We had the opportunity to meet with Bight Games at WWDC to discuss their upcoming games coming into the App Store on June 18th. Bight Games is a mobile gaming company that was founded in 2004. As seems to be the story of many mobile developers, Bight Games started doing primarily contract work. While they tried to publish their own original IP to mobile devices, the realities of traditional mobile distribution made it near impossible.
The iPhone, of course, has changed many of these rules, giving developers an opportunity to much more easily bring their own titles to market. Bight Games has two of these original iPhone games coming out on June 18th.
Big Top 10
Perhaps most efficiently described as “Wurdle with numbers", Big Top 10 is a puzzle game that will debut at only $0.99. Similar to Wurdle [App Store], the game revolves around sliding your finger across the board to make the proper combination of tiles. Instead of letters and words, however, Big Top 10 requires you to add a sequence of numbers up to 10. The longer the combination, the higher your score.
The game begins by giving you only 1 minute to make as many combinations as possible. Time is extended, however, as you make bigger sequences or pick up specific time bonuses. The numbers found on the board start off small but as you progress, the difficulty increases with higher valued numbers. If you find yourself stuck, you simply shake the iPhone for a new set of numbers.
Special items including bombs, clocks and multipliers aid in your task while negative numbers make it possible to make super long combos.
It’s certainly a rather simple concept for a game, but sometimes those are the best. Here’s a developer video:
Puzzlings
Another original iPhone game coming from Bight Games is called Puzzlings which is described as a console-quality puzzle adventure game. At its core, the game is a variant on match-3 but adds achievements in the form of unlockable clothing for your Puzzling avatar. These unlockables serve as both an incentive system to progress further as well as a sort of high score to show off to your friends.
Unlike most Match 3 games, Puzzlings is a bit more flexible in its swapping mechanism. Besides swapping two adjacent tiles, you can reverse the entire line by dragging across all the pieces. Additionally, pieces can be rotated by drawing a square around them. A combination of these moves can result in some careful planning for the optimal combo. Game difficult increases with the introduction of large blocks that can require some quick work. These changes do seem to make it much more interesting than the traditional formula.
Overall, the game offers a fit and polish that makes it feel like great title and should provide puzzle gamers something a little different to enjoy.
Kill All Bugs
Finally, one title we didn’t have much hands-on time with is a mobile port called Kill All Bugs. It’s a Tower Defense game claims to offer some new an interesting twists to the genre, but we’ll have to take a closer look when it comes out. We’ve included this gameplay video for you to see for yourself:
We’ll see the first of these games on June 18th, and Bight Games expects to continue introducing a number of games throughout the year.
