Our games

•  Peggle knows how to congratulate players

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  Peggle is a very fun game from PopCap that will have you spending hours on it. What we loved the most however, was not the gameplay, so much as the “parade” you get in your honor every time you finish a level.

  We even skipped the fact that there is no relation between the game and the horse (His name is Bjorn :))). Definitely saved this in our box of resources and tips for games. Enjoy the video below as many times as you want and even more times than we did. 

  Fun Game Design Peggle Resource iOS iPhone PopCap

•  The game was our teacher

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  It’s finally done. After about 2 weeks and one year, me and Tudor have finally submitted our first game, Clumsy And The Stars, to the Apple AppStore. 

  The thing is, we were actually planning on finishing it in two months. Let’s take it from the beginning…

  In november 2010 Tudor was coming back to Timisoara from Singapore. We worked together a while back at his company and had a great time working on all the projects.  

  A good time before this, I had an idea about making a social card game on Facebook. It was a particular card game known in Romania and Hungary. We talked about it and the idea of us working together again. We started work the very next day…

  In March 2011, after some 6 weeks working time on the card game(we had day jobs too), Tudor laughs out loud and calls me to his laptop. He lets me play a very abstract and simple physics game. I think it had 10 levels total. The concepts were fun and catchy.

  The game got us hooked and thinking about using some of the ideas for a game for the AppStore. It made more sense in terms of fun, time and potential results. We didn’t feel sorry at that time for puting the card game aside and starting on Clumsy. And we still don’t.

  The two of us did not have experience at making games. Even now, we still have a long way to go before we can say that. But we wanted to make that game.

  Me and Tudor had to make a choice to either take some time to study more and experiment, or combine the learning process with the building one. I’ll let you guess which one we chose…

  Clumsy is a great name because it also describes our learning process. We made a lot of mistakes and learned a lot of lessons. But more about that in the next post…

  game iphone appstore game design Clumsy Bleau Tudor

•  Are iPhone games limited by the input options?

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  So, hello. I am Bleau, one of the dudes chillin at moWOW studios here in [place desired location here].

  Me and Tudor are hard at work to release some fun and usefull apps for the iPhone. During this process, first thing we do is buy and use/play a lot of apps and then talk about them and if we found anything interesting, new or noteworthy.

  However, while testing and playing all these games, the main input method was solely the screen.  That means touch, swipe or drag and release. I had a look at top 25 paid apps in US and Romania appstores. Most of them were games and the input method for the majority was based on the screen.

  Ok Bleau, what is the big deal? You don’t have keys, just the screen. It is only logical that the screen be the main input device. Yes, but that raises 3 issues that we ran into:

  1. What about the accelerometer, microphone and camera? These input methods could really bring something new and creative to the table. Yes, there have been quite a lot of games that use the accelerometer, but only a few have reached top 25.

  2. What about shooter games or games that require multiple input methods? Are the players focused on the game or on where they should touch or swipe?

  3. Is the touch screen a creative and enabling input method or does it limit the complexity of the games and apps that we design?

  For one, the fact that we do not have physical keys means the player/user will defocus from the game to focus on where he has to click and touch. If you have a complex shooter game and the UI is not simple enough, the main frustration will come from the controls, not from the game difficulty. 

   Then there is also the problem that the input device is also the output device. Yes, i can require players to use complex controls, swipes or actions on the screen, but that always takes a toll on the users visibility. 

  As the title says, right now games and apps are more or less limited by the input method(just play on an iphone and on a psp to get the idea).

  That means of course that we have to be more creative, but at the same time it affects the level of complexity and detail of games in general. What’s even worse is that a lot of games are based on a few genres or styles of play. 

  So what i want to ask is how did this affect the development of your games and apps and how did you counter it or balance it.

  iPhone apps development input method