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The Joystiq Indie Pitch: High Flyer Death Defyer
Indie developers are the starving artists of the video-game world, often brilliant and innovative, but also misunderstood, underfunded and more prone to writing free-form poetry on their LiveJournals. We at Joystiq believe no one deserves to starve, and many indie developers are entitled to a fridge full of tasty, fulfilling media coverage, right here. This week, Game Mechanic Studios founder and creative director Jason Alejandre explains why freefalling is a great way to feel truly free as an indie developer, with his latest title, High Flyer Death Defyer. How did Game Mechanic Studios get started in development? In 2008, Jeff Hua, Henry Ji and I left EA and started Game Mechanic Studios and we really had only one goal-to create games that make us smile and have fun doing the jobs we love. To get to that point we prototyped a lot, dreaming up a bunch of different original games and pushing ourselves to innovate and think creatively. We immediately started working on creating original IP, kind of modeling ourselves after the beginnings of Pixar. Once we had something we were truly proud of we set that as the bar for all the other games we were developing. We probably had about 30 different game ideas that were each developed to various points, so by having that quality bar established we could immediately see which ones out of the 30 were worth developing further. We ended up with about four ideas we really wanted to pursue and one of those was High Flyer Death Defyer -- which we just recently released and are currently working hard to update.
Daily iPhone App: High Flyer Death Defyer
High Flyer Death Defyer is a new game from Game Mechanic Studios, and I really like its scope. It is an iOS game that's really trying to do something different, something really fun, and look really good doing it. The game claims to be a jetpack game, but really it's more of a diving game -- you play a guy (with a jetpack on) who jumps off high platforms and plummets down into huge canyons, trying to hit score rings and then land just right on the platforms below. I like the idea here, and for the most part, the game pulls it off pretty well -- there's a nice sequence for each jump where you do get a sense of the dizzying feel of what your character is doing, and there are some good mechanics (including some platforms you get to run around on in 3D while falling) to fill out the experience a bit and make a real game out of it. Unfortunately, the controls on something like this really need to be perfect, and in this case, they're not quite right. They're not terrible, but most of the action is controlled with a virtual joystick that's just not tuned correctly. Some of the iTunes comments say tilt controls would be better (easily enough implemented in a future build, I'd guess), but I think the joystiq would have worked if they'd spent more time tuning it just exactly where it needed to be. That said, High Flyer Death Defyer isn't a bad game -- it's a really interesting premise with a nice graphical style and some cool gameplay ideas. Unless the premise really jumps out as something you'd want to play, I'd say wait on the $4.99 price for now. Either they'll lower it eventually, or the app will get an update that fixes a few of the early control problems. Definitely give it a look though, even if you don't jump in (get it?) right away.
