In August 2007, the first native iPhone game was released by Lucas Newman and Adam Betts.
It was called Lights Off and was a clone of an old electronic game Lights Out. At the time, the App Store had not yet been announced and so the only way to install the game was to jailbreak your iPhone. Still, it was a sign of things to come and showed the first example of the iPhone as a gaming device.
Lucas Newman has since been hired by Apple, but this official App Store release [link, $1.99] has been inherited by developer Steve Troughton-Smith and the original artist Adam Betts. The game was rebuilt from scratch with a brand new engine but keeps the polished look and feel of the original.
The game is a simple (yet potentially frustrating) puzzler in which a tap on the screen will toggle the surrounding lights. The goal for each level is to turn off all the lights. There are 212 levels and this new version adds sound effects to the game. Future versions are expected to add internet features, bonus levels and themes.
This video shows the basic gameplay. The actual game does have sound effects which were not recorded in this video:
App Store Link: Lights Off
looks fun!
As a professional graphic designer, I vote nightmare. I find it interesting that a game that is suppose to be about fonts, and uses the names of different fonts in the game, presents the entire game in one font, Helvetica. Terribly boring.
Are you sure it's ALWAYS Helvetica? That would be a bizarre (& unnecessary) shortcoming.
I think to be fair, the game is not about fonts, but rather KERNing, which is an attribute of typography-not at all related to different fonts. I think the designer nature of the game style is intended to be very minimalist and not feature-rich. Not for everyone, but for those who dig this sort of design (like myself) it resonates.
As a former newspaper editor and graphic artist, this game really appeals to me.
But, at 00:54, I nearly puked. Please fix your apostrophe catastrophe.
Well, the video only shows Helvetica being used as the font for all the words. As far as kerning goes, this teaches you nothing about kerning. In real life, you don't drop words from above and try to get them to land around a letter. LOL. I realize this is a game. As a game, I find it boring. It's a simplified version of Tetris but without any of the fun. And as a chance to educate people on typography and kerning, it completely misses the mark. But I don't think its intended purpose (notice the correct use of its) was to try and be educational.