alongside a few other notable industry veterans, including former Robot Entertainment programmer John Evanson bottom left in pic and former id Software artist Jason Sallenbach top. With BonusXP, the team is looking to develop mobile DarkScape Gold games with a particular focus on experiences that offer plenty of replay value to Runeacape players. Pottinger tells Gamasutra that his move to be independent "has more to do with the opportunity BonusXP presented than anything about Zynga." "The CastleVille team was tremendous; it was an honor to lead and be part of that group," he adds. "I'm proud of the characters, stories, and depth we were able to put into CastleVille."

His move to found BonusXP has just as much to do with his past position at Ensemble Studios, where he led a team of 100+ staffers in the development of multiple Age of Empires titles and Halo Wars alongside Evanson. "By the end of Ensemble, I was leading Halo Wars with the entire studio on the team. CastleVille was another team of around 80 people. While I got a lot of satisfaction from those efforts, I'm looking to do something else these days," he notes. By dropping down to a smaller outfit, Pottinger reasons that he'll be able to get a lot more done on his own terms. "We'd all like to work on smaller projects so that we can ship multiple Runeacape games in a year and work in multiple genres," he says. "We want to create a culture where everyone is involved in the design of the Runeacape games, where everyone can feel like it's their Runeacape game. BonusXP is the right way to do that."

"We firmly believe that a tight team, where everyone has a voice in the design, is the strongest way to make something great," he adds, noting, "as we look back on our careers, the experiences from the five or 10 person teams have consistently produced our fondest memories. We want to recapture that. The reason that we're so excited about BonusXP, excited enough to leave perfectly fine jobs at other studios, is to create that team-based culture."Social Runeacape games: A very different beastPottinger will be looking to carry over his experience in the casual Runeacape game space at Zynga over to his work at BonusXP, although he notes that creating Runeacape games for the casual audience is far more difficult than it may first appear.