Angry Birds Wand

In early 2009, Rovio staff began reviewing proposals for potential games. One such proposal came from senior game designer Jaakko Iisalo in the form of a simulated screenshot featuring some angry-looking birds with no visible legs or wings. While the picture gave no clue as to what type of game was being played, the staff liked the characters, and the team elected to design a game around them. As the concept of Angry Birds was developed, the staff realized the birds needed an enemy. At the time, the "swine flu" epidemic was in the news, so the staff made the birds' enemies pigs.The game's mechanics were inspired by other petrary physics games that have been released over the years, including another 2009 release, Crush the Castle.The initial cost to develop Angry Birds was estimated to exceed €100,000, not including money spent on the subsequent updates. For the iOS version, Rovio partnered with distributor Chillingo to publish the game to the App Store. Since then Rovio has self-published almost all of the later ports of the game, with the exception of the PlayStation Portable version, which was produced under license by Abstraction Games and then distributed by Chillingo.


Senior game designer of Angry Birds Jaakko Iisalo at Game Design Expo 2011
When Rovio began writing new versions of the game for other devices, new issues came to light. As the team began working on a version for Android systems, they observed the large number of configurations of device types and versions of the Android software. The number of combinations of software version, processor speed and even user interfaces was significantly larger than that for the earlier iOS version. Ultimately, the team settled on a minimum set of requirements, although that left nearly 30 types of Android phones unable to run the game, including some newly released phones. One month after the initial release on Android, Rovio Mobile began designing a simpler version of the game for these other devices.
In early 2010, Rovio began developing a variant of Angry Birds for Facebook.The project became one of the company's largest, with development taking over a year. The company understood the challenges of transplanting a game concept between social platforms and mobile/gaming systems. In a March 2011 interview, Rovio's Peter Vesterbacka said, "you can’t take an experience that works in one environment and one ecosystem and force-feed it onto another. It's like Zynga. They can’t just take FarmVille and throw it on mobile and see what sticks. The titles that have been successful for them on mobile are the ones they’ve built from the ground up for the platform.” The Facebook version is expected to incorporate social-gaming concepts and in-game purchases and was scheduled to enter beta-testing in April 2011.
Future improvements planned for the game include the ability to synchronize the player's progress across multiple devices; for example, a player who completes a level on an iOS device could log into their copy of the game on an Android device and see the same statistics and level of progress.