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Indie Pinata sale invites you to take a swing at similar games
The Indie Pinata sale offers discounts on 10 Steam games hand-picked by independent developers, available through July 26 at 10AM PT. The catch: You have to purchase or already own one of the games in the sale to get the discounts. That Steam backlog is looking pretty handy right about now. The 10 lucky games are Monaco, The Bridge, Flockers, MouseCraft, 10,000,000, Super Splatters, Dungeon Hearts, Jack Lumber, Triple Town and Contraption Maker. Indie Pinata is put on by Crunching Koalas, the team behind MouseCraft, so this sale features games similar in style to that memorable, puzzle-y tone. "Thousands of games available on Steam make it difficult for enthusiasts of certain game genres to find games that they really enjoy," Crunching Koalas writes in the sale's FAQ. "That's why we teamed up with developers that create games that are somehow similar to MouseCraft. Games we have chosen can be similar in terms of graphics, gameplay mechanics or general feel and we think that if anybody owns at least one title from our list, there's a high chance they will like every other game from our campaign. This is our proposition on how curated storefronts should look like." [Image: Crunching Koalas]
Triple Town leaving Facebook, Steam keys offered for PC, Mac
Triple Town will move on from Facebook on June 16, developer Spry Fox announced yesterday. "This was not an easy decision for anyone, but Triple Town's Facebook edition has not been financially successful for many years, and our ongoing efforts to support and maintain it are detracting from our efforts to make new games for you," the statement reads. "We hope you will take comfort in the fact that the iOS and Android versions of Triple Town will remain available and free to all of you." There's a silver lining to the news for fans - so long as they log in before Jun 16, players that have spent any amount of money on Triple Town's Facebook version will be able to claim a Steam key for PC or Mac, which Spry Fox says is "nearly identical" to the Facebook version. Considering the Steam version sells for $10 and that even a 99-cent purchase makes a Facebook user eligible for a key, that's a pretty decent move on Spry Fox's part. [Image: Spry Fox]
Evilot takes Plants vs. Zombies to Triple Town
This is Portabliss, a column about downloadable games that can be played on the go. Plants vs. Zombies has long been one of the most popular titles on the App Store (or any platform it's been released on, really), but PopCap has only recently revealed a sequel set to arrive in another month or so. In all that time, then, it's not surprising that game developers have "borrowed" PopCap's casual tower defense formula, where you build up units in lanes to defend against an oncoming horde. Samurai Bloodshow is one of the best pretenders to the throne, and there are other games like Legendary Wars that took PopCap's premise and ran far with it. Evilot also belongs in the second category. It's a recently released iPad game that has a very clear resemblance to the longtime battle of flowers against the undead, in that enemy troops come in by lanes from the right, and you need to build up units to defend treasure on the left. But while Plants vs. Zombies uses a straightforward currency system to build up its units, Evilot borrows a core mechanic from another great iOS title: Triple Town.
The Joystiq Indie Pitch: Triple Town
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 believe they deserve a wider audience with the Joystiq Indie Pitch: This week, Spry Fox's David Edery discusses the real impact of social gaming with his Facebook and mobile title Triple Town, which launched on Steam this month. What's your game called and what's it about?Triple Town is an original puzzle game about building a city. It's basically a re-invention of the match-three genre; instead of matching three-plus objects to clear a space, you match three-plus objects to create higher-level objects. Trees becomes huts, mansions become castles, etc. Meanwhile, giant bears move around the board blocking your progress. It seems simple at first, but this is a game that requires extraordinary practice and planning skills. Many people played for months before building their first castle (and there are two tiers beyond that!). We've heard Triple Town described as "the Civilization of match-three games" and we really like that. Triple Town won a bunch of awards in 2011 and we've been updating and improving it ever since!Are you trying to break Triple Town out of the "social game" box with the Steam launch?Not really; it's been doing fine as a single player game on mobile for over a year now. The goal of the Steam launch was to bring a flavor of Triple Town to people who might not otherwise have heard about it, to offer a full-screen and offline mode, and to satisfy fans who wanted an all-you-can-eat version of the game with absolutely no IAP in it.
Triple Town developer sues over iOS knock-off
Spry Fox, a social developer most recently known for its Facebook game Triple Town, has filed a copyright-infringement lawsuit against iOS development house 6Waves LOLAPPS (seriously) over Yeti Town, a mobile app that Spry Fox CEO David Edery claims is almost an exact duplicate of his company's product."We're not just talking about the game's basic mechanics here," Edery said in a statement made on his personal blog. "We're talking about tons of little details, from the language in the tutorial, to many of our UI elements, to the quantities and prices of every single item in the store." What's more, Spry Fox was in confidential, NDA-protected negotiations with 6Waves LOLAPPS to publish Triple Town, right up until the day Yeti Town was released.As part of their negotiations, Spry Fox had given 6Waves months of private access to Triple Town during its closed beta test. "It's bad enough to rip off another company. To do so while you are pumping them for private information (first, our game design ideas, and later, after the game was launched on Facebook, our private revenue and retention numbers) is profoundly unethical by any measure."Mobile rip-offs have become fairly commonplace these days, so its refreshing to see a small developer aggressively try to protect its intellectual property. The outcome of this case will be unlikely to set any legal precedents, but if the courts weigh in Spry Fox's favor, it could be enough to discourage iOS counterfeiting in the future. [ER 09 via Shutterstock]
Daily iPad App: Triple Town
Triple Town was originally a Facebook game, so it does have some weird freemium elements that are kind of annoying: There are some weird turn mechanics where you actually need to "buy" turns, either with in-game gold or real money, that can get annoying after a while. And the graphics themselves do look as though they were created with HTML 5 -- they're serviceable, but the game definitely doesn't take advantage of all of the power of your iOS device. All of that said, however, Triple Town still comes with this sparkling recommendation: I first fired it up late one night last week before going to bed at 3 am, and found myself still playing it two hours later. It is a really incredible take on the match-3 genre: instead of switching items around, you instead place them down on the board, and then three of any kind (in any direction) will automatically combine into one of the next kind up the hierarchy, so grass combines into bushes which combines into trees, then houses, and so on. Bears appear on the screen and need to be blocked out into tombstones, which then combine into churches, which combine into larger churches which can earn extra points. The game is turn-based and simple to play, but very tough to master, and it has that extremely addictive "just one more turn" quality. Triple Town is really a great title -- it doesn't quite outgrow its Facebook roots, but there's more than enough game here that it's definitely worth the free, universal download. Just be careful starting it up late at night -- you might find yourself losing as much sleep as I did.
