TouchArcade.ru

I must be biologically programmed to react instantly to anything that reminds me of The Legend of Zelda for NES. Take Carota! [$1.99], for instance, which is a puzzle game starring a rabbit named Thaddeus who’s been knocked down a hole and must proceed through 50 levels of puzzling to make it back to the Earth’s surface. Must have been a deep hole, yeah?

Anyway, if you’ve ever played Zelda (and who hasn’t), you’ll recognize that some of Carota’s levels take place in a room that looks awfully like the rooms of the Zelda dungeons. And so, the nostalgia begins…

It’s really no more than a hat tip though, which I appreciate, since I’ve played plenty of Zelda clones. Carota! is anything but, going in favor of an interesting little puzzle dynamic where you turn blocks with the touch of a finger in order to guide your rabbit to the door.

This sounds very simple, and in the beginning, that is just what it is. You can drag blocks around the screen in order to craft this path, but in order to clear a level, you must use a certain number of blocks or the door will not open. This is no problem at all when your goal is to use four. It gets somewhat more complicated once you have fifteen. Did I mention the blocks also disappear after you waste enough time? Yep, there is that.

You do have a few options at your advantage, however — you can introduce new blocks in at anytime (and you’ll get a preview of what each block is, in the upper left hand corner), and you also have access to a speed button which makes your bunny friend go just a tad faster. Both of these resources are invaluable as the levels become more difficult. Since Thaddeus only walks in one direction most of the time, you’ll have to be crafty about making sure you turn blocks at just the right moments to keep him moving, too. Oh, but he always turns left at forks. And he cannot walk back on a tile he has already crossed. Have you got all this written down?

Keep that pen out. In later levels, there will be more new blocks for you to learn to work with, such as blue ones that are slippery. To say that Carota! gets difficult later down the line would be a bit of an understatement. You’ll have quite a bit going on to manage if you can progress, and that’s when one of the game’s fatal flaws comes in — it’s not always 100% responsive to touch when you are trying to move blocks around. It’s mostly responsive, but I did have a few issues where I had to drag my finger across the screen several times when trying to move a block, which meant losing the precious few seconds I needed and Thaddeus fell to his doom.

Carota! will time you as you progress through each level, so if you want to try to improve your score, the option is there. To tell you the truth, though, some of these levels drove me so crazy, I don’t think I would ever want to play them again. If you’re a high score rockstar, however, OpenFeint and Game Center are waiting for you to get in there and show off your high scores.

I liked the concept of Carota! but I thought it could have been executed better. If the controls were as responsive as I expected, I think it could have helped with the challenge of later levels, but fighting against that issue and the difficulty at the same time made me feel as if I was struggling to have a good time. When the formula works, it works well, but if you don’t have a high tolerance for punishment, you might want to spend that $1.99 elsewhere.

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Here’s a story that has multiple layers of coolness, or, as Shrek would say (Yeah, I’m going there.) it’s like an onion. It all started back in September of last year at the 360iDev conference. 360iDev, in case you haven’t heard of it, is a great get-together for iOS developers because it’s still small enough that you can attend it and actually have a pretty good chance of meeting everyone there instead of just falling into the sea of people that show up for a massive convention like GDC. One of the things they seem to do at every 360iDev is a game jam, or, a marathon game development session where developers crank out workable games from start to finish overnight.

TUAW’s Mike Schramm attended the last one, but, instead of covering it for the site he decided to jump right in and build his own game. He blogged the whole thing, which I’ve found to be incredibly interesting to see what it’s like when a blogger jumps to the other side of the fence, so to speak. At events like these, we’re used to just showing up, hanging out, pestering whoever we can, and saying peace out… Not actually slogging through the whole gam jam process and coming out with an workable product entitled Antithesis [ ].

Original concept sketch on the left, final screenshot on the right.

The concept for the game is cool too. It’s a Pong battle, so to speak, where you control a black paddle and defend against a stream of black balls, while an AI-controlled white paddle does the same. The line in the middle shifts back and forth between both sides depending on who is playing better in a series of waves. Like most game jam titles, it isn’t the deepest game in the world, but it’s really cool reading the whole process and seeing the game in various stages of development then finally playing the end product.

Game Jam photo courtesy of RetroDreamer.

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This is a promo image for Solipskier, which was used when Mikengreg revealed the game to people.

When a game developer creates an awesome game, we expect its next release to be just as good. This works both ways. Greg Wohlwend and Michael Boxleiter of Mikengreg fame have told me what it feels like to have to work on something new with the expectation of past success in the background. It isn’t just noise — it’s having an effect on the development on its new title, Gasketball. From ideas to coding, the shadow of the success of an arcade skiing game called Solipskier [$.99] looms. It makes decisions harder. It ramps up the scope and quality. It’s making the stakes higher at a time when the studio is looking to do something totally different.

We discussed two kinds of pressure: external and internal. Mike and Greg said that they don’t feel any external heat as they build Gasketball. Solipskier got into a lot of hands, but that hasn’t given the studio the kind ravenous base that other great independent developers, like Team Meat of Super Meat Boy fame, enjoy. There aren’t throngs of people  expecting mastery in the follow-up from Mikengreg, in other words, so the bar feels low.

The pressure comes from inside, they expressed. Solipskier’s sales were the best Mikengreg has ever experienced, and the studio desperately wants Gasketball to outperform it in revenue, quality, and audience. Success is mutating their goals, as if the magic of Solipskier could ever be repeated.

“We really want our next game to seem like a step up, which is not actually very different from our early development days, every game we’ve made has been more interesting, more polished and more successful than the last,” Mike told us in an e-mail exchange. “The difference, now, is that we are trying to succeed in terms of a million players willing to pay us, which sets the quality bar dauntingly high for a two-man outfit.”

Gasketball's logo and the placeholder image for the game's web site.

Greg keeps asking himself if it’s even possible to have another Solipskier, and that seems like a fair question to ask. Its development, from idea to prototyping to final release, happened in brilliant flashes of creativity. Gasketball, on the other hand, hasn’t had that sort of conceptual magic. The conceit took longer to come along, and the studio had to throw out a lot of stuff in order to find this game.

“We had to resolve to getting down in the muck and doing the hard work of prototyping, testing, and scrapping everything for yet another prototype that felt like it had promise,” Greg told us. “For a game to really strike all the chords for us it has to be pretty specific.” Solipkier was initially designed as a Flash game. A lot of its systems and mechanics are designed around that platform. Gasketball is a departure, so it took longer to design as the studio learned new tricks.

The idea for Solipskier came from a brainstorming session that revolved around parallax scrolling. Speed and parallax seemed to gel well, so Mike and Greg started prototyping. In a blog post, the duo described the idea for the landscape painting component came as a watershed, “oh my god” moment. With wide-eyes, they went to work. In the end, the Mikengreg created an exhilarating skiing game unlike any other. Instead of focusing on tricks, jumps, and speed, Solipskier leverages style and the emotion that bursts from your chest when you feel like your acceleration is spiraling out of control.

Version ".01" of Solipskier

This wasn’t the duo’s first rodeo. Solipskier was created first and foremost as a flash game, just like Mike’s other titles as a part of Intuition Games. It was, however, the first game of either developer to grab major mainstream appeal. Mike tells me that he realized that this was a truly special project after publishers had entered into a bidding war for the game. An iOS version wasn’t in the picture at the time, but the reality of Flash development changed the tone of the porting conversation going forward.

“We were always looking for the next step out of the Flash world and into a more sustainable market that allowed for us to make larger, more fully formed games,” Greg told us. “The Flash market is great and gave us a way to become better developers while getting paid for it; however, it wasn’t a sustainable business.”

Mike and Greg were working “crazy hours,” and fretting over paychecks when they developed for Flash. Living by the seats of their pants did have its moments. “It was exciting in some ways for sure, but it couldn’t last,” Greg said. “We were lucky to have such success with Solipskier, as it’s allowing us to fully commit to iOS and downloadable titles in future.”

Within the first two months, the iOS version of Solipskier made a little over $70,000, while the sponsored Flash version generated $15,000. On Metacritic, it’s sitting at a 79 average across five positive reviews. Greg tells us that this success “changed the scope” of what it could do with its next game. The duo continued to pay themselves the same amount of money, but Solipskier gave them consistency and the ability to screw up.

Version "0.5." Can you spot the differences!?

“Since Solipskier, we’ve made six or so fairly polished prototypes and scrapped all of them,” Greg tells us. “We could have taken any one of those further but we’d rather call it a failure early and often than find ourselves with a less than stellar finished game that never found that magic we always look for.”

Solipskier’s success and design are weighing heavily on Mike’s mind as he executes concepts on Gasketball. He second guesses a lot and he’s finding it hard to accept praise from friends. “We’ve always seen the flaws in our work first and foremost, but even worse on this project I see things that aren’t there.” Mike elaborated: “My brain is constantly convinced that there are more features I need to discover before the game will be good, but they’re always just out of reach or vision. Every time I implement an idea and it doesn’t make the game instantly better I feel a crush of defeat. I feel a bit like I’m going crazy.”

They’re not alone in this, though.

The Other Guys

Other studios go through the similar issues. Some deliver greatness quickly. After Chair Entertainment released a brilliant Meteroid-style game called Shadow Complex on XBLA, it was able to stoke a similar sort of fanfare and praise with the launch of Infinity Blade. After Simogo released Bumpy Road, it followed it up with an equally charming rhythm and stealth game called Beat Sneak Bandit.

Some studios deliver late. Mobigame released its puzzle game Edge a couple of years ago to insane levels of acclaim and drama. The app was pulled because of a bogus trademark violation just as it was hitting critical mass, and the studio had to fight for the game to get back onto the App Store. Its follow-up, Cross Fingers, released 11 months after Edge. Mobigame’s David Papazian tells us that Cross Fingers is picking up steam. Edge has since been re-released.

Edge on MacOS

“We were very happy with this second game because it is really innovative and completely unique on the App Store. While I am writing, I can see that Cross Fingers is 5th in the Top Free in the US App Store with more than 8 million downloads. However, the game works a lot better now than it did at the start, because we evolved with the market. We added more levels and in-app purchases. Also, the fans are not the same as Edge fans, a lot of women and men from any ages love Cross Fingers, when Edge is more for gamers.”

Papazian says Edge, and its awards, gave his studio legs. The popularity led him to meeting a lot of people, and gave him a good “in” when introducing his work to press. His studio’s pressure was internal, too.

“But you have some pressure, you must do it again and you polish the new game as much as you can, maybe too much. Luckily we did it again, but we did not receive any awards and Apple never featured Cross Fingers on the US store. We had to fight for this success, by updating the game until it finally worked.”

Tiger Styles grabbed a lot of attention with its puzzle game Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor. While working on the follow-up, a Metroid-style game called Waking Mars, Tiger Styles’ David Kalina said he felt a subconscious kind of pressure to one-up Spider. It’s a similar feeling that Mike and Greg feel as they create Gasketball. “When you make a game that gets game of the year nods,” Kalina told us, “there is definitely this feeling that EVERY game needs to live up to that standard, which is sort of an impossible bar to try and meet every time out.”

Waking Mars is more about exploration than anything else.

The development of Spider had a sense of urgency to it. He needed the game to succeed so his studio could exist. With Waking Mars, Kalina said that urgency was replaced with the desire to blow everything up in its second game, which again, is something Mikengreg is similarly struggling with. “When you start approaching game development that way, the cost of everything goes up, and the more you spend, the more risky it is to fail,” he admitted.

Waking Mars, in the end, will keep his studio alive. However, Kalina said he wouldn’t pour so much time and so many resources into Tiger Style’s next game. Kalina wants to be able to fail and experiment and do bold things.

“I’d like to release two or three games in the next year and have them all be surprising in some way, and if they don’t happen to set the world on fire, we can be cool with that because we’re at least trying to push in new directions,” Kalina told us. “The worst thing we could do now is to say ‘we have to do something just like Spider or Waking Mars BUT BIGGER…’ If we go down that path, you may never hear from us again!”

On Gasketball

Gasketball has a chance to be stellar. It’s a basketball game that has its users matching their opponents’ last shots. It’s like a digital version of HORSE, except rendered on a fantastical 2D plane that lets you freely move the hoop and shot placement around. It also has special balls and barriers that you can set up to make your shot more Byzantine and advanced. There’s a plan in place to continually update the game as it lives on the App Store.

Surprisingly, nothing mechanically in Solipskier informed Gasketball’s creative direction, Mike and Greg said. In fact, Greg argued that there wasn’t one to begin with. He said Mike came up with the idea for a playful and fun basketball game that was “a bit more skill-based than just a slingshot or pre-mapped trajectory control scheme” game. Moving in a new direction entirely, Gasketball eschews the stark contrasts of Solipskier in favor of a more playful and fun art direction.

Mike walking people through their first look at Gasketball.

Our expectations got the best of us when we first saw Gasketball. It’s just not the game you envision this studio doing at first glance. Solipkier was speedy and sharp, and it had a very specific and awesome rhythm, tone, and style. You’d figure the next game from this studio would incorporate some of these elements. This game is exceedingly friendlier in look and behavior. It’s also more thoughtful and maybe even a shade or two less impressive from a conceptual standpoint.

The stakes are just higher now. But there’s also another reason this project is especially different for the studio. Like with Mobigames and Cross Fingers, Mikengreg see Gasketball as an opportunity to grab an entirely new audience.

“We’re both getting older and want to do more with our lives than spend a hundred hours a week in a dark office,” Mike tells us. “When you start working independently you tend to hold your breath and accept sacrifices to your happiness in the short term for long term gains and we’ve yet to really succeed in a way that really gives us the security to let go and look to the future.  It can get very nerve wracking to think that you only have one shot at releasing each game, and every time you fail to reach your goals you get one step closer to having to quit trying.”

It’s a strange world right now for Mikengreg, as the studio struggles with the success of Solipskier and thinks about a studio-wide transition. But it’s confident about Gasketball and its eventual quality. We are are, too. We’ve seen the game in action, watched the videos, and have even fiddled with a build. The title threw us off at first, sure, but now that we’re comfortable with the fact that Mikengreg are switching focus, we’ve been able to move past our expectations. It’s figuring out a way to do that, too.

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If you’re lining up to see The Hunger Games tonight, why not bring its official teaser game with you to pass the time? The Hunger Games: Girl On Fire [Free] launched this afternoon for the generous price of $0 and we recommend it without pause. It’s a conceptually solid runner that boasts a tremendous look, and it even introduces some new ideas to its clotted genre.

If you’d like a way more in-depth look, feel free to hit up our preview. We’ll be bringing you more on it in the near future, too, so stay tuned.

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Work with me for a second. Forget that The Hunger Games: Girl on Fire has a connection to the Hunger Games fiction. Instead, let’s just look at is as if it is a normal, everyday product that isn’t being bankrolled by a major movie studio. Let’s do this because, even in this vacuum, it impresses. Provided the final build is as good as the one we’ve been paying, it’s the kind of game we’d recommend without pause: it’s conceptually solid, it has a fantastic look, and it brings some new ideas to a genre that’s hopelessly clotted.

You could argue that Girl on Fire is a spiritual successor to Canabalt [$2.99]. It’s an endless runner that revolves around a daring escape, but it boasts some key points of iteration that change up the play in strong ways. For one, Girl on Fire boasts a regenerating health system. If you take a hit, you lose your momentum, but not the game. As a result, you get get married to sessions, and the overall runner experience doesn’t feel as hollow as it usually does.

More interestingly, Girl on Fire allows you to act on blockades. When one of the game’s huge human-sized hornets buzz into the picture, you can shoot it. There’s also an avoidance mechanic, too, that allows you to jump between the jungle world’s upper and lower tiers. Choosing when to kill and when to jump is a cool tactical layer, which brings choice to conflict. Do you jump when a conga line of hornets fly hurdle towards you, or do you stand your ground and pluck them off? When they fire back at you with their purple balls of doom-y doom, do you jump and take care of them or do you just try to avoid the confrontation altogether?

Solid controls compliment this action. Swipe to move between planes, press to aim your projectile bow weapon and fire. It’s all sharp, simple, and responsive, just like the 16-bit games that the art style and tone of the game have been modeled around. Playing this is like step back into a portal where gaming was purer and simpler.

Semi-Secret’s Adam Saltsman is one of the big independent developers attached to this project, so that’s probably why we feel the connection to Canabalt so strongly. Even if we could stop ourselves from the comparison, we’d still be high on Girl on Fire after our hour or so with it. We’ll be taking a much longer look at the final build when it hits iPhone and iPad tomorrow, so stay tuned.

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I have to admit, I wasn’t sure what to think about Picnic Wars [$0.99 / HD], a castle crusher showcasing the epic feud between vegetables and fruits (which somehow takes place during a picnic). Yet, despite the absurd story, what follows is a decent take on the genre with a good amount of gameplay variety that unfortunately suffers from a lack of content.

In Picnic Wars, you take the role of either fruits or veggies as they seek to destroy the fortresses of the other. You accomplish this by flinging various units at the castles, causing as much mayhem and destruction as possible. Truthfully, I have no idea what picnics have to do with the story, but seeing how zany the concept is I didn’t bother thinking about it.

Gameplay is a bit more complicated than simply tossing fruits or veggies at the opposition. Players take control of up to five different launchers on an isometric grid by moving them up and down the grid to aim. Each launcher can also be upgraded, with some units being more effective when fired from a certain launcher. Meanwhile, the opposition is throwing utensils at your launchers which can damage and eventually destroy your weapons. Combine this with a countdown on each mission, and gameplay in Picnic Wars becomes a bit more fast-paced than other similar games.

However, before you can throw your units, they must first be grown with seeds. Each unit takes a certain amount of seeds and time to grow depending on its strength. In addition, you start with a limited amount of seeds but can obtain more by aiming your allies at scattered seed bags located within the enemy castle.  Plant projectiles have lots of different strengths and attributes, such as the garlic that turns into a group of mini garlic grenades to the cabbage that acts as a delayed grenade. Players are scored based on speed, item collection, and total destruction.

I thought Picnic Wars did a good job creating a fun, varied gamplay foundation. There are a ton of different fruits and veggies to grow, and almost all of them are viable through the majority of the campaign. I also really enjoyed the isometric view which provides a bit of strategy as to where you want to launch seeing as how you may not be able to see some enemies until you take out certain sections. Controls, however, can be a pain as the same isometric view also leads to situations where you have to move some launchers just to tap on others, wasting precious time.

A hard mode is also available, which allows you to play through all the levels again with different units. Hard mode also increases the likelihood of catapult destruction and also removes the targeting sights, making it a bit tougher to accurately aim your shots. I personally loved hard mode, as it provided the perfect amount of difficulty that was missing from the easy mode.

Visually, Picnic Wars boasts a colorful, cartoony style that works well for the content. The game looks great on retina-iPhones, but not so much on the new iPad yet. The music also reflects the quirky feel of the game, although I wasn’t a fan of most of the sound effects (too annoying for my tastes). Strangely enough, the game also had load times between levels that, while not excessive, were still long enough for me to notice.

While Picnic Wars touts a total of 64 levels, in reality you’re getting two campaigns of the same 32-levels with the only difference being that you play as fruits in one campaign and veggies in the other. Each campaign has its share of different units, but the actual maps are the same, offering little in variety to players that have already completed one of the campaigns. Considering how swiftly you can get through the ‘easy’ campaign, you’ll be hurting for more rather quickly.

I’m a bit disappointed at how little there actually is. When you take into account the decent gameplay mechanics and visuals, Picnic Wars ends up feeling like wasted potential. If you’re willing to check it out I have no doubt that it should provide some enjoyment. However, be advised that enjoyment will be short-lived.

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The description for Ziggurat [$.99] calls it “the end of a much longer story — a story which ends with The Last Human On Earth standing atop a stratosphere-high stone pyramid.” Incoboto [$3.99] could have been described similarly: “Incoboto is the end of a much longer story — a story which ends with The Last Human in the Galaxy trying to survive the heat death of the universe.”

It’s a uniquely lonely and melancholy game, and almost every visual and design tweak reinforces that. Inco, the protagonist and player-character, is tiny and feels insignificant next to the immense contraptions he has to manipulate to find new energy sources for his dying solar system; if you zoom the map out far enough, he disappears from sight completely.

Incoboto’s elegant one-finger touch controls keep developer Fluttermind from having to implement a cluttered user interface, keeping players’ focus on only a few things at a time. The relative abundance of inky black sky only reinforces the idea that Inco is thoroughly alone. In fact, the only communication he receives are from outdated corporate memos and the fragmented death rattles of the dead and dying inhabitants of the Milky Way.

Well … that’s not entirely true.

There’s a sentient star named Helios who chirps and bubbles his way through the galaxy  at Inco’s side, helping him solve puzzles and cannibalizing enough “starpieces” to reinvigorate the cosmos. Helios is consummately chipper, and puts Inco’s dire situation in sharp relief. The best science fiction makes the audience forget that the world is ending in favor of highlighting interpersonal relationships. It only takes a few minutes for Helios to become a charming and precious  sidekick, and Fluttermind achieve it with a few words of broken dialogue and a handful of facial animations. It also doesn’t hurt that cooperation with Helios is crucial to solving most of Incoboto’s puzzles. Utility breeds empathy.

Nevertheless, Fluttermind bring a sort of streamlined efficiency to the rest of their game as well. There’s not a stray piece of dialogue to be found, or a single puzzle or mechanic that doesn’t build upon, integrate, or recontextualize something that came before it.

Incoboto’s galaxy is comprised of a number of small clusters loaded up with machinery, contraptions, portals, force fields, and various other doo-dads designed to encumber Inco on his quest for starpieces. Each world or cluster introduces a new puzzle concept or piece of gear, usually accompanied by Tweet-able slogans or warnings from the cartoonishly evil, Cave-Johnson-era-Aperture-Science-esque Corporation. The worlds feel full and realized: as the Corporation spread, it makes sense that they’d leave defunct machinery in their wake, abandoned on planets slowly rotating about their axes.

The comparison to Portal doesn’t come lightly. A large portion of the puzzles Inco must solve are portal based, and the basics of momentum will be crucial to understanding the toughest ones. More generally, Incoboto falls well within the broad spectrum of physics puzzle games.

Each gameplay chunk is relatively short and discrete — gates to new worlds are unlocked as Helios eats more starpieces — and each new section introduces a new mechanic, giving Incoboto a feeling of constant forward progress. The real trick is how seamlessly each of Incoboto’s new lessons makes its way into the next series of puzzles, getting absorbed into an ever-expanding framework of mechanics and concepts. There are clear laws in Incoboto, but Fluttermind is at liberty to interpret them differently from world to world.

Each gameplay element — the puzzles, the bombs, the gravity beams — are relatively simple, but Fluttermind integrate them in such a way that the game never feels straightforward or boring. Incoboto’s complexity is matched by smart, efficient pacing. I often felt like I was mastering a complex system in a short amount of time. It also makes each section feel meaningful and genuine, giving Incoboto the feel of a much larger and fully-featured game.

In other words, when Incoboto is firing on all cylinders, it’s an empowering puzzle game that makes its players feel smart and successful, like the last gear in a Swiss watch.

When Incoboto stretches too far — when the puzzles seem impossible or, more often, when the touch controls don’t live up to the platforming required of them — it comes crashing to a halt. I spent three days firmly, mind-numbingly stuck in the KindWord system last week.

Finally figuring KindWord out was its own reward, but a single huge breakthrough isn’t quite the same feeling as the joy of sustained momentum, of watching Incoboto’s system gyrate in perfect harmony.  Incoboto is elegant and subdued, unafraid to juxtapose the vastness of the cosmos and the terror of inevitable burning out with the intimacy and charm of a small boy befriending a star. It’s tightly and efficiently designed and as much an experience as it is a game, one that I do hope you check out.

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On the Wind is an eye-catching game. The interplay between the light, floral art and the chunky pixelized interfaces just begs for attention. t’s hard to tell exactly how it plays from the trailer, but the gist is this: the screen scrolls by, getting faster and faster as you progress through the seasons. You control the gust of leaves with your fingertip, moving it around obstacles and through other leaves that scatter across the field. It feels a bit like a wire loop game with added speed and less sadism.

At first glance it’s easy to assume that thatgamecompany’s Flower is the obvious source of inspiration, but developer David Buttress says it didn’t much factor into his design. Instead, he looked to The Helicopter Game, a classic Flash-based cave flier with simple, one-touch controls and a rather brutal difficulty curve. The idea for the leaves and flowing motion came from a more esoteric source: a in-depth look into Boids, an early artificial life program that models flocking behavior. He was particularly fascinated by the idea that such complex and beautiful motion could be created from a few simple rules, and he is bringing that organic motion into play in On the Wind.

Buttress is new to the iOS development world, having just recently launched his one-man studio, Don’t Step On The Cracks. But he’s coming from a long background in game development at Rare. Working with the other creative-types at the studio was often inspiring, but he had few chances to work on the small, creative ideas that cropped up. As with so many other developers moving from the console space, he found that iOS offers a great opportunity to play around with the concepts that had been building up while he put his time into larger projects like Conker: Live and Reloaded and Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts.

Buttress reached far and wide for inspiration while developing On the Wind. The silhouettes that make up the environment were initially inspired by Limbo. Rather than taking a similarly dark and pensive approach, he built on the idea, letting in riotous color for the leaves, flowers and backdrops. The sparseness of the sound is another carefully considered choice, like the auditory atmosphere in Shadow of the Colossus, which was usually formed only by the sound of the wind and the hooves of your horse.

For now, On the Wind is a concise experience meant for on-the-go play, one that runs through the seasons in short order before ending. Buttress is considering an update with an endless mode and powerups in the future, but for now he’s happy to launch with a still-pure experience. Between the procedurally generated world, leaderboards and a series of clever achievements, though, fans should find plenty of reasons to keep going. We’re certainly looking forward to playing more, having had a taste of the game. We’ll be sure to let you know when it lands, hopefully in a handful of weeks.

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Conceptually, it’s hard not to fall in love with this one. Graeme Devine, and his studio GRL Games, are working on a… spiritual successor of sorts to dance game Space Channel 5. It’s called Dance City, and it’s looking to leverage story, attitude, and dancing. In our meeting with Graeme today, he expressed his extreme love for narrative-led games, as well as quick-to-play titles with “one more time” hooks. Extrapolating, we’re guessing Dance City is going to try to have all of these things.

It’s early, so we don’t know much. On the other hand, we do have the following image, which clearly reveals that Dance City will feature a strong protagonist, and a dance-for-followers mechanic, which should be pretty radical:

We’ll keep our eyes on this as it hurdles to release and bring you much more as soon as possible.

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We had a chance to sit down with the folks from 99Games (creators of WordsWorth [$1.99 / Free] and The Jim and Frank Mysteries [$0.99 / HD], among other apps) and took a look at the games they have coming up in the next few months.

First up, WordsWorth HD [$2.99] has a big update incoming. The main thing to expect is a new single-device multiplayer mode. Where the game’s online multiplayer is a strategic asynchronous affair, the head-to-head (or side-by-side) single device mode is frantic. Both players have their own copies of a shared board, and letters disappear as your opponent uses them. Looks like it’s going to be a really great time.

Up next is Night Club Mayhem. 99Games has played with the time management concept before with Prison Mayhem [Free]. Night Club Mayhem brings those lessons back to a setting that might have slightly more crowd appeal. It’s nice to see a solid time management title that doesn’t run on IAP currency. The cool thing here is that the developer has put a lot of love into the accompanying mini-games, with a rhythm-style DJing game and a surprisingly complicated bartending simulation in the mix.

Night Club Mayhem should be out soon— 99Games expects it to be one of the first new games to fully support the Retina iPad, and it will hit Mac and PC at some point too.

A little further down the road iPhone users should be seeing the adorable physics puzzler Tito’s Shell. The version we took a look at was still under heavy development, but it’s looking good so far. Each timed level separates Tito the turtle from his shell, and the player has to use the environment to put them back together. Just about any part of the level can be connected to anything else within a tight range, so the solutions get increasingly experimental in a sort of Rube Goldberg machine way. It looks like it’s coming along well, and will certainly make a place for itself in the world of cute animal physics puzzlers.

There’s one more game up on 99Games’ slate: Dream Star. If you’re into the idea of a IAP-currency supported movie star simulator, keep your eyes open for this one when it comes out later in spring.

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