I was playing a block climbing game and got an idea to improve on its simple idea. The basic premise is to climb to the top of randomly sized and shaped blocks that have been stacked into a tower. The player controls a character that can cling to the side of shapes and jump off onto other shapes. While the character clings to the side of the shapes they will slowly slide down requiring the character to jump to another shape.

The challenge of the game comes from timing and coordinated key presses to keep the character climbing higher. A mistake may cause the player to fall back down the stacked shapes and try again. To keep the character moving up the tower, the player will have to reach certain checkpoint blocks to give them more time to climb. When the climb timer reaches zero, the player loses.

There is a lot of replayability since you have the ability to improve your coordination and reach a higher point on the stack of shapes. Even after reaching the top of a stack, you may find faster ways of reaching the top and getting a better time. Other gameplay modes can include climbing shapes that are falling from the sky into lava. If the player doesn't keep up, they may end up in the lava.

I have been working professionally in the mobile (cellphone) game industry now for over 18 months and I have to say my opinion of it in terms of capabilities and usefulness as a gaming platform has changed. My first impression was that mobile phones are too limited to even make a decent game. I thought of all the cloned games such as snake, space invaders, pong, and black jack running at horrible frame rates on black and white LCD phones. I have to admit I didn’t even own a cellphone until I got a job working on them. Only then did I realize that the devices weren’t as limited as I thought and that they were advancing at such a rate that in a year or two, phones graphics/processing power would be at the level of a Playstation 1 game.

Once I realized that mobile devices were getting better and that console technology was being reinvented in a different form, I realized that mobile games were my break into professional 2D game development. It’s like a time machine took me back 16 years and now almost anyone can start making games. Small teams of less than 5 are able to make a complete game.

Since most people have a cellphone nowadays, the target audience for mobile games is HUGE. All around the world, people are waiting in lines, for people, for a taxi, or just plain bored, yet they own a cellphone which is capable of playing a game and killing the time. Mobile games are usually really easy to pickup and play and very addicting because of the people that own a phone, may or may not play games regularly.

July 07
I've decided to update the website with something slightly different. The website contents have changed and the forums are now easier to get to. As you may have noticed, I have changed News into Ideas which is more suiting of a name because I tend to post news in the forums instead. I still would like a space on my site to talk about anything I've been thinking about, so I will be posting random bits on this page. Consider it as a semi-blog.