NimbleQuest
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Daily iPhone App: Nimble Quest arrives on the App Store
You may already know that the great NimbleBit has released a new game this week, given that I spoke with them earlier here at GDC. Nimble Quest (free) is unlike the company's previous hits, Tiny Tower and Pocket Planes, but it's just as fun and well-implemented. The core mechanic is borrowed from Snake, the old mobile game where you send a long snake around in four directions while eating bits of food and growing longer. In Nimble Quest, you guide around a train of fantasy-based adventurers by swiping on the screen, earning XP and gems as you go. The gameplay is simple, but it can be tough. Running into a wall kills your whole party in one hit, and the adventurers you pick up during play (which are unlocked at a rate of about one per stage) are relatively fragile. You'll probably lose just about as many as you gain over the course of a level or game. Just like in Pocket Planes and Tiny Tower, NimbleBit keeps the rewards flowing. Powerups boost your strength or give you a gem magnet, and clearing out an entire level is a very rewarding feat by itself. The game is freemium, but NimbleBit knows how to keep a freemium game fun even for those who don't want to spend money, so the in-app purchases are always there and ready if you'd like a hand, but never required or annoying. The one misstep is that NimbleBit has borrowed the idea of "boosts." It's a concept that's ascribed to Bejeweled Blitz and has been showing up in several games lately. I don't like boosts at all. The idea is that you can spend some money on unlocking an extra ability or some extra power for a certain stage, essentially gambling that you'll earn just as much or more back with that extra power. In my experience, buying the boosts is never worth it, so I just don't use them at all, and that seems like a less-than-ideal mechanic in a game that's otherwise so polished. That quibble aside, Nimble Quest is another gem in NimbleBit's crown. It'll be interesting to see what kind of audience it finds, as it's a very different game from the others the Marsh brothers are known for. But it's definitely a must-play, and if you're anything like me, this game will snake its way right into your free time for quite a while.
NimbleBit readies Nimble Quest, and then plans a return to Pocket Trains
I've met with David Marsh here in San Francisco a few times before, and somehow it always turns out that I meet with him right before his big releases. The last time was right before he and his brother Ian, the founders of NimbleBit, released Pocket Planes, the company's follow-up to Tiny Tower. And this week here at GDC, we met a few days before Nimble Quest was finally due out for release. So it's tough to ask questions about how the release of Nimble Quest is going when the game hasn't actually come out yet. But Marsh and I did chat about what they expect to see with this latest release. It's not a simulation game at all, unlike Tiny Tower or Pocket Planes, and Marsh says he hopes this game will demonstrate that the company can make a successful game that is a little more action-oriented than what they've made in the past. The two brothers were very struck by the gameplay of a game called Call of Snakes, and Marsh says Nimble Quest is essentially an exploration of that gameplay into a little wider fantasy realm. I've been playing the game for quite a while now and it is very fun, though Marsh agrees that "compared to our last three games, it is less casual." Pocket Planes and Tiny Tower basically both ran their course no matter what you did, but Nimble Quest requires some finger agility and can be lost pretty quickly. At the same time, however, Marsh says that while the game might not appeal to a casual audience, he hopes it will be very engaging with the audience it finds. The game includes a boost system (which Marsh says was inspired by PopCap's Bejeweled Blitz), and there's a certain bit of strategy there to choosing which boosts you use regularly and which boosts you put into play when you're on a hot streak in the game. I asked Marsh about the game's name, and he said that putting the company's name in the title was more about making sure it was something that could be theirs rather than something generic. "Pocket" and "Tiny" are both words that are hard to trademark well, he said -- "we couldn't really own that." When the brothers sat down to try and name this title, "Nimble Quest" is just what came to mind, so it'll be interesting to see if the game's release drives a little more interest in the company for people who may not know their story. Nimble Quest was developed in Unity (using Matt Rix's Futile framework), and Marsh says that engine worked very well for them. Unity allows the company to port its games more easily, and so Nimble Quest is the first title that will become available on PC, Mac and iOS all in the same day (NimbleBit even released a browser version already thanks to Unity's portability). Marsh does say that getting the game on Steam is a goal, though he hasn't started talking to Valve yet about how that would happen. Finally, Marsh says that while NimbleBit is currently focused on Nimble Quest (and will likely provide more content and support after released), the team's next title is actually a step backwards. When Pocket Planes was being developed, it originally started out as Pocket Trains, before David and Ian decided that having to stick to rail routes was a little too limiting and that they should take to the air instead. "But we still had all that art from Pocket Trains," he told me, so the company has an artist working on recombining that art into a "completely new game." That release is still a ways away, but we may see Pocket Trains return in some form in the future. Nimble Quest is coming out this Thursday -- NimbleBit continues to impress (the company is still just three developers and one support employee), and Nimble Quest should continue the brothers' streak of freemium hits.
NimbleBit's Nimble Quest coming to iOS and Mac March 28
NimbleBit has announced that its latest game, Nimble Quest, is due March 28, right in the middle of next week's Game Developers' Conference in San Francisco. I've been playing the game for a few weeks, and it's great. It's definitely more arcade-y than NimbleBit's other games (including Pocket Planes and Tiny Tower), but it's a lot of fun, and there's no shortage of heroes to unlock and high scores to earn as you play through the Snake-based RPG dungeons. The game is coming to iOS and to the Mac next week, which I believe is a first for NimbleBit. The team has released its games on both platforms before, but not at the same time. This is probably a result of the team using Unity to build this one. The Marsh brothers used developer Matt Rix's Futile framework in the Unity engine to make Nimble Quest, and it likely made bringing the title over to OS X easier. Finally, the game will also include Everyplay integration, which is a video-sharing service designed to record and share videos from iOS games. Nimble Quest is hardly the first title with Everyplay integration, but it may be the biggest title to release with the service included, so we'll have to see how that goes for both the game and the service. At any rate, if you've been waiting to play Nimble Quest, the wait is almost over. We'll see the game live on the App Store, for free, next week.
Hands on with NimbleBit's next title, Nimble Quest
I am a huge fan, as you may already know, of the two brothers behind NimbleBit and all of their work, from the earlier titles like Scoops and DizzyPad to the much larger freemium hits they've had like Tiny Tower and Pocket Planes. The last time I talked to either of the Marsh brothers in person, I was told that the company was hoping to shrink in scope a little bit, and make more, smaller games, rather than huge freemium titles full of content. I was also told that they were going to return to Textropolis, an early title of theirs, and maybe expand it into something with a little more accessibility. But it turns out neither of those plans were true. The company is currently working on a game called Nimble Quest, which is both not a word game, and seems pretty full of content to me. As previously described, it's a sort of arcade RPG, where you guide a line of adventurers through a series of stages, earning currency you can use to level them up. When the guys at NimbleBit sent me a preview beta build this week, I eagerly jumped to play it, and I think I can describe the game (in its current working state, at least) in just one word. That word is "Snake." Yes, the classic video game has a long tradition of appearing on mobile platforms, and it is a very clear influence to the NimbleBit team here -- the game even brings up a picture of an old black-and-white device playing the game to describe to a new player just how Nimble Quest works. In each game, you start out as one hero, and then you move that hero around a field, swiping in various directions to steer your little guy around. And that's it, basically. Attacking is all done automatically -- if an enemy is in range and your adventurer is facing the right direction, you'll attack. Killing enemies drops a number of different bonuses and powerups: You can collect coins (which are your main currency, used to upgrade both your individual heroes and all of the powerups), extra abilities (like a coin magnet, similar to Temple Run, or an extra shield or bit of attack power for your hero), or heroes, which then are added to your line (just as you'd grow a longer snake in the traditional Snake game). Ian Marsh has been tweeting videos of the game in action, so you can see what it's all like by checking those out. The trickiest part of the game is that your enemies also have their own routes, speed and ranges, so while soldiers will just slash the space in front of them, spiders will toss ranged webs to slow you down, and skeletons will throw bones at you no matter which direction you happen to be in. In fact, the current beta build is fairly tough: If you crash into the wall or another enemy, you die, and that has happened to me a lot. Having one of the characters following you die isn't a big deal, but having your lead hero die ends the game, at which point you're given a Temple Run-style epitaph ("Ulrich got stomped on by a spider"), and the chance to continue by spending another bit of currency (strangely not Nimble Bux -- they're round and white, so I've been calling them "pearls"). Outside of the core game, you can use the gems you've earned to upgrade each of the heroes, which are unlocked over time, and so far tend towards the main fantasy tropes: There's a tough soldier, a ranged archer, a mage and so on. The characters get more esoteric as you unlock them, so later on there's a ninja to play with, some sort of demon guy and a few fun references to other games and properties. Characters can be unlocked either by finding them in the game, or by outright buying them with IAP, though that feature isn't hooked up just yet. In addition to upgrading the heroes you do have unlocked, you can also use gems to buy one-time buffs, if you so choose. Not that I'd need to buy any extra gems -- like all of NimbleBit's other games, Nimble Quest seems nice and generous with its currency, and there's a lot of fun to be had just questing through the game's levels, earning as many gems as you can and setting high scores as you figure it all out. At some point, an Arena mode also unlocks, which I presume is an endless mode to quest away in -- but I haven't opened it up yet myself. The game does seem a little less complicated than Pocket Planes, which is not a bad thing at all -- this is a more of a grindy, progression-based arcade game than a freemium management title, which will likely appeal to a nice, wide swath of the App Store. But even though the gameplay is slightly simpler, there's no shortage of content here to unlock and find, so NimbleBit's claims of trying to make smaller, more compact games were probably overtaken by the Marsh brothers' interest in creating a lot of fun RPG-style rewards for Nimble Quest. Considering that the game is currently in beta, a release has to be somewhat close, but NimbleBit has stayed mum on exactly when Nimble Quest might be done. Given the state of what I've played already, and a few comments the team has made on Twitter, I'd say we'll look out for it on the App Store within another month or so. I'm scheduled to speak with NimbleBit for sure next month at GDC, so if we don't see Nimble Quest available by then, I'll be sure to ask them why.
Tiny Tower creator NimbleBit's next game is Nimble Quest
Brothers Ian and David Marsh of California-based game developer NimbleBit are taking a different path with their next game for iOS. Having made a huge splash on iOS with their sim-management titles Tiny Tower and Pocket Planes, the duo is turning to the action role-playing genre for the upcoming Nimble Quest -- and it's looking pretty distinct from their previous efforts. Revealed by Touch Arcade, the title has you steering an unstoppable "conga line" of adventurers through endless levels in an attempt to cut down enemies in their path. Drawing on the idea of customizable "Bitizens" from Tiny Tower, you'll be able to unlock more adventurers and grow your adventuring party, thus increasing its power and bestowing it with new abilities. There's also a multiplayer component planned where'll you'll be able to join guilds with other players and embark on time-limited quests together. Nimble Quest is set to be released sometime in the next few months. Head over to Touch Arcade for more screens.
