Aurora Feint

Danielle Cassley took one of the strangest paths you might find to game designer -- just out of a computer science degree at Berkeley, she was trying to get a job as a babysitter when she met Peter Relan of the YouWeb Incubator. And rather than have her take care of his kids, he decided instead to put her in an idea farm and see what happened.

Aurora Feint was what happened -- she and Jason Citron, full of ideas, created a game in just ten weeks that took over the App Store out of nowhere in its infancy. The game originally released for free, and while it promised to be an MMO, it started out as a puzzle/RPG game -- people didn't quite understand what it was, but they liked it anyway.

Almost a year later, Aurora Feint has spawned four different versions and even a social platform, and Danielle and Jason are still full of ideas. In this exclusive interview with TUAW, she talks about how Aurora Feint came to be, what she thinks of the App Store so far (and if developers will ever be able to charge the prices they want), and what's next for the Aurora Feint series (they've just released a new version of The Arena called Daemons) and the iPhone platform. Click the link below to read on.