The Online Magazine Focused on App Design, Branding & Marketing

The Game: Dungelot
The Device: iPhone 5
The Price: $0.99 on iTunes and Google Play
The Basics: The roguelike isn’t a genre that’s well represented in mobile games. Perhaps best known from Blizzard’s Diablo series, rougelikes typically have you delving into a bottomless dungeon for no other good reason than the acquisition of loot. It’s not a type of game whose appeal makes a lot of sense if you explain it, but play and you’ll soon become a believer, and possibly an insomniac. They’re just impossibly addictive.

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The App: Spider

The Device: iPhone 4

The Price: Free

The Basics: You are a spider and you do what spiders do. You will crawl on walls. You will explore a mundane human environment that is an epic landscape to you. You will spin webs. You will capture and devour your prey. You will travel to other levels through a, uh, mysterious swirling portal. Um, okay. Bizarre wormhole aise, Spider seems to accurately represent the experience of being an arachnid in the broadest strokes, but does that make for an entertaining experience?

The Review: In a nutshell, yes. Spider is a exploration game with a puzzle bent, but it has just enough of an arcade angle to appeal to people who enjoy having high scores and having the best time. Above all though, it’s just really fun.

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(Talksauce is a weekly editorial that represents the opinions of Tapsauce editor-in-chief Jacob Hall, not Rocksauce Studios. If he says something stupid, blame him and him alone.)

When I made the big switch from my Android to an iPhone, certain sacrifices had to be made. Chief among them was the complete and total loss of my mobile game library. Everything I had downloaded from the Google Play store was going to vanish into the ether and I was going to have to rebuild everything from scratch…or I wasn’t. I had a choice: do I re-download all of my old games to have everything I had before, or do I start anew and leave the past behind me, my new smartphone representing a new start.

I ended up splitting the difference.

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The Game: Bad Piggies

The Device: The Droid X, still chuggin’ along

The Price: Free (ad-supported) on Google Play, $0.99 for App Store

The Basics: Is there a chance that Angry Birds set the bar too high for Rovio? Without the game no one would know about the Finnish developer, creator of such games as Mole War and Bounce Touch for the super-popular N-Gage. Obviously they’re absolutely massive and successful right now and have raised a ton of money thanks to their ridiculously popular game, but will they ever be able to follow it up with anything nearly as big? As our fearless leader pointed out last week, Amazing Alex wasn’t as successful as hoped. Bad Piggies should be an easier sell- it’s an Angry Birds spinoff that sees you controlling the pigs instead of the birds. Rather than getting back at the birds for their suicide attacks it turns out that the pig are actually great inventors, and love constructing things almost as much as Amazing Alex.

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The App: Huebrix

The Device: iPhone 4

The Price: 99 cents

The Basics: Puzzle games are perfect for mobiel devices. The only problem is finding a puzzle game that hasn’t been done a thousand times before. How many variations on Tetris and Bejeweled can exist before the genre simply implodes and we all go home? Huebrix is refreshing because it takes a common puzzle game goal (find a way to fill all of the space with a strict pathway and limited resources) but does it with elegance and panache. Huebrix doesn’t break a lot of new ground, but it’s definitely not another rehash. If anything, it’s a reinvention.

The Review: Huebrix is so good that I can’t stop playing it…even though I’m terrible at it.

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The Game: Traffic Panic London

The Device: Droid X

The Price: Free

The Basics: There comes a time in every racing game when you get sick of driving safely and just decide to cause as much damage as possible. The Burnout series became a classic when it introduced Crash Mode, which allowed gamers to indulge in their destructive fantasies better than any game before or after. But there’s always going to be contenders for the crown.

Enter Traffic Panic, and its latest installment set in The Big Smoke. Seven million people have played this series so they must be doing something right! With the marketing, that is, because it sure ain’t the gameplay dragging people in.

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The App: Bejeweled

The Device: iPhone

The Price: $0.99

Why We Love It: There’s a reason why Bejeweled has been downloaded 500 million times since the game’s initial creation in 2001. It’s one of the most addicting puzzle games ever made, a game that can be played anytime, anywhere. It’s the kind of game that can be played for thirty seconds or for an hour. It’s pretty much the perfect game for smartphones.

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Plague Inc.: Have you ever wanted to wipe out the entire planet in about a half hour of gameplay? Then Plague Inc. is for you! The game puts you in control of a deadly disease, which you must carefully manipulate to infect the entire world. You don’t have direct control of your disease, but you do select where the plague starts and use your carefully earned points to modify infectivity, lethality and symptoms. You have to take note of how the rest of the world is reacting to your disease and mutate accordingly, trying to find a way to overcome any safety measures being put against you. It’s pretty grim subject matter, but it’s incredibly addicting and requires some surprisingly intense and thoughtful strategy. Destroying the world on your iPhone has never been this much fun.

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If you’re a gamer, you’ve been hearing about Minecraft for a long, long time.

Its creators have made it available throughout all stages of its development, from its early alpha build where it was little more than a concept all the way to the recently released final version available for multiple platforms, including PC, Xbox 360 and your smartphone.

At the time that I write this, the $6.99 version of Minecraft that I can play on my HTC Incredible is not the same game as the $19.99 version you can download for your home console. It’s simpler. It has fewer options. It doesn’t look quite as nice (although the game’s intentionally crude graphics don’t make this as much of a factor). But it’s close. Very close. So close, that when I look at Minecraft and how it was released, I start to wonder about the future of gaming in general and what role smartphones and apps are going to play in that future.

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(Every Monday, Rocksauce Studios CEO Q Manning will answer your questions about app design, app development and the mobile industry.)

What’s the difference between designing/developing a game and a regular app?

The big difference between designing a game and a utility app is quite simple really: you have to make sure a game is fun. Obviously, a utility or check-in application should be interesting to use, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be fun in the traditional sense of the word. With a game, you have to deal with a lot of balance issues you have to worry about. Take a game like Angry Birds. You have to consider a bunch of questions. How far back can you pull the bird? How far can it go back before it lets go automatically? Does the physics engine work? What happens when things fall? What do the graphics look like? And, most importantly and most obviously, is it fun to use? Once it’s designed, there’s going to have a lot of back-and-forth between you and the developer to ensure that your concepts actually translate into an enjoyable experience. It’s easy to create a fun concept, but actually building interesting mechanics? That’s a different story altogether.

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