The Still of the Night Causes a Storm in the Mind

NEW - play it online now at www.iCrashForCash.com

Last year I created this mini-game for a bonus when players completed Debris. It was called Debris Drop and it involved the simple premise of physics-enabled boxes falling from space with players tilting their device in order to match the various colors. Instantly, I knew I had created something cool. The initial mini-game only took about 4 hours to make but it was readily apparent that this core was actually the most fun part about Debris.

After realizing that I’d stumbled onto something my sophomore effort on the iPhone was a pretty easy choice. I took that mini-game and ramped it up a few notches by adding new shapes, online leaderboards, and backgrounds. Poof! Cosmosis was born. The title didn’t take off and I eventually made it free. For a while it accumulated a decent number of downloads but the game had really terrible production values so even as a freebie it wasn’t too enticing. I still thought it was the best core experience I’d created.

This summer I created several iPhone games that still haven’t seen the light of day. After having some success with Skyline Blade I was able to ramp up the production values of Midnight Status titles and invest some money in better assets and tools. Thus instead of making games with a budget of $0 I was able to jump it up. After fighting with myself on which game to “really” make next I chose to iterate again on the physics box dropping concept.

The first game to reflect the new production values ended up being Ragduck Hunt. Of course in truth Ragduck Hunt was actually started in the middle of development on Crash For Cash. I knew Ragduck Hunt was going to be somewhat gimmicky but also fun for a while. Crash For Cash on the other hand had potential to be a really good game so more time was spent on it. I’m probably one of the few people who will drop one project for 2 weeks just to push another idea out there that I think can be done better with less time … but maybe not. The point is if I get a wild hair up my butt I’m going to act on it. In this case Ragduck Hunt was that wild hair.

Anyway, Crash For Cash represents the current pinnacle of iteration for me. I took what was a neat mini-game and evolved it into Cosmosis. Then I took that evolution and completely trumped it in terms of production values, theme, social networking, and gameplay. Cosmosis was still very limited in terms of playability. There were 6 colors to match and the only thing that got harder was the speed. Crash For Cash goes way beyond this.

The differences in gameplay may seem subtle but they are quite effective. First of all as players earn cash they unlock more expensive cars. More expensive cars in turn earn them more money. Of course as the number of various car models increases it also becomes more difficult to make a match. This is where the brand new tap-bomb feature comes in. Players can now tap on a car to blow it up. This adds an element of strategy that wasn’t really present before. Now players have to think on the fly which cars on-screen will help them capitalize the most once things get really intense. Top the new gameplay off with leaderboards, twitter integration, and high quality production values and I think you’ve got a winner.

Anyway, I like it and I hope other people do too. Here’s a video!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 10th, 2009 at 5:17 pm and is filed under App Store, Business, Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.