Train2Game  students are launching four new development studios in 2012 as part of ‘Make Something Unreal Live,’ a competitive process designed to accelerate their careers by giving them the tools and resources needed to release games for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch this spring.

The studios are Commando Kiwi, Derp Studios, Digital Mage and Indigo Jam.

The first titles released by the studios will be based on the Fighting Fantasy series of books created by Ian Livingston and Steve Jackson.

We caught up with Digital Mage’s Craig Moore to find out how the road to Make Something Unreal Live at The Gadget Show has gone so far. Listen via Train2Game Radio or read it here on The Train2Game Blog.

Hi Craig. Why did you decide to call your Make Something Unreal Live game development team Digital Mage?

Well, originally we were called Team Gandalf, and because we’re using the visage of a mage and everything like that, it just seemed a bit close to the bone in regards to licensing. So, we decided to change to something that was equally wizardy and call ourselves Digital Mage, which actually came about because we found a random name generator online and it happened that upon us. It kind of felt like fate.

And I guess it works well with the Fighting Fantasy IP you’re working on, can you tell us which book in particular your game is based on?

We’re working on Armies of Death.

And what genre is your game going to be?

Luckily for us, we’re making a strategy game, and we’re hoping to do something quite fun and interesting with it within what we can do with the engine itself.

How have you found using UDK on IOS and how are you finding making a strategy game out of it.

In all honesty we’re working against the grain, it feels at the moment. It’s a lot of hard work but hopefully it should be good when we get it all up and running, we’ve managed to make some quite nice headway with it and we’ve got some really good stuff and it’s looking promising. We should be able to deliver the game we want to deliver at the end of it, the game we set out to deliver when we first started planning it all out.

What’s going to make your game different?

There are a lot of strategy games in general out there – tower defence is a huge genre on IOS devices – but one on the Unreal Engine is a completely different story, that’s a bit of a rare beast.

What particular element of strategy are you going for in particular?

We’re doing what we like to call ‘Tower Offence’ where we’re changing the game upsidedown on its head and you’re no longer places all the towers, you’re doing the attacking.

How have you found the transition from being Team Gandalf at the Train2Game & Epic Game Jam, to being Digital Mage, a fully operative game development studio?

It’s a lot of hard work, we have to spend a lot of hours in the evening just communicating things that could be done very easily in face to face situations. But it’s slowly coming together as a lot of people in the team who’d never worked in teams before are getting the hang of it now and it’s all kind of slowly falling into place which is really good. It’s a credit to the team themselves who are coming together nicely and it’s working well.

What targets have you met recently that you’re particularly proud of?

As sad as it sounds, about 1 a.m. last night he had a massive breakthrough. We managed to get all of our units appearing in the game and with little animations. It was kind of a real nice penny drop moment where we thought we could actually do this, and come up with something that potentially could be really cool.

And you’re looking forward to many more of those moments on the road to Make Something Unreal Live at The Gadget Show?

Yeah, hopefully! Fingers crossed we should have lots of more of those and they should just get better and better with each turn.

And how much are you looking forward to the event itself, working on the game in front of potentially a large audience in Birmingham?

It should be fantastic. The size of the crew and the crowd don’t really phase me in any way, it’ll be really nice just to have the team together in one place after all this learning experience building up to it, but having all that power and working knowledge in just one place again will be a really, really nice feeling and it should help us mould even better as a team.

For those who want to find out more about Digital Mage, what are your online contact details for Facebook and Twitter?

They can look for us on Facebook, just search for Digital Mage, we should show up with a little black icon.  And on Twitter we’re @DigitalMage.

Great, thanks for time Craig and good luck.

Keep up to date with the latest news from Make Something Unreal Live here on The Train2Game Blog.