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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 holding a fall sale, first episode of Tiny Tower Shorts out now
NimbleBit sent along an email announcing that the company was holding a fall sale, and it made me do a double take: how does a company whose games are all free hold a fall sale? Surprisingly enough, NimbleBit found a way. From this Friday through Sunday, all of the in-app purchases in NimbleBit's freemium hits Tiny Tower, Pocket Planes and Pocket Frogs will be available for half the price that they usually are, so you'll be able to buy Tower Bux, Plane Bux or Potions or Stamps for half price. In other NimbleNews (feel free to use that for your blog, guys), the company has released its first animated short based on Tiny Tower to go along with the Pocket Planes series that was already in progress. This one riffs on Tiny Tower's upgradeable elevators, and how they sometimes tend to go a bit too slow .. or too fast. Enjoy by watching it below.
Pocket Planes coming to Mac, getting animated shorts
Here's an interesting pair of announcements from NimbleBit, the makers of the hit freemium games Tiny Tower and Pocket Planes. First up, Pocket Planes is coming to the Mac App Store. Starting this Thursday (at this link, which doesn't work yet but will when the game is live), players will be able to grab Pocket Planes on the Mac, featuring the same excellent freemium plane simulation gameplay on your desktop computer. The app will sync with the iOS version and feature an exclusive plane, the "X10 Mapple Pro." Pocket Planes is also available through Google Play on Android. Secondly, NimbleBit has commissioned several animated shorts from Loading Ready Run, the first of which is available to watch right now (below). The shorts bring some voices to the plane-riding Bitizens, and a pretty absurd (but chuckle-worthy) premise. There will be a series of these things to come, and Loading Ready Run is also working on some shorts from the Tiny Tower universe. Kind of a different addition to NimbleBit's series, but they're free too, so sure, why not?
Daily iPhone App: Pocket Planes flies high
Odds are that if you read our quick interview with NimbleBit, you already went to check out Pocket Planes, the new freemium title from brother David and Ian Marsh. If you were a big fan of Tiny Tower, you've probably been counting the days until it arrived, already knowing just how addictive these deliciously grindy games can be. But if you've never heard of NimbleBit or played Tiny Tower, maybe you need me to tell you: Go play Pocket Planes. The one caveat is that it is a time-based freemium title: The gameplay consists of a series of small bursts on various cycles rather than a full-fledged traditional game. But just like Tiny Tower and Pocket Frogs before it, Pocket Planes is polished to a brilliant shine. It features the Tiny Tower bitizens, and this time, they're flying planes around a real world pixel map. Using coins and bux, you can set up airports, fly passengers and cargo around the world, and slowly build up your tiny little (gigantic) airplane empire. A lot of people have noted that the game's more complicated than NimbleBit's previous titles, but only in that there are slightly more interesting choices to be made: You get to set your planes out on routes you choose, and given that fuel costs gold every time you fly, it's always possible that you'll spend more on gold than you are able to earn by delivering your cargo. Some cities are snowed in or otherwise blocked off, too, so making the right choices about where to send your planes for the most money isn't immediately apparently. Experienced gamers will probably like the extra complexity, however, and I have a feeling that even casual players will learn that making the right choices can be more fun than just tapping away for profit. And there are plenty of fun extras in the game, too. NimbleBit has clearly learned a lot from Tiny Tower and its various patches. You can take on flights to a randomly selected town every three days to earn extra money and items, and you can even join a "flight crew" with other players, which allows for some very light, very anonymous multiplayer gameplay. The "BitBook" fake social network is back from Tiny Tower, and the citizens post some hilarious updates. With tons of planes to build and collect, hundreds of airports to open and upgrade, and lots and lots of great characters and production value, Pocket Planes is a great iPhone title. It's another jewel in NimbleBit's very profitable crown, and unless freemium titles cause you to break out in hives, it's a must-play game. Download it now for free in a universal build. Oh, and join the "#schramm" flight crew -- we're #311 in the world and growing!
NimbleBit talks about the release of Pocket Planes, and what's next
Brothers Ian and David Marsh's NimbleBit is finally releasing its latest freemium title today (following on the company's success with Pocket Frogs and then the hugely popular Tiny Tower) called Pocket Planes. The app borrows Tiny Tower's little pixelated denizens and moves them over into a growing worldwide airline, tasking the player with building airports and planes, guiding planes around from one real life city to the next, and ferrying cargo and passengers all of the world to earn in-game coins and "bux." Just like Tiny Tower, the title is free to download and depends on in-app purchases of bux for monetization, and just like Tiny Tower, it's completely addictive and super charming. And just like Tiny Tower, it's probably going to be a huge hit. Ian Marsh met up with TUAW here at WWDC in San Francisco today, and while he says he is a little nervous to be flying home to San Diego tomorrow as the game launches worldwide, you can tell he's not panicking too much. He's been through this process a few times already with his previous titles (though given how big Tiny Tower got, this game certainly has the highest expectations NimbleBit's ever faced), not to mention that he and his wife had a baby girl last December. In fact, NimbleBit's biggest issue with Pocket Planes, says Marsh, was that it took so long to make. Most traditional games can take years to put together, but NimbleBit is used to a much shorter production schedule, so Marsh says that Pocket Planes' development, at nearly a year, was a little too "stretched out" for the brothers. They've had to spend a lot of the last year dealing with Tiny Tower's success rather than making the game. And they have hired on a few more part-time people, but Marsh tells me that even with the success of Tiny Tower (and the presumably pending success of Pocket Planes), he still doesn't want to make NimbleBit bigger. "We like making cool games," he told me. "If we have a team of other people making cool games, I'll be jealous that I'm not making them." What would NimbleBit do if Pocket Planes fails, if the brothers start to face issues with their current Tiny company structure? Marsh grins at the thought of Pocket Planes failing. "Make the next game," he says. NimbleBit has done so well with its current titles, and has kept things so compact, that even if Pocket Planes falls out of the sky, they'll just make another game they like. Right now they're in the concept states of their next title, which will be a word game. Marsh says they're returning to an old NimbleBit title called Textropolis, from before the company's freemium days. That game requires you to make words from the names of places, and Marsh says the new game will play in a similar way ("We really enjoyed Textropolis," he says), but it will be very much influenced by Tiny Tower's aesthetic, presumably in the same way that Pocket Planes is. That's further down the line (the brothers' main task this week will probably just consist of getting feedback on Pocket Planes), but Marsh says that NimbleBit does want to make development a little quicker and simpler. "We like making relatively simple games," he says. In the future, he hopes to bring NimbleBit back to the point where it's releasing a few games a year, much like the company did when it first started on iOS. Other than that, Marsh is happy to just keep on making games that he and his brother love. "We always can," he says. "That's the great thing about not answering to anyone else." Pocket Planes should land on the App Store this evening -- we'll have more on the game itself later on this week after release.
Pocket Planes gets a trailer, looks great
I first saw Pocket Planes, Nimblebit's next freemium title, running at GDC earlier this year. Being a huge fan of both Pocket Frogs and Tiny Tower, I can't wait to see it in action on my iPhone and iPad. Unfortunately, the game's not out yet (it's still "coming soon"), but Nimblebit has released a trailer below, so you can at least see what the game is like and how it plays. The game uses the same 8-bit aesthetic and characters as Tiny Tower, but instead of building floors in a building, you're growing an empire of airplanes, flying them around the world for fun and profit. You'll need to build up both planes and airports, and different types of planes fly at different speeds and have different fuel capacities, which can limit how far they can travel. The game looks really fun. It's a little more complicated than Tiny Tower, but shouldn't be any less addictive. As soon as it's on the App Store, we'll let you know.
NimbleBit builds a tiny empire of quality freemium apps
NimbleBit's David Marsh kindly met with me at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) this week. While he's not interested in discussing the Zynga/Tiny Tower fiasco (a game he first showed me at GDC last year), the public's interest in that story is understandable. Zynga is a social company that uses analytics and testing to make its games easy to play and monetize. However, Marsh says he and his developer brother don't bother with a lot of analytics. "Part of the thing," he admits, "is that we don't try to figure it out a lot, because that's not the most fun part of making the game for us." NimbleBit consists of the two brothers, another programmer hired last August and David's wife, who manages support. The group is happiest while making good games that monetize themselves because users enjoy them so much. That's a contrast to many of the social and freemium titles out there. NimbleBit makes its games with love, and that's why it's funny when other companies try to copy their success without that key ingredient. When I asked Marsh if NimbleBit would consider acquisition by a larger game developer, he reiterated what he told me last year. "We're making enough money." Tiny Tower has consistently been on the App Store's top grossing list since its initial push, and then again after Apple picked it as the iPhone Game of the Year. "Getting Game of the Year for iPhone was really awesome for us," said Marsh. NimbleBit's next title, Pocket Planes, looks like it will follow the same pattern of success. Marsh gave me a quick demo of the latest build. The look and feel are very similar to Tiny Tower, but the goal is to build a network of planes that around the world, as opposed to an apartment building. Originally, says Marsh, the idea was to make a game about trains, and he even showed me a screenshot with train cars that had interiors using the Tiny Tower floors layout. But they found that running trains around tracks was too limiting and slow to be fun, so the trains became planes. Marsh says taking to the air has inspired a nice "jetsetting feel, about exploring rather than being stuck on rails." The build I saw looked great. You can buy planes with bucks earned either by playing the game or with in-app purchases, and then you can build airports at various cities, "unlocking" them with in-game gold (of course, any of that might change in the final release). Once you've got a plane and some airports to travel to, you can take missions from the in-game citizens, ferrying passengers or cargo from city to city. Each plane has a range, and each trip costs a certain amount, so the game currently consists of figuring out just how money you'll make versus spend on a certain mission. If you think that sounds complicated, you're right. Pocket Planes is the most complex freemium title that NimbleBit has put together yet. That doesn't mean it's inaccessible. While the worst you can do in Pocket Frogs or Tiny Tower is leave your frogs or bitizens unattended, in Pocket Planes you could lose money by playing badly. Could NimbleBit have the same success with a title that's more complex? Marsh says he and his brother are doing what they always do: making a game they want to play. "We're aware of the fact that it might have a smaller potential audience" due to the complexity, he says, "but that's one of the things we're interested to find out." Marsh also says that because it is still early in the development, there's lots of time left to spin the game more casual or complex. One idea he and Ian have played around with is "plane parts," which users could buy, trade, or collect, and use build planes with various stats. But that system isn't quite done, and it might not be included in the final game (or might be added in with a later update). NimbleBit hopes to release Pocket Plans in "summer, hopefully." Pocket Planes looks terrific, and it's great to see NimbleBit make great games that support a solid freemium model with excellent gameplay.
