. Not only did he put the two together in an idea lab, but he's one of the driving forces behind the OpenFeint enterprise. Under his oversight, the Feint folks have swelled to become one of the major forces behind iPhone gaming (and thus, behind the iPhone's app ecosystem itself).

Netanel "Net" Jacobsson is a newer addition -- he's previously worked with Sony Ericsson on their mobile devices and Facebook on their own growing app empire, and now he's arrived at OpenFeint to help them use the lessons he's learned at the biggest online social networks around on their social software. Get the sense of how big this is yet? Relan, Jacobsen, and Citron all have pretty big ideas about where iPhone gaming is going, and as 3.0 comes down the pike and introduces a whole set of new features from Apple, they're in the best seat they can be in to do exactly what they want to do.

TUAW sat down with the three last week, and chatted about iPhone 3.0 and why it's such a big deal for developers, how they're going to approach microtransactions (carefully), and what's coming next for OpenFeint now that they've rounded up a whole stable full of developers implementing their backbone. Click "read more" to continue.

Have you seen anything like that already, where developers have said, well we thought about doing it this way, but we're going another way?

PR: Too early. The phones aren't even out yet, user experience hasn't occurred yet. I would say July, we'll get a lot of feedback once these games come out with push notifications. The other thing that's kind of interesting, by the way, is that OpenFeint is working on cross-compatibility, because if I have a 2.2 iPhone and you have a 3.0 iPhone, and you send me a social challenge, in my app on 2.2, it won't show up as a push notification, right, because I don't have the 3.0 iPhone. So we are support the concept of push notifications in the plumbing and infrastructure of OpenFeint, however on a 2.2 phone, whenever the user next opens the app, they would see a screen that is an OpenFeint screen that would have a notification saying "you've got to beat my score," as opposed to seeing it on the iPhone icon, as a number, like the Mail thing, where it says you have notes waiting for you.

So I think as a user experience, the jury's still out, because the platforms are just getting ready, right? So the key here is to say that we're going to make it trivial by continuing our tradition, which is no servers, very easy to integrate, and some big games will launch in July with push notifications and then we'll go from there.

I think, to a certain extent, the same thing will happen on the microtransactions side. It already has happened with Xbox Live -- I don't know if you remember the story of horse armor, where everyone says "how can you release a different graphic and ask us to pay for it?" Have you seen examples yet of how developers want to use microtransactions? Are they aware of that danger or are they fearful of that at all?

PR: So I think the obvious one, just because I have, as I said, investments in companies in the Facebook app space, the big reason for microtransactions is virtual goods. So any kind of virtual world, avatar apps, some of these Mafia iMob apps, you can assume that there will be virtual goods unlocking with microtransactions. That one I think will translate over fairly well, in fact Net is going next week to China, where he's a keynote speaker at Tencent's annual conference. Tencent is an Asian company which does a billion dollars in microtransactions, all of it virtual goods. So I think that microtransactions, as we see them on social networks today, will come pretty much that way onto the iPhone social network, or the iPhone gaming network.

NJ: I also think that it will actually lead to the pricing, might even drop dramatically, but those who are charging for applications are going to go free, because they're going to earn much more by making it free and leveraging microtransactions.

Yeah, if you're charging $4 for an app and can sell four levels for $1 each, that's the way to go.

NJ: The user starts playing, gets very engaged, and wants to get to the next level and make the purchase, and it's very difficult not to make the purchase if you're engaged and you want to continue the game.

PR: The thing that's a little trickier, I think, is when you have microtransactions that aren't directly virtual goods, because virtual goods don't fit the theme. But are like chapters, or just additional content in the game. Then, I think, the business model is a little trickier, because that's your content update strategy, and to some extent, the iPhone user is used to -- like, if you look at the success of Pocket God, it's a double edged sword. If you talk to the Pocket God guys, their game is one of the few games that stays in the top five constantly. It's just always in the top five. And they use OpenFeint, and they're going to use push notifications, but when we spoke to him about microtransactions, he said, I have to figure that out, because their commitment to their userbase is, every week you're going to get an update with more content. So given that he's already committed that on the current price point, how does he unlock more content with microtransactions? So he was the first to say I definitely want to do push notifications, but I have to think hard about how I could incorporate microtransactions into Pocket God. So I do think there's a little more complexity there, especially when it's not just direct virtual goods. But I think they'll crack it. I think some other people we're talking to are certainly thinking of Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, three microtransactions. And certainly the virtual goods guys are like no questions how they'll do it.

And there are definitely precedents for both, in terms of episodic gaming on other services. Jason maybe you can talk about this, too, as a developer -- I'm really interested in the balance between making sure that what you're selling people is worth it, or something that's not. If you're asking to pay a dollar for a gun that's just a re-skin, people won't go for that. What do you think of that?

JC: I think, as a game designer, what you have to really think about is the motivations for why people will want to purchase this content. Whether it's a re-skin or not is less important than what it will allow you to do in the game. And the reason why I think virtual goods have done so well on social networks is that social pressure is a huge motivator to getting people to do things, and if part of that social pressure results in you engaging and buying virtual content, people are much more likely to do it. I mean, if you just have another gun that allows you to increase your DPS by two points, that's not terribly interesting to anyone but the ultra hardcore gamer, and then they'll probably just be pissed off that they have to pay for it. So that's not really an appropriate way to go about it. As a traditional gamer, buying episodic content or buying level packs, or substantially new gameplay experience, fits with my head, and then virtual goods, I think, have to be motivated through social pressure.

And the last question I have is just about the future of OpenFeint. I have to give it you guys -- there were quite a few, and there still are, services poking around that want to do the kind of stuff that you're doing. And just in terms of size and influence right now, you're kind of the top of the heap. So what's next, are you planning to kind of sit on the heap and just keep things set, or are you still aiming to improve here?

PR: I think that definitely we will continue to innovate and add more services to the platform -- there's no question that it's a platform play, and that we will continue to add features and additional things. I would say two things: one is, we will publish games, always, on top of our own platform technology, that will really kind of push the borders of gameplay design around the OpenFeint platform, to sort of demostrate and lead the way. So in the last announcement, we did hint at a new game coming out this summer based around push notifications and microtransactions, where we want to lead the industry. Because we never think that by being in front today, that we will be always in front. So we want OpenFeint to be the premiere platform, we agree that today, we certainly feel like it's way up there, but we feel like you constantly have to build new product on top of your platform to really make a world class platform. Because otherwise you're just sort of opining and thinking oh, this is good stuff. So we always want to test our own platform, and expect a title this summer based on OS 3.0 and OpenFeint features.

The second thing, which is, I think we're really doing something different around the business model. Ngmoco announced their Plus+ platform this week, and it's really a publishing tool rather than an open platform, and we're pretty proud of the fact that we're sort of the biggest player who is really able to provide an open platform where a developer does not have to make a publishing deal with us in order to get access to the platform. Ngmoco's platform is hey, we have this platform, it's part of our publishing network, and if you want to publish games with us, that's how you get the platform, and obviously you know the economics of the publishing business in the game industry, right? There's revenue that has to be sacrificed there. So I think as a guiding strategy, we will never make our platform related to anything with our publishing because it's our belief that this OpenFeint thing does two things that we will always have to provide for publishers: no servers, because 90% of developers have no experience building servers, they build great console games, client side stuff, C, C++ programming, all this stuff, but they really don't have any backend experience. And two, we're not going to take rev share, in terms of publishing deals. And those two things, I think, are sort of our long-term guides. The third thing is to build our own games constantly, so we can use Danielle and Jason's game design and knowledge to say here's the kind of games we can do. So if we can do that and execute, I think, with some fingers crossed, with some luck, we'll emerge as the de facto standard, which is our goal.

I had talked to Danielle a little about pricing already, but I wanted to ask about microtransactions as well -- when you do that stuff, are you not skimming off revenue as it comes through, or what is the pricing scheme there?

PR: Well even today, we have cross promotion inside OpenFeint 2, even before microtransactions, where if two players meet in a lobby, and they're from different games, then one player clicks on the other player's game, and you go to the App Store and you buy that other player's game? That's what you call our one-touch iPromote product inside of OpenFeint, it's a big draw for a lot of developers, because our community is now three million and growing -- we call it our social bazaar, because the App Store is so cluttered now that it's hard to differentiate. So you use OpenFeint and get your game in front of three million people in these lobbies. That revenue, when someone buys a game using OpenFeint's cross promotion feature, doesn't come from the developer, it comes from Apple. Because we are an Apple affiliate, through BigShare. So we take the user into a webview, which is our own catalog, where you can buy games off the App Store, and then Apple actually pays us. So that's hopefully -- this is the same thing, the whole idea is to get Apple to pay us every time there's a purchase in the App Store, including in-app purchases, as opposed to the outside.

Great. That's pretty much everything I had to ask, was there anything else you wanted to share? I guess we'll keep an eye on the game coming out this summer.

JC: Yeah, I guess the only other thing worth mentioning is that OpenFeint is available now -- it can be downloaded by anyone from our website. It's real.

Cool. Thanks very much.

During our interview with Danielle Cassley of Aurora Feint, I talked with her about OpenFeint, the code backbone for a social network that iPhone developers can use in their apps. Since then, a number of developers have added the interface to their apps, perhaps most notably Pocket God, which has used the tool only to create the barest of online leaderboards so far.

Now the crafty folks at Aurora Feint are revealing another trick up their sleeve: something they're calling iPromote. It sounds like more or less a crosspromotion deal for various apps and games in the OpenFeint system -- certain apps will give their users a chance to pick up other paid apps under the OpenFeint umbrella. While the press release is fairly vague about exactly how it works (they say there will be "a revenue sharing model for sales that occur through OpenFeint"), it'll probably show up in the user's interface as links or promotions for other apps.

There are quite a few of those apps -- Aurora Feint lists over 20 apps that have already integrated OpenFeint, and there are more on the way, including some high-profile apps from Chillingo. Even our friend Steve Demeter, who was working on his own community platform called Onyx, has abandoned work on that to join up with OpenFeint. There are at least a few other such platforms like this that were vying for widespread acceptance on the iPhone, but it looks like OpenFeint is primed to take the top spot. Which means we'll probably be seeing lots of it in applications near you very soon.

Danielle Cassley took one of the strangest paths you might find to game designer -- just out of a computer science degree at Berkeley, she was trying to get a job as a babysitter when she met Peter Relan of the YouWeb Incubator. And rather than have her take care of his kids, he decided instead to put her in an idea farm and see what happened.

Aurora Feint was what happened -- she and Jason Citron, full of ideas, created a game in just ten weeks that took over the App Store out of nowhere in its infancy. The game originally released for free, and while it promised to be an MMO, it started out as a puzzle/RPG game -- people didn't quite understand what it was, but they liked it anyway.

Almost a year later, Aurora Feint has spawned four different versions and even a social platform, and Danielle and Jason are still full of ideas. In this exclusive interview with TUAW, she talks about how Aurora Feint came to be, what she thinks of the App Store so far (and if developers will ever be able to charge the prices they want), and what's next for the Aurora Feint series (they've just released a new version of The Arena called Daemons) and the iPhone platform. Click the link below to read on.

The folks behind the popular Aurora Feint series of iPhone games have decided to share their work creating a "social MMO" system on the iPhone with other developers. They've just announced a system called "OpenFeint," which other devs will be able to license and use in their own games. OpenFeint will supposedly allow a developer to put together a multiplayer community in an iPhone app, complete with profiles, news boards and chat, in under an hour. They're also providing a server for developers to use, so devs won't have to host their own server software -- they'll just have to make their client work with the existing system.

Wild. It sounds like they're just making the systems they've already developed in their own games available to anyone who wants to use them. Right now, they're looking at a private beta (interested devs can sign up on their site), and eventually the service will be free for a limited number of users, with certain costs as the userbase grows.

The cynical side of us wonders if there's a catch in there somewhere -- presumably, all of the users in OpenFeint will keep their information on the Aurora Feint-owned server, so we'd guess there's a chance that at some point in the future, they could use that list for less-than-honorable actions (Steve Demeter's Onyx Online plan is another service that aims to be platform-wide, which seems to have similar risks). But that's just us being paranoid -- taken at face value, this just seems like one team of indie developers opening up what they've already done to help other devs. Very cool.

Our good friends at Massively got an opportunity that turned us green with envy -- they got to sit down with the devs of Aurora Feint, one of our favorite iPhone games, and see how its fulfilling the "MMO" promise they've been offering up since it first debuted on the App Store. The new game is called Aurora Feint II: The Arena, and while it doesn't exactly offer real-time MMO gameplay, it does let players compete with ghosts -- the game will record what you or your friend plays, and then offer up that re-play as an opponent. There's also a new "Tavern" feature which will let players leave messages to each other from right in the game.

And the goals don't stop there -- they're working on a third version of the game, which will eventually feature an offline MMO mode, as well as a very, very deep experience for a fairly casual iPhone game. "Warcraft on the iPhone" -- it's not a phrase I'd use to describe Aurora Feint yet, but it's one the creators will happily use for the future.

The early MMO features are in the App Store right now -- the app will normally be priced at $9.99, but it's currently in there for $7.99 during the holidays (the free, non-MMO version is still there as well). Pretty amazing -- this was one of the games that jumped to the forefront in terms of presentation and quality right when the App Store opened, and it doesn't look like the creators have any plans to slow it down.

As you might imagine, my iPhone is more littered with games than useful stuff like Steve's or Victor's. Sure, I've got Twitterific and NetNewsWire, but my most-used apps are of the video game variety.

The game that's most grabbed me so far is Aurora Feint. When it was first released, I didn't get much out of it, but since it's been updated a few times, Aurora Feint has turned into a pretty deep puzzle/RPG. There have been some security scares, unfortunately, and the game's "MMO" promises haven't yet come to fruition. But for sheer matching puzzle gameplay (it's similar to the great Poker Smash on Xbox Live), it's probably the most addictive game on the App Store.

My second favorite is Characters (I originally wrote about it on WoW Insider). If you play World of Warcraft and have an iPhone, this is the closest thing you'll find to an official Blizzard app. It lets you see every bit of information on the Armory in a very nice-looking iPhone app format. We're still waiting on Blizzard to provide us with an iPhone version of the in-game Auction House or mailbox, but until then, this is a great way to look up the WoW characters of folks you meet.

And finally, I've been really impressed with Midomi (and also the similar Shazam), a music recognition app. Hit the app, let it listen to a song you're hearing (or even you singing the song or saying the lyrics), and it'll tell you exactly what that song is. And once you've find it, you can listen to it, find it in iTunes or on Youtube, or see band pictures and reviews. Midomi is the kind of app I've never had on any other devices I've owned, and yet I've put it to great use a few times.

Honorable mentions go to Freeverse's (renamed) Moto Chaser, which is consistently the game that most impresses people playing with my iPhone; Trism, which turned out to be an excellent game, and Frotz and Sketches, both of which I've written about here before.

And I'm still waiting for two things: some great persistent pet gameplay (Wil Shipley, what happened to all of those ideas?), and some great location-based MMO gameplay as well. There's good stuff out there, but we're still just getting started in the App Store.

I'm here at E3 in Los Angeles all this week (come say hi at the Joystiq meetup tonight if you're in town!). Yesterday, I got to sit down with Brad Pitser, the Director of Global Production for THQ Wireless, a company that makes games for mobile platforms like the iPhone. Pitser has helped oversee two iPhone games so far: De Blob (now on the App Store) and Star Wars' Force Unleashed (coming out later this year -- Joystiq has my impressions of both). He said that developing for the iPhone so far has been "a dream." They've partnered with Apple to publish on the iPhone and iPod touch as much as they can. "Apple was interested in our brands," Pitser said, "and we were interested in their platform."

One concern he does have about the App Store so far is the pricing -- "everyone thinks $9.99 is too much," he told me. THQ released De Blob at the $6.99 price point. He says THQ has a lot of licensing fees and costs to pay for every game they make, and when those games compete with software that sells for 99 cents, they don't necessarily have a money-making proposition. But at the same time, he'd rather let the market figure things out -- the App Store has a lot of settling down to do, and Pitser is sure that companies will find their place in the price plan soon enough.

I asked him what he thought of what he'd seen in the software that wasn't his, and he said he really enjoyed the iPint visual gag, the UrbanSpoon restaurant finder, and Aurora Feint (all very nice choices). It's great to have a bigger company like THQ interested in getting some good licenses on the iPhone, and hopefully we'll see more come out of Pitser and the division he oversees.