TouchArcade.ru

Putter King Adventure Golf [99¢] is released by Putter King, a company with real indoor miniature golf franchises, so these guys should know how to design a fun and challenging mini-putt experience. We were keen to see how their real-world ideas would translate onto our iOS devices. The good news is: They've done a pretty decent job of it.

This game sports four different modes: Championship mode is a regular single-player round of mini-golf. In Time trial mode, you're racing against the clock to sink the ball in the shortest possible time on any specific unlocked hole. Multi-player mode allows 2 to 4 local players to take turns on the same device (there's currently no online multiplayer). But before you play the other modes, you may want to invest some time on practice mode, to hone your skills. It would be nice if there was a career mode or tournament, to tie multiple games together, but there's currently not.

There are four cartoon avatars to choose between (2 male, 2 female), although this decision only affects which character appears on the screen. The avatars have no different attributes and don't really impact the game, so they're basically just a cosmetic preference. Although they are quite large and do obscure your view of the course, so since there's no option for "no avatar", it's probably a strategic advantage to pick the thinnest character.

There are three different courses, with 23 uniquely themed holes to play in total. The courses include 'Adventure in Japan', 'Trip around the world' and 'Putty's playground', with the last course being initially locked.  Each hole in Putty's playground must be unlocked by completing a specific challenge, such as: Score two hole-in-one's in a row, or finish a championship below par.

The courses are all rendered in 3D and feature all the slopes, jumps, water traps, bridges, tunnels and obstacles you'd expect to see on a regular mini-putt course.  Some of the more elaborate obstacles include a sumo wrestler, a moving sushi conveyer belt and the mandatory windmill.  There's different surfaces, like fake grass, wood, stone and even an ice slope. They also mix things up occasionally by making you take shots in the dark or without any aiming lines. One level even asks you a multi-choice general knowledge question, which opens a short-cut if you answer correctly.

The physics are well implemented, providing the same frustration you'd feel in real life as your ball circles the hole without sinking, or narrowly misses the hole and rows back down the slope of Mt. Fuji (again). The main challenge is getting the speed of your swing right, as a gentle touch is required at times.

The controls work pretty well …mostly. A large horizontal slider along the bottom of the screen lets you choose which of the three starting points to tee off from (not sure why you can't just touch a starting tee).  To aim your shot, you drag your finger around the screen while little white dots indicate where you're aiming. When you're ready to hit the ball, you simply drag a large vertical slider down …and then push it upwards at the desired speed. Very occasionally, it wouldn't let me aim the ball in the direction I wanted, as it became a little confused in tight spaces, although it would always respond in the end.

In real mini-golf there's often a maximum 9-shot limit, to stop queues forming at holes. But here, you can take over forty shots. There's no option for throwing your clubs when you play badly, but you can hit the ball right off the green, into the "out-of-bounds" area, which every mini-putter needs to try at least once.

Once you eventually sink the ball, your result is displayed (eg: Bogey) and your overall scorecard appears. Unfortunately the scorecard doesn't include an in-progress total, so you can't immediately tell if you're above or below par overall. Openfeint leaderboards are provided for the three courses and for time trials on each hole, with just seven achievements.

The 3D course graphics and themed backgrounds are generally well presented, although your avatars feet and club often pass straight through the objects on the course. And some text labels exceed their background boxes, which looks untidy. Also, some objects become translucent when they block your view, however a couple of times my view was completely obscured in both camera perspectives, making aiming difficult, which is particularly frustrating if you're in the middle of a dream round (I wasn't).

Putter King Adventure Golf does a great job of capturing the spirit of miniature golf, bringing back memories of playing this as a child against my father. With the multiplayer mode, a family of four can now have mini-golf competitions at home, with the loser doing the dishes. The 3D holes are pretty creative, but if you want something different, the developers are currently running a design-a-hole competition, with the winning three user-designed holes to be added as a free update in future.

[source]

The developers at ustwo™ have unleashed their first full-fledged entry into the gaming category on the App Store in the form of Whale Trail [99¢]. Taking the simple mechanics from the popular cave-flying genre and wrapping them up in gobs of top-notch style and presentation, Whale Trail offers an experience that is practically like nothing else currently available on the iOS platform.

We took a fairly extensive look at the ins and outs of Whale Trail during our hands-on preview from earlier this month, so be sure to give that a look for even more details. But to reiterate, Whale Trail employs cave-flying mechanics, where touching the screen causes protagonist Willow the Whale to rise into the sky, and letting go drops him down. You must use this to avoid the evil dark clouds in the sky, which will only increase in numbers the farther you travel.

Keeping you afloat (because as you can imagine, whales can’t inherently fly in the sky) is your magical rainbow trail that flows from behind Willow. Your trail is constantly running out, but you can keep it energized by collecting the many colorful lines of bubbles that are laid out in your path in the sky. The dark clouds will cause your trail to evaporate at a rapid rate as well, and an errant turn into a group of clouds can end your run quite suddenly if you aren’t careful.

Adding some complexity to the fairly basic cave flying is a multiplier system tied into the scoring. Collecting bubbles will fill a meter that increases your multiplier which in turn exponentially increases the points earned by picking up bubbles. Running into a cloud will drop this multiplier down a level, forcing you to refill the meter to get it back to where it was and giving you yet another reason to avoid the clouds.

Other gameplay elements include the ability to do a loop the loop, which can be necessary to follow the trail of bubbles, but can also totally throw off your rhythm; and boost swirls, which will propel your forward in a quick burst and can get you higher into the sky to collect out of the way rewards, but can also make Willow more difficult to control.

Finally, stars can be collected along your journey and getting enough of them will send Willow into a state of temporary invincibility. During this time, a large invisible aura surrounds Willow which will grab bubbles even if he isn’t touching them, making it much easier to grab them all. Also, you can blast straight through clouds while invincible, and these give off a huge point bonus. A spell of invincibility coupled with a particularly high multiplier is key to earning the type of huge scores that will make you stand out on the Game Center leaderboards.

The gameplay in Whale Trail is simplistic but with subtle strategies, and really nails the type of hooks that keep you wanting to play over and over again to improve both your skills and your score. About the only thing I don't like is that a run can take a pretty long time to complete, and the difficulty ramps up a bit too slowly. These are easy things to forgive, but some sort of quick play option that throws you right into the heat of the later parts of the game might be a neat addition.

However, beyond the solid gameplay, what stands out the most about Whale Trail is the stellar presentation. Bursting with color, whimsy, and downright bizarreness, the visuals in Whale Trail are like a psychedelic trip for your eyes and ears. It’s the type of game I imagine Dr. Timothy Leary and company could have dreamt up at Millbrook back in the 60s. It’s straight up wild, man.

But besides being like a freaky LSD trip, Whale Trail is also very endearing. It’s the sort of game that just makes you happy when you play it, even if you can’t explain why. Willow is adorable as a main character, and you find yourself rooting for him to succeed, and trying extra hard to avoid clouds so that he doesn’t get zapped by them. The excellent folky soundtrack complements the visuals perfectly, and everything just comes together as a cohesive experience.

Whale Trail contains all the components of a hit iOS game – colorful visuals, catchy music, a cute main character, and gameplay that’s easy for anybody to pick up but hard to master. But somehow, it manages to not feel forced or contrived, and instead sticks out as something wholly unique from anything else out there. It’s an experience as much as it is a fun game to play, and for the low price of entry you shouldn’t hesitate to turn on, tune in, and drop out to Whale Trail.

[source]

Adult Swim has been on a roll lately publishing flat-out incredible games, and if you thought Monsters Ate My Condo [99¢] great, the publisher has somehow managed to ever-so-slightly one up themselves with Bring Me Sandwiches!! [99¢]. The premise is simple, and delightfully ridiculous– You play as Jimmy Nugget, a hapless employee of Stuffy's, a local fast food joint. For some reason, you and you alone have ben put to the task of feeding an evil alien would-be overlord named Gourmo who has the strangest taste in sandwiches.

The idea is to make a sandwich by collecting ingredients from around the platform level. You can start with a basic cheese sandwich, but, you can add non-standard fillings like burgers, apples, oranges or hot-dogs. And then, what the heck, let's throw in: Wine bottles, flowers, tins, potted plants, beach-balls, and much much more. Each time you add another filling, your sandwich gets taller, until you're carrying around a giant towering treat filled with the craziest ingredients. A sandwich meter of sorts lets you know when your sandwich has grown large enough to please your alien master.

Soon, Gourmo starts placing more specific food orders: "Bring me …1 sandwich with a cat!"  The particulars of his order are displayed as icons at the top of the screen which are ticked off you collect them.  To find the ingredients, you must explore the busy levels, which include buildings to climb, bouncy roofs, clothes-lines to cross and water hydrants to smash so you can ride the gushing water into the air. There's dissolving clouds, larger items to push around, locked sections that need a key and even hidden areas to discover. And all this time, you're still carrying around a massive sandwich, which expands and contracts depending where you are.

Once the food is prepared, you take it to a waiting alien representative, who transports it up to the obese invader Gourmo, who devours it hungrily. There's an indicator on the screen which always points towards the alien, so it's easy to find. As the game progresses, you're put to the task of building multiple sandwiches as well.

When you make a second sandwich, your slice of bread gets larger, so you can dump bigger fillings on it, like crates, televisions or satellite dishes. Apparently Gourmo isn't too fussy about his nutritional intake. When you make a third sandwich, you're given a VERY large slice of bread, which allows even larger fillings, like say, a fridge. I won't keep listing the ingredients, but according to the "Food Journal" in the main menu, there's heaps of fillings to discover.

After a while Gourmo starts asking for other things to eat; like cake. But food's not the only thing to collect. There's also 29 alien spaceship parts to discover (one per stage) and presumably these help you reach "the mysterious Planet Nuzz" mentioned in the iTunes description. There's also special pick-up items like the alien rocket pack for double jumping, or a food-magnet to attract out-of-reach items.

It"s not always easy to walk around with a towering sandwich. Birds and dogs are attracted to it and a protesting hippie might hit you with his protest sign, knocking  some fillings off your bread. Naughty children might fire slingshots at you and beware of dogs and nasty little girls on pogo-sticks. These hostile characters can all be slapped onto a large piece of bread and fed to the alien. Problem solved.

After being hurt five times, such as falling into a hole, your health meter is depleted and the stage ends. Although you can restart from a checkpoint, with the same score, stage time and sandwich percentage you possessed back at that point. Discovering a red heart will restore some health. Or, If you collect 50 coins, you earn one heart. With all the sandwich making, it's easy to forget this is also a platform game.

There are four chapters to play (USA, Mexico, Italy and Japan) with 29 stages in total, including four auto-scrolling stages which play like an endless runner in a platform game. Each chapter has one bonus stage to unlock. The chapters are all uniquely themed. For example, the Mexico chapter has a desert setting with prickly cacti and kicking donkeys, with Mexican-style music, bandits in sombreros and Mexican food items to collect, like tacos. The last stage in each chapter is a larger level, which can't be by-passed with the skip level function. Plus there's a special final chapter, at the very end of the game which you need enough spaceship parts to unlock.

Instead of a star-scoring system, three slices of gold bread are awarded for each level, based on specific targets for score, time taken and number of food spills. These three goals can each be achieved in different runs, which provides an incentive to replay levels. Although just by reaching the end of a level, you unlock the next level, even if you fail the time, score and spill targets.

Three control options are provided, including tilt, touch (choose one half of screen for running and the other half for jumping) or buttons. The developers even get bonus points for implementing buttons that can each be individually re-positioned on the screen. Although strangely, when the game starts you're presented with two control options to choose from, as this wonderful button option is not mentioned. Although it's available, in the options menu. My only criticism is that the jumping is a bit awkward when bouncing off someone's head, sometimes requiring multiple attempts. Apart from this the controls work perfectly fine.

We gave the last wacky game from Adult Swim, Monsters ate my Condo, a five star review, and Sandwiches!! is another quality well-constructed release, with similarly vibrant graphics. It's amusing, varied, highly entertaining and excellent value for a dollar.  Also, for you hopeful iPad owners out there, while an iPad version isn't available (and also isn't currently in the works, per the developers) it also hasn't been ruled out as a future possibility.

[source]

Late in 2010, Semi Secret released SteamBirds [$1.99 / HD], a turn-based aerial dog-fighting game based on the Flash game of the same name, which we thought was "tons of fun". Apparently other people liked it too, as it's reportedly been played by 12 million people worldwide (including the online Flash version). Well, the original makers of the game, SpryFox, teamed up with HalfBrick to release a sequel – Steambirds: Survival [Free/HD]. And it's definitely worth checking out (again!)

It's a top-down dog-fighting game where you play a pilot with the Allies, fighting against the Axis powers, to protect the United Kingdom. But the cool twist is that it's also turn-based. Your aircraft has an arrow in front of it, which represents the distance and direction it will travel in the next turn. You can bend the line to control your plane's flight-path.

When you press the "End Turn" button, your plane moves for a couple of seconds, as do any other planes in the sky, including enemies.  If any enemies appear in front of you, your plane automatically opens fire. It's like a slow-motion dog-fight, which plays out in bursts. Some of the AI controlled planes are on your side, so they'll also shoot at any Axis enemies.

In the original version, the missions were pretty basic: The enemies all appeared at once and you had to shoot them all down. Whereas Survival has eight cities to unlock and defend, like Aberdeen, Manchester and Exeter. Each city has eight specific missions to complete, such as  "Down three planes", "Survive 5 waves (of attack)" or "take down 8 bombinos within 5 waves". Instead of one wave of enemies, there's now multiple waves, making the missions feel more much varied and interesting. In fact, there's much more content in this release overall, with 64 missions and eight planes now and a further 56 missions and seven additional planes to be released soon.

Once you've completed a mission you can either return to base to play the next mission, or continue playing for glory and to earn extra copper (money). You'll score more copper by taking out more challenging enemies. Once you've beaten a mission, you can't replay it, although after beating the first seven missions for a city a much harder eighth "infinite" mission is unlocked. You keep playing this eighth mission until the enemy eventually shoots you down; and you can replay it too, for better scores in Game Center or Openfeint.

In the original, your plane started with specific power-ups, with no additional power-ups being available during the mission. In Survival, power-ups can be gained by shooting down enemies. To use a power-up, you simply tap the arrowhead in front of your plane to display an icon for each acquired power-up. This might include super-speed to travel further or bombs to deploy when planes are tailing you. You can also collect homing missiles, a 180 degree turn, a 360 degree attack, shields or maybe a poisonous green gas to deploy in front of an approaching enemy aircraft.

The touch controls work brilliantly, allowing you to frequently and quickly adjust your plane's direction as you hunt down other (moving) planes. But remember, you're sometimes given a finite number of turns to complete a mission, so if you fly around excessively or chase down every single power-up, you could put the mission in jeopardy.

In Survival, each of the eight cities features a different aircraft for you to pilot, each with different strengths and weaknesses. For example, one of the first planes you unlock is the "Buster", a bomber with relatively weak guns. Whereas the "Looper" is powerful with fast guns, but has relatively weak armor and relies on 360 degree power-ups and careful flying to stay alive. You have to use different strategies for each unique airplane.

You can tap any aircraft, including enemies, to view it's statistics ("health", weapons, speed, agility and armor) plus a status description, such as "on fire – nearly dead" or "going down!" This allows a clever player to be strategic in their attacks. For example, prioritizing your kills by attacking the main threat first and targeting planes with a shorter firing range from a distance. Of course, if you prefer more casual play, you can just fly around shooting at stuff.

Another new feature is that you can use your copper to buy assistance at the start of a level (up to two extra controllable allied planes). This allows you to fly multiple planes together as a squadron, for defensive maneuvers or for stronger attacks. You can also use copper to unlock cities earlier, although this leaves less to spend on other things.

Steambirds: Survival is a free-to-play game, with advertising banners at the bottom of each menu screen and full-size advertisements between each level – but there are no adverts displayed while you're actually playing (although the standard version has a bug which causes ads to appear obtrusively, but the developers have already submitted a fix to apple). If you choose to remove the adverts altogether with an In-App Purchase (IAP), it also unlocks all of the eight cities. The developers advise that the entire game can be completed without IAP, but it's available if you're impatient to progress.

The developers plan to eventually deliver asynchronous multi-player Steambirds, which would be super-awesome. With the arrival of iOS 5, hopefully we'll see more asynchronous turn-based games being released. In the meantime, there's a free Flash version of Steambirds: Survival to try on your computer. It isn't exactly the same as the iOS version, but gives you a feeling of the gameplay …but since it's free (and a great game) you might as well just download the iOS version!

[source]

One of the many features that set Twitter ablaze with the announcement of iOS 5 back at WWDC was AirPlay mirroring. AirPlay had already been around for a while, and in its initial form allowed iOS devices to steam video to an Apple TV or audio to an Airport Express. Mirroring, as the name implies, mirrors the current display of your device on whatever video display you've got your Apple TV plugged into. Crafty developers have even figured out how to output a different image than the one that's being displayed on your iOS device, which is really cool in action.

Initially, AirPlay mirroring required an iPad 2 and when it was first unveiled it was never very clear if or when other iOS would have the same capabilities– Especially since Apple has made it abundantly clear that they still consider the Apple TV a "hobby" of theirs. Well, with the release of the iPhone 4S, which also comes packed with AirPlay mirroring support, it seems reasonable to assume that all future iOS devices will have the capability.

Unfortunately, without some killer software utilizing the functionality, it sort of seems like a gimmick– At least, so far. The selection of games that embrace the mirroring functionality in interesting ways are remarkably sparse. So far the best of the bunch seems to be Chopper 2 [99¢]:

As cool as AirPlay is, its main drawback for gaming seems to be a ever-so-slight but totally perceptible lag. Piloting the helicopter in the Chopper games seems to be almost intentionally floaty (it is a helicopter, after all). This seems to mask the lag very well, and using the iOS device screen for input is done well.

Comparatively, Real Racing 2 [$4.99 / HD] does much more with the actual iOS device screen, but the previously mentioned slight lag in controls makes just playing the game normally without the Apple TV seem much more fun. The multiplayer mode does feel like the future though:

Aside from the small bit of lag, it works really well, almost surprisingly so. I downloaded the game on my iPad 2, flipped on AirPlay mirroring, and hosted a local game. Seeing the same video output on my iPhone being routed through the iPad 2 and rendered on my TV wirelessly seemed like magic, especially as more iOS devices joined the race.

I'm so incredibly torn on this functionality right now. The potential it has is just incredible, especially in future devices and/or developer optimization of these games reduces the lag between the iOS device and the Apple TV. Once this delay goes from barely noticeable but always there to non-existent, I think it'll be totally easy to get onboard, and an Apple TV might even be required hardware for the dedicated iOS gamer to own. Right now though, I wouldn't encourage anyone to rush out and buy an Apple TV specifically to try out this new Real Racing 2 mode.

That being said, the Apple TV is a really cool device that is well worth the $100 if you've got an HDMI port on your TV and don't already have an Xbox 360, PS3, or even something like a Roku Streaming Player hooked up to it. If you've got an A5-powered iOS device, being able to do some neat things with an incredibly small (right now, anyway) library of games is just icing on the cake. Sure, you can duplicate all this mirroring functionality with the Apple Digital AV Adapter as well, but it's incredibly clunky hanging off the side of your device, and at $40, you might as well just spend another $60 and get all the added functionality of the Apple TV.

[source]

The arcade shoot'em-up Crossfire was released for Xbox in July 2010, followed by Crossfire 2 a few months later. Now Radian Games and their publisher, Chillingo, have released Super Crossfire [99¢ / HD] for our iOS devices. This game plays like a colorful version of the classic 1978 game Space Invaders, with one key difference: When a wall of bullets and lazers rains down on you, leaving you boxed in the corner and about to be destroyed …your spaceship can flee to safety by warping between the top and bottom of the screen.

But warping to the top of the screen doesn't necessarily ensure your safety, as the aliens can shoot upwards too. Some enemies have shields and can only be hit from one side, which necessitates warping up and down to get a clear shot. By collecting the gems dropped by destroyed aliens, you can charge up segments of your super-fire meter, then briefly shoot anything, even if it's shielded.

The warp drive is an interesting twist, as it forces you to pay attention to both parts of the screen. The developers blog mentions that they once considered having enemies move like another classic arcade game, Galaga, but they decided against this as it interfered with the warping. Still, it would be nice to see some different movements or perhaps a boss appear. That said, the game  throws 19 enemies and more and more bullets at you, until it almost feels like a bullet-hell scenario, which works really well.

Periodically, a UFO flies across the screen, which is another familiar concept from Space Invaders. The flying saucer drops a power-up when destroyed. For example, it might drop a bubble shield or slow-down the enemies movements. To collect a pick-up you simply warp across it. Unfortunately the pick-ups aren't super exciting and it doesn't announce what they are when collected.  Although the bubble-shield is very handy amongst all those bullets.

The game has a fast and exciting pace, with wave after wave of vector-graphics style enemies. There's a camera tilt effect which displays the entire game on an angle which changes each time you warp. You can select high or low angle tilt, although I personally found the angled perspective off-putting and turned this option completely off, so it's great that these options were included.

After every five waves of alien attack, your ship is repaired and you're given the opportunity to upgrade it using the points you've acquired. The upgrade system works really nicely. There are ten upgrade categories, including:  Armor, speed, shot frequency / power, firing rate, shot spread / speed, super power, super segments and gem magnetism. You can also downgrade these categories mid-game and re-allocate the points to different abilities. An auto-upgrade option is available, but it's fun to customize it manually.

Super Crossfire offers hundreds of control options (or to be more precise: 9). This includes 3 button, 3 tilting  and 3 slider lay-outs, with additional options for multi-touch. Unfortunately, none of these control options felt nice on the iPad, as the left and right buttons are too far apart. If you're going to put that much effort into controls, it's probably better to let the user customize the button positions themselves. Fortunately, it's far more comfortable, enjoyable and cheaper to play on the smaller iPhone or iPod touch screen, where the buttons are closer together.

The main menu has an "Unlockables" section, listing nine items to unlock with earned victory points. For example, the "doubler" makes enemies and gems worth twice as much, "Musician" enables the music-player option on the main menu, with sliders for tweaking filter and pitch, while "perfection gives you extra victory points for each perfect wave.  The most expensive unlockable is "Super Blast" which gives you a wider superfire.  You can also use your victory points to unlock chapters early. And you can buy victory points as in-app purchases.

There are five chapters to play through, with 150 unique enemy waves and three difficulty levels to unlock. The leaderboards are managed using Chillingo's Crystal as well as Game Center, along with 16 achievements. There's high score tables for 1-life and composite scores, plus a leaderboard for each of the five chapters. When you die, you can continue an infinite amount of times, without needing to restart from the very beginning, thankfully.

Personally, I didn't enjoy playing Super Crossfire on the iPad as the main left / right controls are too far apart. However, after switching to the smaller iPod screen, it was an enjoyable classic-feeling arcade experience. After 33 years, shooting space invaders is still fun! The developer advises the first update will include the "Dark Chapters", delivering some even faster-paced action and offering higher upgrade points, with an alternate background color scheme. The first update will also include additional leaderboards and achievements.

[source]

TechCrunch is reporting that Nintendo's exclusivity with the Professor Layton series is ending and one of the first things developer Level-5 will be doing is releasing a new iOS game called Layton Brothers: Mystery Room. Unfortunately, details further than that are non-existent at this point. We'll just have to wait and see on pricing and availability, as well as how the content of Mystery Room will compare to previous installments in the Layton franchise.

What has me leaning back in my chair and contemplatively puffing my proverbial pipe with this news is the fact that the Professor Layton games are by far the DS's most successful series– Both critically and commercially. If you follow TouchArcade, you no doubt remember the various pieces we've done on Nintendo such as "Nintendo Facing Investor Pressure to Bring Games to iPhone" analyzing the puzzling future of the gaming giant.

I don't think it's much of a stretch to say that the Professor Layton series brought a bunch of players to the Nintendo DS, and while I'm sure the DS still would have been a successful platform without it, it's definitely not a good sign to see developers anxious to jump off the exclusivity ship with the big N.

These are interesting times, indeed. *puffs pipe*

[source]

One thing that I do quite a bit of for TouchArcade is attend various conferences. We always hit the big ones like E3 in Los Angeles, along with both WWDC and GDC in San Francisco as well as several smaller conventions throughout the year that often don't amount to a lot of coverage– But where it's still great to meet people and have a presence at them. These events (even the mega-corporate ones like E3) have a vibe about them that's really difficult to describe unless you've been to one.

I think the best way to label the feeling would be "inspirational." You're surrounded by game developers who have all travelled from the farthest corners of the Earth with goals to both promote their existing games, as well as improve their future titles. I've seen amazing things come out of game jams, partnerships spring up over coffee, and game ideas being refined via a form of incredibly open peer review over beer and pizza. The whole process is great, and leaves you feeling lucky that you even had the chance to play your small role in witnessing it.

Attendees of these various get-togethers likely know exactly what I'm talking about, and this is wholly the reason why I always encourage developers to attend conventions whenever possible. Sure, they can often times seem like an unnecessary business expense, but can you really put a price on the value of one piece of random feedback that takes your entire project to a whole new level?

Anyway, not having attended GDC Online since 2009 (It was GDC Austin then) I was beyond stoked to take part in the conference. Not very many developers that I've worked with in the past were going, but that was OK– the best part about conventions is meeting new people and being absolutely awestruck when they show you what they're working on.

Sword & Sworcery amazed us at GDC '10.

GDC is split into several different sub-categories that they call summits. Of particular interest to me was the Smartphone and Tablet Games Summit, which historically at other events has been fairly interesting with compelling panels and speakers covering a wide variety of topics. Looking back at my last visit to Austin, TX I heard a talk from Imangi Studios on their tips for success as well as the guys from Tiger Style detailing their whole creative and business process. These sessions were educational, and while they both cited specific things they did, the advice was all general enough that everyone could take something away to improve their games or how they make their games.

Somehow, over the last two years, GDC Austin Online seems to have shifted to a convention where you go to learn how to be a better game developer to a convention where you go to learn how juice the absolute maximum amount of money out of your player base. Sessions where you listen to developers give newcomers incredibly useful tips and inspirational advice have been replaced by representatives from large free to play development outfits talking about the chilling precision their in-depth analytics package allows them for real-time tweaking to encourage in-app purchasing rates in their farming games.

Panels on utilizing the touch interface in unique and clever ways have been shifted to presentations on the importance of monetization, and everywhere you look it seems like there's a different middleware provider anxious to tell you all about their new virtual currency, metrics package, or captive pool of freemium players that they're willing to sell you if the price is right.

I felt something was off for the whole convention, until I attended the "Smartphone & Tablet Developer Rant" panel, where Graeme Devine said what I imagine quite a few people (myself included) were thinking: GDC Online isn't a game developers conference, it's a data miner and metrics convention. "We're not game developers here," as a response to the pressure from every direction to monetize every possible avenue in your game where a player might have the opportunity to earn you money in one way or another.

Following the rant, I had quite the discussion with Devine about the current trends in iOS gaming. We both fondly looked back to that initial experience of powering up the original iPhone. According to Graeme, inertial scrolling and pinch to zoom felt "magical," and I'm in complete agreement. We've gotten to the point where this 30+ year veteran of the gaming industry has no qualms describing iOS devices as the best gaming platform, as the potential that the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch have borders on limitless– But the direction that many iOS developers are taking them couldn't be more depressing.

"Metrics are great," says Devine, referring to the ability of always-on and always-connected devices like the iPhone to constantly report all forms of analytics. Now developers can easily tell when you play, how long you play, when players fail, and much, much more. For a game designer actively looking to improve their game, on the iPhone it's easy to see that too many players are falling into a pit in your platform game that you never intended to be a challenging obstacle, for instance. That hazard can be easily tuned, and quickly dispatched via an update. Even though metrics can certainly have a spyware-like feel to them, they can also be instrumental in building a substantially better game. Especially a low-budget iPhone game that likely doesn't enjoy the benefits of a vast army of play testers.

Unfortunately, the way developers are using these tools, and the way far too many business-types are encouraging them to, is to fine-tune revenue streams. Remember, if you're not buying a product, you are the product– With the success of the free to play model on the App Store, projects are now being built from the ground up with maximum monetization in mind. Developers are evolving their business to even stray from in-app purchases as their primary revenue sources, realizing that there's just as much (if not more) value in the larger portion of their user base that never buys anything who can be sold and traded with other developers for cross-promotion deals.

Graeme argues that the word "monetization" shouldn't even be in the game designer's vocabulary, and offers examples of previous creative works that would never have existed in today's metrics-hungry world of live tweaking and over-analysis. He proposes a whole host of ridiculous changes that would've been made to a game like Pac-Man if power pellets could only be obtained through some kind of in-game credit system. These kind of things would have changed gaming history, and it's sad to see how thoroughly similar creativity is being stifled in the name of scientifically extracting the most money possible out of the audience.

As a life-long gamer, I find this trend to be incredibly unsettling. I realize the cold hard reality of the business of video games requires developers to turn a profit, but I just hate thinking that the developer who might have come up with the next Sword & Sworcery or Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor has eternally relegated that project to the back burner in exchange for spending time pouring over analytics and tweaking their latest freemium time sink for optimal average revenue per user.

I suppose it's only human nature to try to assign blame for this latest turn of events in the ever-evolving saga of the App Store, but when you think about it, whose fault is it? The ad networks, the virtual currency systems, and the people behind all other forms of metrics-hungry middleware are merely fulfilling a heinously profitable demand. New companies wouldn't be springing up on a seemingly daily basis offering the next big thing in free to play monetization if there weren't a pool of developers hungry to hop on board. Similarly, these developers wouldn't be pulling out all the stops to become fully invested in the free to play model if the money wasn't there from an ever-growing user base eager to pump proverbial quarters into these games to speed a progress bar.

At the end of the day, it's the customer base that is driving developers down this road. Just like middleware providers, they're similarly fulfilling a demand. Since the launch of the App Store in 2008, the value proposition of your typical iOS title has continually sliding towards offering more and more for less and less. Simple games like Moto Chaser launched at $5.99, slid to $4.99, and settled at the rock-bottom price of 99¢ in less than two months. 99¢ became the expected price for games for the next few years, and now– Even 99¢ is too expensive. The talks of GDC are also just reflecting this demand, as the entire event agenda is set by an advisory board who is well tuned into all aspects of the gaming industry.

So what can we do to change this? For the first time, I'm really not sure. This is normally where I'd champion the premium priced "full" game experiences with fabulous production values like Infinity Blade and encourage people to actually try to support developers at higher price points in attempt to stop the toxic "I'll wait for the 99¢ sale" mentality. But, this problem is far bigger than that. The people driving this market are the ones who've never read TouchArcade, who don't follow gaming, and are just downloading the next free to play sensation because the carefully tuned viral aspect of friend recruitment drove them to, they saw it on the charts, or a million other reasons that'd never put them in the same room as someone who cares about a long-winded editorial on monetization as a part of game design.

I think I'd just really like to meet the person who launches one of these games, does their daily in-app purchase to buy a load of in-game currency, spends that all in the course of five minutes, then feels satisfied enough with their purchase to do it again and again and again.

My question to this person is, "Why?"

[source]

If we've learned one thing from the current generation of home consoles (and Nintendo's newest handheld the 3DS) it's that people love avatars. Of course, gaming avatars themselves are nothing new, but having a persistent online profile associated with your console of choice and a decked-out avatar to go along with it has really been one of those sleeper hit features in gaming these past several years.

As Joystiq notes, the folks over at AppleInsider have gone digging around and discovered some patent filings that hint that Apple may also be interested in jumping into the avatar game for their own Game Center service. This thought has certainly been tossed around plenty of times between our staff and people in our forums, but seeing concrete evidence that it's actually a blip on Apple's radar is pretty cool, even if it's something that never ends up materializing.

The patent filings go on to detail how players could create their own personalized avatars by adjusting features and characteristics using the unique capabilities of the touch screen, and of course adorning them with items and accessories. What's the point of an avatar if it doesn't have a fancy hat, right? There is also mention of making these avatars available to developers for inclusion into games and apps. It doesn't sound too different than what's already been going on in the console space for years, but still sounds pretty cool nonetheless.

These patents were filed back in April, and there's really no telling when or if something like this will ever actually be included into the iOS feature set. But it's sure a neat prospect, and I'll be keeping my fingers crossed that we see it on our devices sometime in the future.

[Via Joystiq, AppleInsider]

[source]