Why Amazing Alex is more than just a game

With over 300 staff, Rovio is a pretty big games company.

When it came to making Amazing Alex, however, the development team was very small; just six individuals. Lots more people had some involvement in terms of character design, production, animation, testing etc, but the core team was tiny.

Based in Tampere, a Finnish city about two hours north of the capital Helsinki, the team was led by Mikko Karvonen.

"It was exciting and difficult because as well as making the game, we were setting up a new office for Rovio," he says.

Luckily, most the team had previously worked together, so their experience meant the development process was relatively straightforward. Another advantage was that Amazing Alex was based on an existing game, Casey's Contraptions.

Of course, there are plenty of changes and tweaks, but the core idea remains the same.

"There was no uncertainty in terms of what we were doing," Karvonen confirms. "We wanted to retain the concept of Casey's Contraptions, but improve and harmonise it."

In terms of what this meant in practice, all the game art was redrawn and the game code was reworked for Rovio's in-house technology. This was required so that the game could be released on multiple platforms.

"It's a new style," says Karvonen, of the art. "The weight of the item outlines, the colours and shapes are subtly different to give the game more of a 3D perspective."

It's hard to see without directly comparing the two games, but if you do, you can see that many of the objects Alex uses to make his contraptions are streamlined. Other small changes include making the pipes transparent so you can see how balls are rolling through them. The user interface was also changed to make it fit into Rovio's house style.

The major new additions to Amazing Alex were the all-new 32 levels in the new Tree House location. Combined with the original 72 reworked levels from Casey's Contraptions, this brings the total that will be released when the game launches to 104.

There are plenty more to come, too, with every planned update adding a new themed location to Alex's world, and new items to experiment with.

But Rovio's development team won't be the only people making levels for Amazing Alex. One of the reasons the company was so keen to acquire Casey's Contraptions was its level editor and the ability to share the levels you create via email and online.

"We're really interested to see how people will use the sharing features. It has huge potential," says Karvonen.

Indeed, when the game launches, he says he'll be following the total of levels that are uploaded to the online hub, rather than counting the number of downloads.

Given that Casey's Contraptions has over 30,000 user-created levels, it's certain that there will be hundreds of the thousands of levels for Amazing Alex before the end of 2012. Much of Rovio's focus will be creating features so the community can rate and highlight the best examples.

And it's this that Karvonen reckons will provide something different to the millions of people already playing Rovio's games.

"Angry Birds is about aiming and timing, but Alex is about solving puzzles in your way and at your own pace," he says. "I think a large part of its appeal will be about making the levels."