You might not have heard very much about it recently, but Barcelona developer Digital Legends is one of the most impressive studios in Europe for mobile and portable gaming.

It was heavily involved with Nokia's N-Gage, and has recently gained exposure with Bruce Lee Dragon Warrior, its Indiagames' co-published iPad and soon-to-be iPhone beat-'em up.

We caught up with CEO Xavier Carrillo Costa to get his take on what's going on in the world of pocket gaming.

Pocker Gamer: We didn't hear much about Digital Legends during 2009, so what were you up to?

Xavier Carrillo Costa: 2009 was a transition year for us with a lot of invisible work.

We launched Dance Fabulous on N-Gage in the first half of the year though. It was a really nice project, and challenging as it was the first cross-media game for Nokia, mixing music and games and involving collaboration with Dave Stuart from Eurythmics.

We also worked very closely with Samsung embedding Kroll for its H1 Vodafone 360 handset launch, and we developed Dance Fabulous for Nokia's Ovi Store, as well on the X6 touchscreen handset for China.

And we started Bruce Lee Dragon Warrior and two amazing triple-A projects with major publishers that should be released in 2011.

How did the Bruce Lee deal come about?

We met Vishal Gondal, Indiagames' CEO three years ago when we were working on the fighting game ONE for N-Gage. There was a good fit between both companies as well as the willingness to do something together.

Bruce Lee proved to be the perfect licence to start working on. We have joined forces in a co-publishing and co-development agreement in which each company has contributed its core expertise. Everything as been done in a smooth and natural way.

Bruce Lee is your first iPad game, so what are your thoughts about it as a gaming platform?

It is a great gaming platform. The size of the screen combined with the touch capabilities will certainly open many new business opportunities. We are absolutely thrilled with it.

What do you think are the strengths of Digital Legends?

If I had to define it in two words they would be innovation and quality

We focus on high quality games, with a special focus on graphics and animations. We create games that make use of cutting edge technology to provide a more immersive or innovative experience to players.

What do you think are the biggest opportunities and obstacles for mobile game developers now?

Opportunities: In the past 18 months, the industry has performed an irreversible shift from Java to native code, something that's been led by iPhone. This has created a large and increasing market for native games.

We've always believed in the convergence between handheld and mobile devices, and with new and accessible digital distribution channels appearing, the opportunities for companies like us are fantastic.

Good business models combined with good billing and discovery systems, plus user friendly touchscreen devices, creates a great ecosystem. It will also be very interesting to see the role network operators want to play in this new game with new rules.

Obstacles: This is creating huge levels of competition, especially as companies are now migrating from traditional console and handheld development into mobile. This results in a fight for visibility. Another a big obstacle could be fragmentation - unless you develop your own abstraction layer which is what we do.

The winning solution for us is overall quality plus production values and targeted marketing.

There are lots of mobile platforms now, so which ones do you expect to support?

We have been developing our in-house abstraction layer that supports all existing native OS, so we will bring our games or our customers' games to OSes where we can find a sustainable business.

Of course, iPhone is already established. Samsung's bada, Android, Nokia's MeeGo, Symbian, WinMo, etc, all of them are fighting to get their share and we'll keep our eyes open and teams ready.

What should we expect next from Digital Legends?

We'll be releasing additional content and supporting additional platforms for games that we've already released.

We hope to launch several triple-A titles for publishers in 2010, as well as some original IP. It's going to be a busy year. We are also integrating social network features into our core technology so expect to see this in our next titles.

Thanks to Xavier for his time.

You can keep up-to-date with what Digital Legends gets up to via its website.