A couple months ago, Neil Roberts showed me a game he started in high school, and he said he always wanted to take it further and was considering porting it from an old version of Flash to the iPhone. I met Neil because I work at a coworking space called Impromptu Studio in the lovely small city of Des Moines, IA.
Coworking is an awesome concept and I love working here. A cool benefit of coworking is the ability to collaborate on projects, and that’s what is happening with Neil and I. A couple weeks later after I saw his simple Flash game, he showed me a prototype of it working on the iPhone, and before I knew it, it was completely ported and more fleshed out. The game is nearly complete in functionality and design, but he wanted better art for it and help smoothing out a couple kinks. So I decided to help him out with the art and a little design.
This as-of-yet unnamed iPhone game is an economic strategy game where you must make the most money you can in 30 days fishing for crawfish (slang for spiny lobsters) in the Bahamas. The game has a couple other modes, including one where you try to make $1 billion as soon as you can and a “daily game” mode where you get the same seeded random events as other players and you see how well your strategy compares with others. In the game, you place traps in either shallow or deep water, buy more traps, move traps around, and a couple other more minor things. It’s a pretty fun and simple game. The part I like the best about it is that random things happen to you while you’re crawfishing, and that combined with the play-through-the-menu style of gameplay really reminds me of playing Oregon Trail.
I’ve heard that Oregon Trail is coming out for the iPhone, but after checking it out online, I was a little disappointed. The art seems great, but the mini-games seem to take a little too much away from the original feel of Oregon Trail, which was more about using your imagination given suggestive text with simple, low-res illustrations and also about the hunting game of course. I can’t think of any other way to say it right now other than the fact that the design seemed pure. There was a purity to it. The new Oregon Trail seems to have the more recent flavor of casual game-style rewards. Another way to put that is that it has a lot of extrinsic rewards systems, and fewer intrinsic reward systems. I might be wrong, and I’m sure the game will still be good, but it’s just plain different from what I remember about Oregon Trail.
And that’s what excites me about Neil’s game – it will focus more on the suggestive text and simple illustrations to create a world that lies within the player’s head. I don’t know enough about psychology to know what that kind of experience that is called, but I think this game tries to achieve that. And I’m not saying that games shouldn’t explicitly provide a rich world because it takes away from the one in the imagination, but I’m saying it’s nice to have a simple experience like the one you get from the original Oregon Trail every now and then. And besides, it’s just plain nostalgic.
So for the past couple weeks, I’ve been creating art for it in a pixel art style. I’ve had a little taste of making pixel art before, but this project has allowed me to get a lot more familiar with the style, and I’m having a lot of fun. When will the game be released? I’m not sure; I suppose part of that will depend on how soon Intuition gets approved as an iPhone developer. Yep, this collab of God at play and Neil Roberts will likely be Intuition’s first iPhone game. Woot!
