Escape for Google Glass brings casual gaming to explorers (hands-on)
You know what's not new? Android games. You know what is new? Games for Google Glass. There has been the odd attempt so far, but french-based game developer AMA is porting one of its bonafide titles over to the small screen for real. Escape! is a simple puzzler, the sort that we're all familiar with on our phones, that is being squeezed into the wearable format. While games on the hardware might be something of an inevitability, we managed to get our eyes inside a pair to take a better look for ourselves. Head past the break to see how it worked out.
The premise of Escape! is simple. Guide the character around the path of dots so that it lands on all of them once, and you can only go forward. This sort of puzzler has seen away the monotony of many a commute thanks to their prevalence on mobiles. Google Glass on the other hand is a trickier beast, but a game like this is a good place to start. Currently you need to have Glass connected to a laptop to launch it, but that's due to it being a prototype. Once complete there'll be no need for that, and it won't use the mirror API either, meaning that it can be played fully offline.
Graphically, it's very simple. In fact, if you head over to the Android version's page on Google Play, you'll see what we mean, but that's actually what makes it a good first game to port over. The screenshot you see here were taken from the game, via the display output on a Galaxy Nexus. Control-wise, it makes use of the touch-strip on Glass, with swiping up, down, forward and back guiding the character in four directions. It works well, but does take some getting used to, to avoid dropping back into the menu etc. In the future, AMA told us that you will also be able to use Glass's voice controls for gameplay.
The final version is still a little way out, while AMA waits for a few developer tools to be available -- not that many of us have the means to play it anyway. In the meantime, the firm's opening up a dedicated studio in France to create even more -- and more complex -- games for Google Glass. There is, of course, the little matter of what the final hardware will actually look like, which might have more impact for game developers than those of other apps. But for now, it's a fun, promising start.
