'Gold Miner Joe' – An Upcoming Platformer with Swipe Controls
posted by arn on September 8th, 2009 6:06 PM EDT in Upcoming Games, iPhone games, iPod touch games
Donut Games recently gave us a heads up on two of their upcoming iPhone games.
The first is called Cows in Space and is a cute physics puzzler that is shown in this video. Using your Jelly beam, you try to save the cows of the earth which have been left floating around in space.
The second title, however, especially caught out attention due to its unique control method. Donut Games has ported their platformer Gold Miner Joe to the iPhone and has spent time modifying the controls to fit the platform's touch screen. Donut Games wrote:
We fiddeled back and forth quite a lot, experimenting with the controls since this is our first "all directional" platform game. And personally, I can't stand the DPad in an iPhone platform game, and other alternatives I've tried haven't felt natural. We came up with a type of control that I haven't seen in any game before… I guess you could call it the "floating swipe pad", and it works extremely well! Then there's all the elements from the original as well, including 50 shafts to explore.
Despite being a popular genre, iPhone platformers have received mixed reviews largely due to their dependence on virtual d-pads. While some players have no problems with them, some find them near unusable. We're hopeful to see how this works in practice.
Game looks pretty good. I'll be sure to put it on my watch list.
Seems fun to me
Swipe instead of D-pad is my preference for any genre I have ever tried. D-pad can work fine, but swipe just works better in my experience.
These guys make great games !! Love them:)
These guys make great games !! Love them
I agree.
Good going Donut Games!
can't wait to see BOTH of these titles hit the store.
Richard
Swipe controls are always best, and I like the implementation in this game.
This, in my opinion, is how Toki Tori should've been done (or at least an option for this alongside the existing method).
Sure, swipe controls are great, but this game looks like trash. We have enough crappy platformers on the iPhone OS.
I like swipe control as well, and it fits the game very well. Good game
Reminds me of Spelunker on my old Atari 800. Loved that and this looks pretty good. Also similar to Montezuma's Revenge also on my Atari 800.
The voice acting makes me want to kill myself.
Looks good.
Hey Donutgames, I would LOVE to see y'all port Jumpman! =:P
Donut Games is quickly becoming one of my favorite iPhone game developers. I remember playing this game back on the Pocket PC and thinking it was a cute little platformer. It will be interesting to see how the iPhone version fares in regards to the control scheme. Cows in space looks like a lot of fun as well.
this looks classic. this is how i prefer my gaming to go…love it!
The game looks fantastic – congrats!
We've found this type of control works well – take a look at Flashback:Quest for Identity on iPhone / Touch, which we released back in May and more recently C64, which also uses these controls. In the C64 video, I demonstrated that these types of controls are perfect for platformers like Bruce Lee: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUQH24c63g8, given you can move your thumb around the screen to keep the player visible.
The one think I noticed about this video is the fire is a tap using the same thumb – can you fire and move at the same time?
Cheers