The life of a video game developer must feel like a roller-coaster ride. Everything is up and then down over and over, and the whole time it feels like your stomach is gonna fly out of your face — but maybe you’re having a good time?

The former employees of Impossible Studios are having a down day. Epic Games is shuttering that developer less than six months after forming it out of the ashes of Big Huge Games, which dissolved in the 38 Studios fiasco.

We’ve reached out to ask Epic what went wrong, but a spokesperson only provided the following: “Our statement on the community site is the only statement we’re making on the matter.”

Here’s the statement that Epic founder Tim Sweeney wrote in a blog on the developer’s site:

We’re closing Impossible Studios.

When former members of Big Huge Games approached Epic last year, we saw the opportunity to help a great group of people while putting them to work on a project that needed a team. It was a bold initiative, and the Impossible folks made a gallant effort, but ultimately it wasn’t working out for Epic.

In addition to providing Impossible Studios employees with three months of severance pay, we’ll be giving the team the opportunity to form a new company with the Impossible Studios name and the awesome Impossibear logo.

This means that Infinity Blade: Dungeons is now on hold as we figure out the future of the project.

In May, developer 38 Studios ran out of money and laid off the staff of Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning developer Big Huge Games, which it owned. In June, Epic came to the rescue of those people when it hired most of them to establish Impossible Games. Epic put the studio to work on Infinity Blade: Dungeons.

But Impossible will never release that game.

Epic closed the studio without it ever releasing a game. As Sweeney noted, Infinity Blade: Dungeons, a sequel to the iOS action RPG franchise, is now without a studio and in development-purgatory.

We will continue to update this story as more information comes to light.

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Today, developer Epic Games announced its newest division, Impossible Studios, which is comprised of former employees of Big Huge Games.

Many employees from the now defunct studio found themselves without jobs when parent company 38 Studios experienced significant financial troubles early this year. A skipped loan payment and missed payroll led to layoffs at the developer, which declared bankruptcy and closed down in June.

Now Impossible Studios — which houses 36 employees in its office in Hunt Valley, Md., Epic told GamesBeat in an email — has welcomed those previously working under Big Huge Games’ roof.

Sean Dunn, who was the studio general manager at Big Huge Games, leads the studio as director and will oversee its first project: the touch-based action-role-playing game Infinity Blade: Dungeons for iOS. Impossible is developing the title in collaboration with Epic’s studio in Cary, N.C., and the Utah-based Chair Entertainment.

“Epic Games has truly embraced this stellar collection of developers who were displaced by the closing of Big Huge Games,” said Dunn. “They have looked after us with complete care, giving us all the tools and resources we need to make a lot of gamers happy.”

The past employees of Big Huge Games worked on releases such as the Rise of Nations titles for PC and Mac, Catan for Xbox Live Arcade, Age of Empires III: The Asian Dynasties for PC, and Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC.

“We were so glad we could help keep this great team together, and we’re lucky to have them,” said Epic Games president Dr. Michael Capps, who will lead a panel about Infinity Blade: Dungeons with its lead designer, Ian Frazier, and author Brandon Sanderson at Dragon*Con on August 31. “At the time, I said that finding a full team of superstars was ‘impossible,’ and apparently the name stuck! Pairing the imagination and experience of Impossible with Epic’s technology, IP [intellectual properties], and resources makes for a business greater than the sum of its parts.”

Infinity Blade: Dungeons is set to release in the App Store later this year.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Developer Chair Entertainment’s iOS adventure Infinity Blade II has been crowned the most profitable title publisher Epic Games has ever produced (with some caveats). Since the sequel’s release last December, Infinity Blade II has received two major expansions featuring new items, enemies, and locations. This week, it receives its third and presumably final free expansion: Skycages.

“The most action-packed Infinity Blade II expansion to date,” claims a press release from the developer, “Skycages invites players to delve more deeply into the story of the Deathless, as new areas are unlocked and relics from the past come to light. While battling all-new enemies such as the Headsman, Petrified Noc, Xyloto, Ryth, and others, players can now harness the power of the sun with the Solar Transport Energy Blades, a completely new weapon type to be mastered.”

The new weapon type in question is essentially a Star Wars lightsaber (pictured above), available in normal, dual, and heavy flavors. Each Solar Transport weapon costs $1,000,000 gold (equivalent to 25-50 real-world dollars depending on which in-app purchase you’re looking at) and may seem overpriced at first, especially given the hefty price tag, but any socketed elemental attack gem will have its power magnified 10-fold.

Other new items include a chainsaw and a set of scuba equipment from Chair Entertainment’s first Xbox Live Arcade title, Undertow. While not overly expensive if purchased outright, I was able to get the entire Undertow collection consecutively by using the special prize wheel items.

The 1GB+ update also seems to have patched the infinite gold trick where players could exploit a specific cutscene to sell an endless supply of free Infinity Blade weapons. Now the weapon can no longer be sold during that sequence.

For those looking to get the most of their time with Infinity Blade II, the makers of the game recently shared a few tips and tricks for the ClashMob mode:

• On treasure challenges, try to pick up tightly grouped bags as quickly as possible and leave the others alone.  New gold bags will spawn a few seconds after you stop picking up bags.  Picking up that one extra bag resets the timer and could cost you even more bags!
• With parry challenges it is best to use dual or light weapons as they have a better reaction time. Don’t waste time attacking the enemy during a break, hit him once, wait for him to recover, then start parrying again (same with dodge challenges).
• During “kill the titan” challenges, learn to sneak a ‘scratch’ attack in after every parry to increase the overall amount of damage, while still being able to obtain a parry break. Also, always go with a heavy weapon so you can deal as much damage as possible.
• Due to the time limit on some ClashMobs, try to get as many parry breaks as possible to get stab points that will do extra damage, and then continue on when they get dizzy with slashes and combos.
• When doing any Parry challenge and the enemy becomes dizzy, attack him to bring him out of the dizzy state faster so you can get more parries. If you wait without attacking, more time will come off the timer and you’ll lose potential parries.
• Be sure to have one of each class of weapon in your inventory (sword and shield, two hand, and heavy) to be ready for any type of challenge.
• Use Dual weapons for the Stab challenge. Damage doesn’t matter and you will be able to get 40+ stabs with dual weapons rather than 18 stabs with light sword.
• Don’t worry about your health, exhausted dodges, or broken blocks.  Achieve the objective at all costs, since the costs go away once you’re back in SP.
• Dodge/block/parry/stab/survival challenges are more friendly to low-level players than boss-killing challenges.
• Set reminders for future ClashMobs and the game will send a push notify when the event is about to start.  If you didn’t allow Infinity Blade II to access push notifies, you can go into the iOS settings to enable them.

So why is this likely to be the last major update for Infinity Blade II? While the game is undoubtedly a well-reviewed cash cow, Chair is already setting its sights on the upcoming Infinity Blade: Dungeons, a prequel to the original game. And for those of us who have seen the true ending of Infinity Blade II, I’m sure we’re more than ready to get our hands on Infinity Blade III….

To celebrate the release of Skycages, Infinity Blade II is available at the discounted price of $2.99  on the iTunes App Store for a limited time.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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And that could begin an interesting test. Will the hundreds of millions of users who have embraced simple, two-dimensional games from social game makers such as Zynga also embrace games with great 3D imagery? To run on Facebook or in browsers, Unreal Engine 3 games have to be paired with Adobe’s Flash 11.2 version, which is shipping in the near future. Flash 11.2 is able to tap graphics hardware in a computer, rather than running simply on the PC’s microprocessor.

“Yes, these could have been Facebook games,” said Mark Rein, Epic vice president, in an interview with VentureBeat. “For us, this is important because everybody is in our wheelhouse now.”

The demo used a pre-release version of Flash 11.2.  It runs on every browser, including Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer. Unreal competes against rival 3D technologies such as Unity Technologies, which has also focused on running on downloadable PC games as well as social and mobile games.

“It works for games of all sizes, small, medium, or large,” Rein said. “This is the year when we reach every platform.”

The newest platform to run the Unreal technology is the Sony PlayStation Vita. Rein showed a version of Mortal Kombat using that environment.

Rein also showed last year’s Samaritan demo, which is Epic’s vision of next-generation 3D graphics in a game. Last year, it took a PC with three Nvidia GTX 580 graphics cards running with a huge power supply and a total hardware cost of about $2,000. This year, the same demo can run on a single Nvidia Kepler graphics card. Nvidia is expected to launch the Kepler technology in the near future.

The company is working on Unreal Engine 4, its next-generation 3D technology, but it isn’t showing it publicly now. It may be shown later this year, and Rein said that Unreal Engine 4 is likely to be running on next-generation console hardware, whenever that hardware comes out. As I was interviewing Rein, I heard the Unreal Engine 4 demo running in the next room. Rein acknowledged that the demo was running but said he couldn’t show it off now. He said that launch games for the next-generation consoles could use Unreal Engine 3, but larger-scale next-generation console games would likely use Unreal Engine 4.

[Photo credit: Dean Takahashi]