"The iPhone has revolutionized everything. It’s going to enable incredible things for gaming," says Neil Young. No, not the guy with the guitar and muttonchops, but the one who spent years churning out blockbusters as the head of Electronic Arts’ gargantuan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EA_Los_Angeles Los Angeles studio. Since http://www.joystiq.com/2008/06/18/breaking-11-year-ea-vet-neil-young-leaves-for-new-project/ splitting from EA last June, his startup http://www.ngmoco.com/ ngmoco (short for next generation mobile company) has been http://www.blog.newsweek.com/blogs/levelup/archive/2008/06/30/just-the-faqs-departing-electronic-arts-executive-neil-young-talks-to-level-up-about-his-new-venture.aspx cranking out games for Apple’s all-in-one device. Young says the iPhone platform represents an "inflective moment" for the industry, one that necessitates a whole new approach to development and distribution. It’s all about tiny teams making games rapidly and offering them on iTunes at impulse-buy prices. "It’s like having Wal-Mart in your pocket," he says. Young also believes that the platform enables developers to experiment and adapt more quickly. Click on the thumbnail images below to learn how ngmoco works the iPhone ecosystem to its—and players’—advantage.
Instant Price Cuts To stay on top of the iTunes charts, ngmoco plays a meta game with pricing. For example, ngmoco began giving away its popular Tetris-style http://topple.ngmoco.com/ Topple—but included links to a new $10 game, Rolando. "We subsidized the traffic by using Topple as a promotional engine," Young says. Twelve percent of Rolando’s holiday sales came from the giveaway. Two months later, ngmoco cut the price to sell more.
On-the-Fly Updates The connected nature of the iPhone allows videogame developers to respond to player behavior. Shortly after releasing Topple, ngmoco noticed that many players quit after reaching the fourth level because the game got too complex too quickly. Days later, ngmoco uploaded a new config file, and the number of puzzlers who hung in there until the last level skyrocketed.
More Variety "By building smaller experiences and delivering sequels more frequently, we can create a different pace and cadence to a game’s life cycle," Young says. Ngmoco’s quirky http://drawesome.ngmoco.com/ Dr. Awesome, which lets players perform surgery with tilts of an iPhone, was designed in just a few months. Similarly, the sequel to http://rolando.ngmoco.com/ Rolando,which debuted in December, rolls out this summer. And Rolando 3 is due by Christmas.
WordFu With its kung fu screams and karate chop pace, ngmoco’s word scrambler is a quick fix for logophiles on the go. And the game is fine—tuning its action thanks to iTunes feedback. At first, players got 45 seconds to choose their letters at the beginning of play — which, Young learned, was driving a fair portion of gamers nuts. The solution: adding up to 45 more seconds to the start time. Ngmoco is also tweaking the competition for what Young calls "asynchronous multiplayer" gaming. Ngmoco distills a player’s high scoring performance down to small packets of data, which can then be unpacked and replayed for another person in real-time head-to-head competition. "You’re playing against the ghost of a competitor," Young says. The other thing iTunes taught them: "Non-English-speaking people find English word games strangely compelling," Young says.
Dropship To create a game that’s part Tetris, part Geometry Wars, ngmoco goes old school in this incandescent, candy-colored, arcade-style shooter. To play, you zap baddies as you vector thrust your tiny ship through angular enemy caverns. Gamers will find the control scheme similar to the company’s upcoming first-person shooter, LiveFire — which ngmoco built after trying out the setup on Dropship. "This game helped us test [the control scheme] with customers and iterate it to what we think will allow first-person shooters to work on the device," Young says.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUhgXgoXAj4
Rolando 2 The sequel to roly-poly platformer, Rolando, will build on the data gleaned from player behavior in the first. "For Rolando 1 we learned that people actually do want traditional, deep gaming experiences on their phone," Young says. "The average play session for Rolando is 22.5 minutes and the average user plays 11 times." The answer — shorten the gap between titles. Rolando 3 will be coming out over the holidays, and the plan is to keep the pace up as long as the demand requires. "But we don’t want to get ahead on how much you’re spending," Young says.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Az1fkoiwnRY
Star Defense Coming in May, this is a fast-action, 3-D tower defense game sure to keep players fingertips — and heads — spinning. But the coolest twist is the social networking. Young’s keen on exploiting services like Facebook and Twitter for gaming, and Star Defense is launched with this in mind. "You can automatically post and tweet your scores to the Twitterverse and your friends," Young says. "All they have to do is click the link and play against you."
