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Daily iPhone App: SlamBots crashes into some surprisingly deep action
SlamBots is the latest title from Retro Dreamer, a company that's been taking the one game a month idea very seriously this year. This title is based on a game Retro Dreamer put out back in February of this year, which took an endless jumping game and turned it into more of an arena-style beatdown, where you could jump on the heads of various monsters, touching down on the screen to "slam" them. Retro Dreamer took that idea and ran with it, converting it into a robot-style theme and adding a few more progression and monetization elements, and the result is this US$1.99 app in the App Store right now. The result is a very interesting title -- it's casual, but offers up a whole lot of depth if you're looking to go and find it. The basics are clear: You tilt your iPhone back and forth to control your slambot, bouncing off of platforms and enemies and collecting coins as best you can. But as you start to figure out the game's mechanics, there's actually a lot of complexity, and if you can land a few slams in a row, your scores can get sky high. See this players' guide by developer Matt Rix for more -- there's actually a lot of really deep, criss-crossing elements present in this game. Some of you might not be convinced at the price of $1.99, and that's fine: Retro Dreamer says there's a free, ad-supported version on the way soon, and I definitely recommend that one when it appears. But this is a really interesting title, and especially if you've been following Retro Dreamer's path through the App Store. It shows very well how app ideas can evolve forward into something really special.
Daily iPhone App: Sneezies Match is a good idea made better
I know developer Gavin Bowman of Retro Dreamer (co-creator of apps like Velocispider and Duckers, along with artist Craig Sharpe) fairly well, having met up with him at a number of different conferences and events in the past. His studio released a game called Socks a little while ago, which was just a fun, simple puzzle game (meant for kids, really) where you matched socks of similar patterns. "It's fun," I told him after I played that one, "but it needs some more depth -- a real progression system." A little while later, Gavin showed me a new game he was working on that actually used my feedback (which, disclaimer, was freely offered and unsolicited), and this week on the App Store, Retro Dreamer released it as Sneezies Match, which uses the company's "Sneezies" characters in a simple matching puzzle game, similar to Socks, complete with a full power-up and progression system. You play Sneezies Match by dragging around lines of variously colored Sneezies, lining them up so that Sneezies of the same color are adjacent to each other. Once they're all together, you can tap on them, and they'll clear out and drop off into buckets below, scoring points and powering up extra abilities. The game isn't timed at all, which I really like -- instead, you just get a certain number of turns, and the goal is to score as high as possible within the turn limit. Sneezies is colorful and interesting -- there could be a little more depth to it, and it's sometimes annoying to have to re-align a whole structure of Sneezies if you want them to fall in certain powerup buckets down below. There are also ads placed liberally throughout the app, which can be annoying, though you can remove them (or buy more in-app currency) with an in-app purchase. But aside from those issues, Sneezies Match is a lot of addictive fun, and well worth a download. Just personally, it's really exciting for me to see Retro Dreamer taking feedback and doing something fun and new with it. Apps on the App Store are always growing and evolving, of course, but it's very cool to follow the line of a gameplay idea through the course of its evolution.
TUAW Origin Stories: Retro Dreamer
Today we continue our Origin Stories series by interviewing Gavin Bowman, one of the co-founders of Retro Dreamer, a great iOS indie developer that's released games like Velocispider, Duckers, and most recently, Happy Fall. In the interview, Bowman lets us in on the wild story behind Happy Fall, and tells us about his company's philosophy lately, of simply making smaller games and testing the App Store market bit by bit rather than building huge projects with substantially more risk. Thanks very much to Bowman for chatting with us at the recent MacTech conference in Los Angeles! Retro Dreamer has updates coming for a few of their apps very soon (including Ice Cream Jump), and we'll stay tuned for more releases from them.
