10 Sweet iPhone Games

By: Derek Yu

On: December 15th, 2009

I think we’re well due for an iPhone/iPod Touch post. My Touch has become the peripheral of choice for the go, so I made sure it was well-stocked with games. Here are 10 of my favorites:

Eliss – Steph Thirion’s Eliss was one of the first iPhone games to catch my eye, and still stands out as one of the best games for the platform, in my opinion. It’s gorgeous and challenging, and makes great use of the iPhone’s multitouch.

Canabalt – Conceived by Adam “Atomic” Saltsman, the big brain behind Flixel and Edgecrement, Canabalt has you leaping from roof-to-roof in a frantic and stylish escape from a dying city. It’s the best one-switch game I’ve ever played and the latest update – which features new environments and sick beatz by Danny B. – make it even better.

Developers should check out Adam’s post about “The $0.99 Problem”, too.

Evacuation – We covered Bennett “Benzido” Foddy’s Evacuation on TIGSource before, when it was a Flash game. It’s even better on the iPhone.

Little Master – Likewise, Benzido’s cricket game started life as a Flash title before it became an iPhone game, and we covered it before. What can I say? I really like his work!

Sword of Fargoal – Jeff McCord’s classic roguelike game has been rebooted by McCord and his partners, Paul Pridham and Elias Pschernig. For those of you yearning for a good roguelike experience on the iPhone, this is it! It’s a fantastic update to the game.

Earth Dragon – Earth Dragon was created by Chaim Gingold, the design lead for Spore’s Creators, including the Creature Creator (now indie as the day he was born). It’s quite cute and fun and makes clever use of the accelerometer and touch to let you control your dragon. The art is by Jane Ng, who also worked on Spore.

ZenBound – Zenbound is a calm (I wrote “clam” first, and almost left it), meditative game that has you tying up wooden animals with rope. It’s really striking to look at. The creators, Secret Exit, are best known for their Stair/Truck Dismount series of games.

Stair Dismount – And yes, Stair Dismount has finally made it to the iPhone. This version has a variety of different levels and lets you paste your friends’ faces onto the ragdoll via Facebook. I chose Edmund McMillen, because his photo was cropped the best. Then I chose a baby.

Skull Pogo – Chevy Johnston’s Skull Pogo started off as a Game Maker game, but it works best on the iPhone, where you can use the accelerometer to control your little skullpogoman. Aside from being an awesome, creative, and helpful dude on the forums, Chevy knows how to make an addictive game. The recent update is pretty sweet, too.

Cross Fingers – Because of a certain someone asshole, Edge has been removed from the App Store again. But at least he didn’t prevent Mobigame from releasing their next title, Cross Fingers, a sliding-block puzzle game that uses multitouch. Although perhaps not as unique as Edge, I actually prefer CF as a game to play on the go.

So there you have it! 10 good games for under $22. And I’m sure you got more, so lay it on us in the comments.

Flixel Workshop

By: Brandon McCartin (BMcC)

On: September 17th, 2009

UPDATE: Above is Adam “Atomic” Saltsman’s Flixel workshop, recorded live today. It was helpful and useful. (Nice job, Adam!)

Adam “Atomic” Saltsman is giving his Flixel workshop live, RIGHT NOW.

Canabalt

By: Xander

On: September 1st, 2009

Adam Atomic and Danny B are at it again with Canabalt, a flixel powered one-button platformer. Your incredibly suave protagonist continually runs to the right and all you are required to do is hit the jump button, varying timing and length in order to avoid the obstacles in your path.

So it’s a simple game to play then, but so much of the game is executed gloriously. The atmosphere is fantastic, with the multitude of greys creating a distinct world that’s easily identifiable even when your hero is at his fastest. The scheme even flows into the browser window itself, which frames the game in a similar style, which is a great touch. The wide resolution of the game also helps with seeing the oncoming obstacles without having to slow the game down to help you cope with the pressure.

The sensation of speed throughout is intensely gratifying. It’s often been said about the classic Sonic games that the speed sections were simply rewards for careful platforming and beating enemies, but here the whole game feels rewarding. He doesn’t take long at all to build up speed and it just increases as he tears across randomly generated rooftops. I also love the feeling of being out of control of the character, which sounds fairly silly, but it conveys the feeling of speed akin to say a runaway train. There’s no way to stop him, the best you can do is use the one button you have to get the hell out of the way of anything that will put a premature end to your rush.

Sometimes that can be a giant robot. Just FYI…

flixel

By: Derek Yu

On: June 5th, 2009

Adam “Atomic” Saltsman’s Flash game API flixel is out. It’s a vastly-improved version of the engine he used to create his popular web games Gravity Hook and FATHOM.

Features:

– High performance 2d Flash rendering
– Lots of retro game physics and effects built-in
– Easy to learn, uses no Flash libraries or Flash classes
– Object-oriented Actionscript 3
– Includes the source code for a complete game
– Forums to help collect tutorials and whatnot

And the online documentation is generated dynamically by Ivan “toastie” Safrin’s Nanodoc system.

Ladies and gentlemen, the world just became a better place to make games exist in.

FATHOM

By: Brandon McCartin (BMcC)

On: May 18th, 2009

FATHOM, the latest collaboration of Adam “Atomic” Saltsman and Danny “B” Baranowsky, is your standard 2D action-platformer… or is it? The game throws some fun surprises your way, which I don’t want to spoil here, and is definite food for thought. I give it 33 thumbs up!

Like their hit Gravity Hook, FATHOM uses Adam’s Flixel framework for Flash-based 2D games to great effect. (The entire game took about 10 days to make.) Which is cool, because Flixel should see a public release “in a few weeks.” (!) There’s also a bunch of procedural trickery going on in the background which the player may not notice, but I think is worth mentioning in case Adam wants to talk about it more in the forum thread.

Play-Make.com

By: Brandon McCartin (BMcC)

On: January 13th, 2009

This post is long overdue. Shame on me!

Ivan “Russia’s Gift to Gaming” Safrin (“toastie” on the forums) has launched a sexy new indie gaming blog, all grey and pink and personal, featuring significant contributions from Adam “Host of Killer Pool Parties” Saltsman (a.k.a. “adamatomic”), called Play-Make.com. It’s more developer-centric than the average blog, with many links to postmortems, exclusive interviews, and other excellent things.

Beyond that, it provides a new perspective on The World of Indie Games, if you’re interested in that sort of thing. (And my guess is you are!) I love how personal it is. There’s even some juicy behind-the-scenes details on the first TIGJam!

While I’m writing this post, I might as well mention that Ivan’s been The Official TIGSource Photographer since Gamma 256. You can find his photos of numerous indie events on his Flickr photostream. (That is, if you really want to get an idea of just how infrequently I bathe!)

I was going to add this to the External Links section, but apparently I already did when I first sat down to write this post!

Gravity Hook

By: Derek Yu

On: September 15th, 2008

Gravity Hook is a new Flash game from Adam (Atomic) Saltsman and Danny Baranowsky. It’s based on a game prototype by Niklas “Arne” Jansson where you climb higher and higher by grappling onto mines and swinging yourself up. The catch is that the mines arm themselves when you’re hooked onto them!

Like Thrustburst, Gravity Hook rewards risky behavior – releasing yourself from a mine when you’re right next to it results in a significantly larger boost. It feels good to catch the wind with a series of dangerous jumps. So good, in fact, that I’d like to see a visual or aural reward when I nail one… perhaps a little spark or a different sound effect?

Another thing I like about the game is how quickly you can retry after dying – your highest score is submitted only when you exit to the title screen. It may seem like a small thing, but for a score-based reflex game like Gravity Hook, every second between death and the next attempt can seem like a freaking eternity. For me, anyway.

Now if only I didn’t suck so hard at it…