After a grilling of our credentials from the Young Producers (the guys steering the game and creating the content) over a Skype call we won the tender and have since been working with them to shape and transform the idea.

It’s extremely exciting to be working with such a talented group of young people and we’re now very close to beginning work on the app (now known as Hunter & Hunted), which will show off Lancaster in a way never before seen. It debuts at the Dukes on the evening of Thursday 26th August.

To find out more about Blaze and to keep up to date with the latest point your internet at http://www.blazeonline.org.uk/

Myself and Rich will be giving a talk at Bathcamp tomorrow (Thursday 8th July) evening on our experiences with the iPhone and how we feel the ecosystem has changed and will change. To attend check out the Ning here. There will be lots of geekery and some beer I’m told.

I’ll also be rocking the big one in Brighton next week: Develop Conference 2010. If you’re about on Tuesday or Wednesday get in contact and we’ll meet up for a chat and a hot and steamy or cold and bubbly beverage. Also check out the GamesAid charity poker event on the Tuesday, where I’ll be rapidly losing stacks of chips for a very good cause.

This morning I received a nice surprise in a brown Please Do Not Bend envelope: a Pocket Gamer Silver Award certificate for B-Boy Beats emblazoned with the quote “the sheer level of polish and an excellent soundtrack ensure that feet and fingers alike will be itching to face off against the next challenge”. Me and Tom were so moved we rushed out and picked up a befitting silver frame, stuck it on the wall and shook hands in a neat photo op (as seen below).

Our thanks go to PG!

What happened next is a magical camcorder moment.

We’ve overtaken Tap Tap Revenge 3 to become the number one free music game in most countries now and are currently in the top 50 overall free apps (not just games, all apps) in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Solvenia, Japan, Netherlands, Belgium, Singapore, Finland and Italy! And are rocking top 100 game in almost every country in the world.

Hitting that top spot!

Twitter has been astir with tweets aplenty and we had a huge big-up from the App Era. If you haven’t gone and gotten the game yet, then go and grab it now while it’ll costs you diddly-squat. Let’s see if we can’t rock that number 1 spot by the end of the week!

A big thank you to all the kind words we received and here’s to many more years here in The Oven.

So, onwards with this week’s end of week merrymaking. It’s in celebration of a new arrival in The Oven. She’s 20 years old and from Japan. Her name is SEGA Master System II:

To be this old takes AGES!

This beloved mass of silicon and injection molded plastics has been especially introduced to the Mobile Pie team for tonight’s big (belated) B-Boy Beats launch retro gaming party! Ever the sharing type here in The Oven we want you to be in on the fun, by joining us in a little game.

To play:

Below is a series of pictures, each displaying a section of a classic Master System game’s box art. Some are obvious, some are more obscure. Simply identify the game and pop your answers in the comments.

Game 1.

.

Nintendon't like the publisher of this classic arcade puzzler

Game 2.

Radical!

Game 3.

Everyone was shiny and muscly in the early nineties, even criminals

Game 4.

A very underrated shooter - a Transformers game in disguise

Game 5.

A very buggy title that featured a hint-giving professor in the manual

The correct answers will be revealed on Monday and muchos kudos goes to the person who gets the most right!

Answers

Game 1: Klax
Game 2: California Games
Game 3: Streets of Rage
Game 4: Transbot
Game 5: Teddy Boy

The MWC always promises to serve up exclusive previews of the latest mobile technology, and the big players always aim to be the ones that provide the game-changing story of the week.

Big players means the device manufacturers such as Sony Ericsson, Samsung, Blackberry, Motorola, and HTC, and the others forging their mobile strategy such as Google and Microsoft. Nokia were a notable omission – limiting themselves merely to an off-site invitation only suite – and got people wondering whether they really had nothing to show, were concentrating on their legal battles or were just fishing for Apple-esque enigmatic points (Apple historically never attend external events such as this – apart from their secret agents of course). We can never know the reason, but of those that attended, it was Google, Samsung and Microsoft that probably made the big impressions.

Samsung’s new Bada platform and showcase device the Wave looks to make a splash (Bada is Korean for ocean, we understand). Aside from the usual nonsense technology trademarks (e.g. TouchWiz interface, super AMOLED touch screen), it’s the potential of the integrated application store and developer focus which tickled our interest.

Microsoft announced their new platform Windows Mobile 7.0 and it looked like a decent effort that focused heavily on social network and Xbox Live integration. Users can play mini games on their phone which use their Xbox Live gamertag to earn gamerscore and achievements, which seems pretty cool. When Richard probed on whether this functionality would be open to developers, we were advised to look out for a “rich developer story” that would be announced in the near future. We will, and that may look something like this:

The social side of the latest devices really seems to be taking center stage. We lost count of how many times a phone’s qualities were demonstrated to us by presenting the way in which a user’s combined contact, SMS, email, Twitter and Facebook information is delivered in one almighty integrated UI, and it looks like designers have been working very hard on this aspect. (The bias on this focus can really be seen in the phone TV ads too – which spectacularly took my ‘most annoying ads’ award from cars in 2009.) Notable examples of these socially-obsessed devices are the new Sony Ericsson Xperia X1, and its genuinely snazzy little brothers X10 Mini and X10 Mini Pro. However this Android family of devices told another, bigger story…

Slowly but surely Android has turned in a great year, and now has been adopted by most of the main device manufacturers. Google didn’t exhibit, but the talk by Eric Schmidt in the congress was all over the front pages of the MWC daily newspaper (yes, that really exists!). After the release of the Nexus One this year, he formally announced the shift of the company’s attention from desktop to mobile, and showed off the new Google Goggles app. Big talk.

The battle of the platforms is hotting up nicely, and seeing how it plays out will be intriguing. Also the mobile advertising industry is finally attracting major attention, with ad networks Admob and Quattro Wireless being acquired by Google and Apple respectively, and Orange delivering their brand new ‘Orange Shots’ service.

The MWC is also an opportunity for countries to show off their latest tech companies, with their own ‘pavilions’ – turning the halls into a kind of mini United Nations. One such outfit in the UK space showed off a new mobile typing technology that guessed the words you were going to say before you even started typing them, using machine learning. This could be impressive and/or embarassing! Outside of UK, it was the Swedish Pavilion which was our favourite. Hats off to them, they were they first to be dishing out the free alcohol on Monday. Swedish innovators myFC are looking to solve that ancient mobile power problem with their neat hydrogen powered FuelCellSticker technology. From what I could understand from the demo, you drop a magic pill into a pouch of voodoo-water to get 6hrs of battery time. Sounds great to us! At this point I’d like to add thanks and a shout-out to Caroline Karlsson of Swedish Trade Council for showing us round! Tack så mycket, Caroline!

As documented in my South West Screen MWC blogs from last year, we were a little disappointed with the lack of attention on content and content providers for mobile, but this year we were more optimistic with the presence of App Planet, sponsored by Vodafone. However the 50 exhibitors inside were not much of an attraction and the representation of games was still woefully inadequate. It was a good idea and intention that maybe was poorly executed, we will hold out for next year!

All in all, it was a very interesting few days. It seems like there was a little more buzz about things than last year. Over the course of the congress the general ideas, concerns and hopes everyone has do sink in, and it’s good to take some time to think about the direction of the industry as a whole.

On a final note, away from the conference Richard continued his baffling ongoing international pursuit of saffron.

Mobile AR is the next big thing, or so the informed media would have you believe. Put simply, AR is a blending of real and virtual worlds in real-time. Some common examples of the technology are often seen on televised sports, when displaying scores or lines marking players movements.

Despite all the hype, AR has actually been around for a while now, but only now is the technology allowing it to really break from simple passive overlaying to rich user interaction. Last year saw a number of AR apps launched on the App Store, including Layar and the AcrossAir Browser. These apps are merely the tip of the possiblity iceberg for AR as they simply overlay basic graphics onto the video stream.

So, driven by these possibilities we have been investigating how to improve on what’s currently out there and how to bring the next generation of AR to mobile platforms.

The first application of the tech we dug in to is the likely familiar navigator (see the screenshot below). This displays the direction of nearby locations and corresponding information about them. Okay, so not groundbreaking perhaps, but we’ve made huge leaps in usability when compared to the slew of currently available sub-par apps and have also increased functionality with new market-leading features.

Currently we’re getting stuck in to smoothing off the rough edges and beautifying it, allowing it to be customisable and reskinnable. We’ll follow up in the coming weeks with a demo video showing the technology in full action.

There is a lot more to AR beyond this rather simple use however. The holy grail is to create software that is intelligent enough to understand it’s surroundings and produce stunning imagery which can be blended into the environment. This is the second sort of application we’re working on – detecting items in the real environment and mixing in virtual 3D objects with the video stream.

Some of our initial work on analysing real world video and mixing in 3D

A lot of computing power needs to go into getting the software to understand the real world. One of the first steps we took towards this was simply detecting edges. Even something as trivial as this involves intensive resources – especially in real-time and especially on a mobile phone, so it required lots of programming trickery to make things run quickly and smoothly.

The image above shows the writing on the page has been detected and highlighted as an edge (it’s marked in green). The result may end up looking a lot like a cheap sci-fi B-movie effect but in fact it is cutting edge research!

3D models running over real-time video photoage

Another challenge facing mobile AR technology is getting nice 3D graphics running over video. This is key to creating rich and seemless world-merging experiences which is likely to be the future. The above screenshot shows Mobile Pie’s AR technology displaying a spinning globe over a real-time video stream on an iPhone 3GS. Unfortunately iPhone doesn’t have a huge amount of power behind it compared to the supercomputers used in Hollywood blockbusters, so lots of optimisation is required to make even this simple display run smoothly. In this demo the globe rotates depending upon which direction you’re facing.

I hope this preview of our work-in-progress AR technology has shown you a little glimpse in to the future of not only Mobile Pie but the way in which we will interact with devices and the world around us. If you would like to know more or how this technology can help your company or organisation then please feel free to contact us.

One of the most accurate thermometers of the iPhone gaming climate is the Touch Arcade forums where many a knowledable and refined gamer doth dwell. Some choice words from the official B-Boy Beats thread:

“I love this game… The finger mechanic is awesome and makes more sense score-wise than the just-released Riddim Ribbon… In a span of mere moments this has become my fav music game on the iDevices. This makes me happy to have such a platform. It’s exciting to know this type of development is possible. TAG Games, you have my utmost respect for this. BRAVO!” – russiaone

Wowee, russiaone! I’m sure you meant Mobile Pie when you said Tag Games (our publisher), but we’ll let you off on that one. You’re on our Christmas card list for sure this year. Some other bite-sized chunks of wisdom:

“I really like it. Very well made and unique.” – asd921150

“A lot of fun” – Hodapp

“This is top of my birthday shopping list” – ‘Jeep

Even down at Apple’s App Store people are feeling the funky-funky-thang of BBB:

“This will top all other music games” – Funky Chunky Munky

“Excellent rhythm based game… A nice change from the usual tap to the beat games. Really enjoying this and love the hip hop soundtrack” – Makaveli-8

“OMG, it’s awesome! Within minutes my fingers were breakdancing away and I had a HUGE smile on my nodding head… The dancing gameplay is really unique… loads of fun once you’re in to it! Would recommend this to anyone – nice graphics, funky tunes and a lot of fun. It’s well worth the money – just buy it!” – BristolZoo

“The tracks are awesome… a lot of fun” – Mickeyjtothed

“What a great game. Totally addictive and really fun. With a fantastic soundtrack and genuinely new gameplay. It’s so exciting to play a game that just isn’t the same thing all over again, but is new, fresh and really engaging. I highly recommend it” – Gingertom_UK

“Plenty of humour… Up there among my favourite iPhone games” – Precutted

“If you like Tap Tap… you’ll love it.” - ChuckyNorris

But what about them pro journos reviewers? So far we only have one review in, but it’s from the awesome, fair and balanced dudes over at Touch Gen. What they say? They say:

B-Boy Beats doesn’t have any flash 3D graphics, but it oozes charm through cartoon characters and graffiti style elements that capture the essence of the hip-hop dance scene.

This is all about the music. And for hip-hop lovers this doesn’t disappoint. Sure, the music doesn’t feature the creme-de-la-creme of hip-hop stars… but what it does do is sound great and, most importantly, gets your toes tapping (or in this case your fingers).

B-Boy Beats then is a fun little dance game. While it doesn’t have the brand power of the DDR series, it can stand toe-to-toe (or finger-to-finger) with it in terms of gameplay.

3.5 stars / 5

So there we go! B-Boy Beats has been a true, but often tough, labour of love for us here in The Oven and it’s really overwhelming to see such positive response from the world, making what we do so worthwhile.

If you have any comments about BBB then contact us and let us know – we love to hear your thoughts and suggestions!