This is part three of the Five Games I Want to Steal thread I've been writing for the past week or so, so if you haven't read the first two you should check those out. As I've said before, I got the basic idea for these posts after I read a book that Austin lent me called "How to Steal Like an Artist". The book explained how creative people steal ideas that already exist and then change them enough so people don't know where they came from. After reading that I thought I would look at five games I would want to steal from to help make our games more creative.
To recap from the last two posts I want to steal Color Zen and KAMI for their creative puzzle game ideas (in fact, we may start working on a puzzle game in the near future) and I want to steal Ozone for it's unique maze style game play. In this last post I'm going to kinda lump two games together. I was originally going to separate these two but then finals got in the way and I don't want this thread to drag on. So I decided to just wrap things up with this post.
The first game in this wrap up that I want to steal is Tiny Wings. This is one of my all time favorite games and if you don't know what it is you should go and get it from the app store. The reason I want to steal this game is that it incorporates a lot of physics into the game. While any kind of platform or endless runner is going to have some kind of basic physics engine to deal with the motion of the player, Tiny Wings adds another level to that by dealing with collisions into the ground and the physics of ramps. For example, to get as far as possible in the shortest amount of time you have to time your decants just right so that you hit the ramp at just the right angle. If you time it wrong you'll end up running right into the side of a hill which will drastically decrease your velocity. I've always enjoyed physics and I enjoy that extra aspect in this game. While it would be very challenging, creating a game based around physics would be pretty fun.
The last game I want to steal is BADLAND. I want to steal this game because, well, it's just overall a great game. It has won so many awards and is arguably one of the best games on the App store. I think that we should use this game as a standard for all of the games we make. While there is so much to love about this game, the unique gameplay, the challenging levels, the reason I really want to steal this game is because of its art. The art in the game is simply incredible. I think it would be cool to make a game that is based around the art, instead of the art being made for the game. Creating a game where the entire plot and gameplay was about the art would make for an interesting game.
With these last two games this thread comes to an end. I hope you enjoyed reading about some of the games and the things that make them unique. Make sure to check out the previous two posts on my blog if you haven't read them all ready. Thanks for reading and stay tuned for some fun videos tomorrow.
-Matt.