Mobile multiplayer game Kodo from Jadestone wins IGF Mobile award
Swedish developer Jadestone last week won the Achievement in Art award at the Independent Games Festival (IGF) Mobile, held at the 2008 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.
The original mobile game Kodo was released in early 2006 and was awarded as a highly original puzzle game. Up to 8 players can compete, using one button each on the same mobile phone, in a race to eat the others before becoming eaten yourself.
For the new version of the game, Jadestone decided to not only move from isometric 2D to full 3D, but to really push the limits of mobile graphics. Given truly state-of-the-art tools, the visual artists went wild and took a quantum leap with the design of the Kodos and their world.
Tommy Palm, designer of Kodo, comments: “Over the next year, a far richer graphical experience will become available in mobile phones, approaching the 3D quality of PCs. Kodo represents an early example of the kinds of experience mobile players will be able to enjoy. We’re very happy and proud that our work on Kodo has been recognized by the IGF Mobile jury”.
Jadestone designers started the development of the game on PC emulators and then moved on to prototype hardware featuring the OpenGL ES 2.0 graphics platform. As phone models with large screens gain momentum, it is expected that 3D hardware acceleration will gradually become the norm for rich media phones.