This is a little outside of what we’d normally post on TouchArcade, but I’m always watching (or listening to) talks from all sorts of industry-relevant events and you’d be surprised by the sort of super interesting or inspiring stuff you come across. This particular talk comes from Chillingo’s Levi Buchanan at Casual Connect. Levi discusses ways developers squeeze impactful narrative into mobile games which might only be played for a few seconds at a time. He focuses on Cut the Rope ($0.99), Where’s My Water ($1.99), and Canabalt ($2.99) as three great examples as games with “thin slice narrative," arguing that the best mobile narratives take three things into consideration: Relevance, momentum, and voice.
Anyway, there’s not much reason for me to paraphrase it, as much like the ideas Buchanan conveys, his talk is similarly brief and to the point:
If this sort of thing interests you, either as a gamer or a developer, be sure to check out the rest of the Casual Connect YouTube channel, or the GDC Vault. Levi offers some awesome advice here, and hopefully developers take note… As I’d really love some more iOS experiences with narrative as flawlessly executed as Canabalt.
