iPad games that don't suck

PongVaders turned out better than I had expected. There was a point about two weeks before development closed when we first had enough pieces in place to call the game playable. During this initial playtest we found that it was not fun. Two friends had contributed art to the project, and I was determined not to let them down, so Cole and I forewent grotesque amounts of sleep and iterated and playtested (both by ourselves and from outside sources) until we had something that Nullsleep and Anna could be proud to be associated with.

The key here was iteration and playtesting; I wish I could isolate some secret sauce. We did take an analytical approach and listed fun tactile experiences, the most rewarding aspects of the games we borrowed from, and explicit risk-reward scenarios. This informed our iterations so we at least had ideas of where we should wander.

The game is short and we weren’t able to tweak an endless mode in time. The game also sets up occasional impossible situations which we counter-balanced with generous regenerating health.

The germinal idea of this game was born from a project I was working on where I wanted to create a Girl Talk style manic mashup of almost every game I like, as an instant retrospective of my experiences in games. Needless to say, that was an impractical task for one person to complete in a week. What we’re left with is a cute Arkanoid-Breakout-Pong-Space Invaders combo, but it’s only a baby step toward the cross-genre play-bending experience I’d hoped for.

But what gets me the most is that I often push for games to be made about things other than games. The majority of games are iterative improvements on established genres, but games have started to appear that are literally about games (cf Contact, etc.). There’s even a video game about a comic book that’s heavily informed by videogames. And here I am with a game that, from title to finish, samples liberally from the gaming canon. I’m not sure this is bad as far as making games qua games is concerned, but PongVaders is not a particularly expressive game.

Moving forward, we’re definitely going to leave more time for playtesting and utilize our community for feedback.

The next game that we make will not be strictly derivative and it will hopefully, to quote the charge that Keita Takahashi gave to me on Facebook, “to continue challenging a new thing”. So be it!