An Apple employee was just telling me today of another developer -- I probably shouldn't say who -- whose worse-selling iPhone app sells 500-1000 units a day. A DAY. What the heck?! Granted, it's only 99 cents, but that's still around 375 dollars or more a day after Apple gets its cut. Holy cow.

Makes me wonder if I should look into porting Midnight Mansion to the iPhone. The iPhone has half the resolution of Midnight Mansion's current resolution, so it would probably look just great on the iPhone. And unlike my latest game Insectoid, which requires a 1.2 GHz computer or faster to run (and even then barely makes it), Midnight Mansion's system requirements are much lighter... the game would perform just fine on the iPhone.

I'm not sure what would be involved in porting it... how much work it would be... but I'm starting to wonder about it, having heard of those crazy sales figures. Of course, not all iPhone games are a success -- some have barely made the author $500 in return, but Midnight Mansion could really fill a niche in that market.

The only question is if it makes *sense*, given the controls.... up, down, left, right, jump, and action... how would that translate to the iPhone? I could superimpose a control pad over the screen, but I'm not sure if that would work well. Or have players tilt left/right/up/down to move Jack, and jolt the iPhone up real quick to make him Jump. Maybe tap the screen for action. OR maybe touch the screen to Jack's left or right to make him walk in that direction... he walks/climbs towards your touch. Maybe one of those would work... hard to know without trying it though.

Thoughts?

-Vern

Wow Vern, I don't know were you come up with these ideas, but that idea is fantastic! I've played emulators of Gameboy Advanced with a little gameplay interface button on the touch screen, and oh man, MM on the go and stuff would be awesome. You should definitely look into this after the Expansion is out, unless you have another project in mind.

P.S. You're not considering iPod Nano/Class with just the wheel, right? You'd run out of buttonz =p

I want... an iPhone... (8) I just recently got my nano but thats ok, music videos and photos are just fine for me in my pocket.

What's google voice?

VernJensen wrote on 13.08.2009 at 04:59:14:


If you want Tilt Controls as an option, I'm all for it.  But not as the only option for controlling Jack.  It's far too imprecise for me.

I've been mulling a control scheme, and think using touch regions (fully explained, with graphical buttons, of course) could work well.  To start, I made this super quick example of playing the game in portrait mode *attached*.  The advantage is that you get to see the whole playing field without covering it with controls, but the disadvantage is that the screen gets shrunk down probably too much.  The play field here is 1/2 MM's size, so it is 320x240.  And the iPhone's screen ha a high resolution so that makes the physical size very small.    I also haven't worked out how to distinguish between 'up' and 'jump' - you could use a gesture, but then things start to get VERY complicated.  The yellowish regions are the "easy mode" jump left and jump right.  I think you'll need those for the game to work on the iPhone.  The purple/pink regions move Jack left/right, the red region is duck/climb down, and the green region is for jump/climb up.  While at the base of a ladder or on a ladder or vine, the region moves Jack up.  To jump off a vine, you have to use the yellow regions.  

The area above the play field is for Jack Lives, Inventory, Score, and could all function as a large pause button which allows you to go to maps, or suspend game, or abort game.  The maps would be fantastic using iPhone native pinch to zoom techniques.  

Anyway, I think the winning solution involves playing MM in landscape mode, not portrait mode, so this is all moot -- but maybe it is interesting fodder for conversation or further development.

Spider: Secret of Bryce Manor has controls sort of like Alan described- you "draw" with your finger where you want the spider to jump:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2MaK-shoqU

Maybe something like that with a combination of tap commands for levers, etc?