Riven iPad a couple of weeks from submission

Old gorgeous-pants adventure game Riven is but a couple of weeks from App Store submission on iPad, maker Cyan Worlds has said.

"We have spent many months fine-tuning the Riven experience for the iPad, touching almost every aspect of the game. We have reduced the compression of the original images, we've improved the movies and animations, we've cleaned up the user interface, we've improved the sound and music presentation, and we've added a few small new features. All in all we've worked really hard at making the best iPad version of Riven we could, and still squeeze it into the 2 gigabyte size limit," Cyan's Rand Miller told Modojo.

Cyan Worlds put out realMyst on iPads earlier this year. It broke the break-even point in sales but turned out to be a tougher project than anticipated, "so it was a relief to at least pay the bills".

Incidentally, the "real" part of the realMyst name refers to it being fully explorable, something Riven on iPad isn't.

"'realRiven' might be possible some day," said Miller, "but the risk-reward ratio makes it very improbable in the near future. We had to take advantage of previously built realMyst models and textures to even consider doing realMyst on the iPad, and even then it was a challenge. Riven has never been converted to real-time, so it would have to be built more or less from scratch. That's a big job."

Cyan Worlds is content adapting its old adventure games for new platforms for the time being. Might come a time, however, when Cyan Worlds looks to doing something new - a new Riven/Myst-like experience.

"The Kickstarter possibility has inspired us to discuss moving beyond porting our previous content to creating some pretty interesting, larger, original products," shared Miller. "The platform target has yet to be decided, but if I had to guess I'd say that mobile will definitely be a part of it."

Riven will work on all generations of iPad.