From Casey's Contraptions to Amazing Alex

Developed by Noel Llopis and Miguel Friginal and released on iPad in 2011, Casey's Contraptions combined the gameplay of The Incredible Machine with the bright and colourful art style involving a slightly scruffy, spiky-haired kid called Casey.

Shipping with 70 levels and the option to make more and share them online (there's over 30,000 currently available), the game gained massive critical acclaim, and was highlighted by Apple in its 2011 Rewind promotion.

It also quickly caught the attention of Rovio.

"The game really resonated with us. We thought it would appeal to Angry Birds players," says Petri Järvilehto, who oversees development at the Finnish company.

The result was that Rovio bought the rights for Casey's Contraptions from Llopis and Friginal, and started the process of rethinking it and its main character for a wider, global audience.

This took around six months, and involved everything from coming up with a deeper backstory and new characters to redoing all the artwork, refactoring the code so it worked on Rovio's own multi-platform development tools, tweaking the existing levels and designing more, and, of course, changing the title and hero.

"Casey's Contraptions is a bit of a mouthful, even if English is your first language," explains senior producer Kalle Kaivola.

The new title also expresses a subtle change of focus for the game.

Amazing Alex highlights the importance that Rovio is placing on Alex as a character, rather than his contraptions. This change will become more obvious in future updates and games, which will reveal more of the Amazing Alex universe

"We think of this release as the just first step," says Järvilehto. There's plenty more amazingness to come.