Creative Assembly creates Digital team to focus on mobile

Sega's British development house The Creative Assembly has formed a Digital team that will focus on bringing titles to mobile platforms, starting with its flagship Total War strategy game franchise. Over the last 12 years since Total War's debut, The Creative Assembly has developed the series with PC gamers in mind, but now it believes it can reach a wider audience by adapting the experience for mobile handsets and a portable play. "For the last 12 months, our Digital team has been extensively prototyping technology and making sense of exactly what a Total War game on mobile would look and feel like," says The Creative Assembly brand director Rob Bartholomew. The group is building its first project, Total War Battles, with the Unity game engine, which has become popular with developers creating 3D games for mobile. It plans to use that development platform for other future mobile projects, too. Founded in 1997 and acquired by Sega in 2005, The Creative Assembly employs nearly 200 developers -- it's staffed up since last May, when it had only 160 workers and was planning to open a new 10,000 square foot facility. Along with Total War Battles, it's also currently working on a game based on the Alien film franchise for consoles, separate from the Gearbox Software-developed Aliens: Colonial Marines game that Sega will publish this fall.