After a billion Angry Birds downloads, Rovio's follow-up may be Casey's Contraptions

Rovio has announced that its Angry Birds franchise has seen over 1 billion downloads, and also teased a new release for Snappy Touch and Mystery Coconut's physics-based puzzler Casey's Contraptions. Though the Finnish company has made a number of moves to expand recently, such as opening a studio in Sweden and acquiring Shattered Horizon developer Futuremark, it hasn't purchased Snappy Touch or Mystery Coconut. Snappy Touch's Noel Llopis tells Gamasutra, "I'm still very much an independent developer, and I've been working on prototypes for my next game full time for the last few months." Llopis and Mystery Coconut's Miguel Angel Friginal released Casey's Contraptions, a Rube Goldberg-style puzzler for iPad, to critical acclaim last year. Like Angry Birds (and other popular titles like Crayon Physics and Tiny Wings), it's built on the open-source Box2D physics engine. In a trailer announcing its latest Angry Birds milestone, Rovio hinted that it's working on a new Casey's Contraptions title, with a redesigned version of the game's titular character, for mobile devices. Llopis and Friginal previously said they were working on an iOS version of Casey's Contraptions, but they've yet to release one. Gamasutra published a postmortem for the original Casey's Contraptions game, which shared what went right and wrong during the iPad title's development, last June.