Hey guys, I'm a student developer of mobile games and I needed some reference material to help me flesh out the mechanics of an iOS game I'm working on. Does anyone know of any 2D games on the Store right now that feature some kind of exploration or decently sized world environment? I'm also looking for games that deal with guiding NPCs in some way around an environment or through combat. Without giving away too many details, the game I'm developing deals with AI characters moving around in an environment under constant attack by that environment, guided around by the player in some way. It's a little vague, I know, but if you need more information I can give it to you.
You can also check out dungeon hunter 1 & 2 and sword and sworcery. both have npc that you can quide around during combat, mainly just one other character. but S&S will show you some interesting ways to interact with the world around you which is kind of cool. final fantasy games too.
Editing my OP to say 2D games. I'm really looking for two things, one is how to set up the game structure of a large world and autonomously moving NPCs, the second is ideas for moment-to-moment gameplay (combat, navigation, etc) for the player to control those NPCs.
I've spent some time trying to find something like this before, but I'm relatively sure that there isn't a game like this so far. If I understand correctly, what you have in mind is more or less an offline "MMO" (without the O and the MM being AI-controlled NPCs) with dynamic events and a possibly (at least partially) randomly generated world. Something remotely similar to Dwarven Fortress, but completely different.
More or less sort of. The world I'm creating will be much smaller than any mobile MMO I've ever played. Also, the NPCs are sort of the player's avatar in game. They're a persistent partially-AI controlled group that the player indirectly influences through the gameplay that I'm trying to formulate. That group changes every so often, but for a good 15 minutes you've got the same 5-7 NPCs. It's got very reduced RPG elements and the focus of the game is more or less on getting the group to survive to the end of a "core gameplay" path, with the option to explore the rest of the world (or zones)
It sounds like an intriguing project, and something that I have been wanting to play for many years (some ten years ago when I stopped playing Ultima Online, I even set up a local server just so that I could play in my own little world, minus other people!). I also believe there is certainly a market for this kind of game, so hopefully you'll stick with it. Should you need or want testers at a later stage, feel free to nudge.
Yep. It's a big year long student project, so I'll probably come to TouchArcade for testers in the future. Just now I was reading posts on TouchArcade from a few weeks ago and discovered Dofus:Battles, which from the description looks like the closest thing I've seen so far, with some major differences. I'm grabbing the Lite version and seeing what's there.
Your description reminds me of an older game called Grunts. This might help: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/grunts/id319706910?mt=8
There is a game like Metroid but I forgot the name. But if you search on google metroid type iphone games it should come up. I think thats the game you should look at.
