iPhone Game Development

Every month I play a game called Celebrity. Ten of my friends gather in a room and we proceed to shout, yell, jump, and make fools of ourselves. I look forward to this evening without fail. This month I found myself showing Word Fu to every single person there. We’re all game developers, so we appreciate seeing new and interesting ideas. But I’ve never once gone around and pimped someone else’s game so much.

It turns out that one of my friends just recently released his first iPhone game called Letterbug. It’s remarkably similar to Word Fu. Yet, I wasn’t nearly as captivated by it.

Why?

It comes down to personality. Games that relate to us through our emotions will stick. Games that don’t relate just pass us by in the night. What makes Word Fu stand out isn’t its game mechanics. It’s all the polish they put around it. From the crazy intro animation to the silly karate chop sound effects, it just makes you laugh. It makes you feel good. And it’s what makes me tell every single person I know about the game.

Giving a game personality is hard. I’m not going to get into detail about how to accomplish it here. That’s another topic for another day. But, it boils down to having incredibly coherent and styled audio, visual, and gameplay cues. I’ve been told we did a good job with Aurora Feint II: The Tower.

I looked around at the other iPhone games that I’ve shared with friends over the last few weeks:  ZenBound, Up There, Ancient Frog, Sneezies. These games have personality. They relate to you in some way emotionally. And that makes them special.