While the main attraction of PAX Australia are World of Tanks and Saints Row IV, it is also the place where indie developers can showcase and preview their new games. One of the best, in my opinion, has to be Armello – by local studio League of Geeks.
Armello takes the traditional tabletop board game and moves it on the iPad, creating a fairytale world with vivid and colourful landscape. The plot is simple: four animal clans compete against one another to take the crown from a tyrannical and corrupt king of Armello.
The game has been in development for two years; and in order to maintain the board/card game dynamic, League of Geeks developed Armello on paper for eight months to ensure that they understood how the cards and the game overall works so they could better translate the game onto the iPad.
I was able to see it during the pre-PAX party, and the graphics were outstanding. The developers have paid a lot of time and attention into the detail put into the game – such as making a player invisible to others but translucent to you, and the number and types of cards. It will be interesting how such a game will work on a tablet, but I have high hopes that it will succeed.
According to the developers, the game is likely to spend at least another year in development. “Release date is officially when it’s ready because this is our passion project,” Trent Kusters from League of Geeks told us. It will launch exclusively on the iPad initially, but League of Geeks plan to put it on many platforms.
Editor’s note: Armello requested us not to show off any footage of the game. They are planning to do it themselves.