One half of the development pair that created baby-dragon-rearing game DragonVale is moving on to something new later this year. Phobic Studios, which worked with Backflip Studios on DragonVale, is announcing today that it plans to release Glare, its next game, this fall.
Glare is an action-platformer that stars The Shiner, which is a being of pure of light. The sun is under attack from an evil threat and The Shiner must rescue and heal the star. Phobic plans to release the game on PC, Mac, and Linux this fall.
“It’s always been about making great games that we ourselves wanted to play. Glare is no exception,” Phobic chief operating officer Jonas Wills said in a statement. “Phobic Studios was started by a group of guys who met in high school. We’ve been fortunate to have great success on mobile, and as the industry changes we want to evolve with it. Now we want to see what other platforms can do for our games.”
Phobic’s DragonVale was a social game for mobile platforms. It had players building up an island to house a baby dragon. Glare is something new for the studio. The developer is using the Unity game engine, which should enable it to release the title across all three scheduled platforms with relative ease. Unity could also enable Phobic to release the game on other platforms, including mobile and consoles, without much additional effort.
“Glare started out as a six-month project intended to help us better understand how to work with Unity for development and explore new distribution platforms,” Phobic creative director Brian Powers said. “It quickly became clear that we wanted to create a deeper experience. After eighteen months of development, we’re very proud of what we created with Glare and we are excited to share it with the entire community.”
The developer used Unity and developed its own tools to create 3D cylindrical levels that suggest the curvature of a planet. Phobic plans to show the game in action behind closed doors at the upcoming Penny Arcade Expo later this month in Seattle.