Hey guys! It's been a while! Since I put AWESOME Land and MANOS: The Hands of Fate out on iOS a couple of years back, I'd been busy making Angry Video Game Nerd Adventures on PC (which will also be out on Wii U within the next month or two), but now I'm back to announce my new mobile game, Jump'N'Shoot Attack! Subscribe to the TouchArcade YouTube channel Everything you hate about mobile games? This is the opposite of that. - Destructoid In the year 30XX The president of Earth 4 has been kidnapped by evil space mutants known as the Xatharr! Louise Lightfoot, The Master of Jumping and Shooting has been recruited to find and rescue him! Theres no time to lose!! This game marries the concepts of traditional platform gaming, and NES Hard, with a simple two-touch mobile control scheme (think Kid Tripp - in fact, Mike Burns was a big inspiration here, and supplied some input). Expect visual and audio homages to the likes of Mega Man, Metroid, Journey to Silius and more classics! JumpNShoot Attacks mission is to create an authentic NES-like experience players can carry around in their pocket, without the downsides of unresponsive virtual buttons or fiddly touch controls. The game achieves this by using a gameplay style similar to popular runner games, refined to allow precision platforming, paired with a traditional video game structure; a set of stages with a beginning, middle and end rather than the infinite-scrolling score attack game players have come to expect. - No virtual buttons - No pointless In-App Purchases - Loads of stages - This is not an 'endless' runner! Many retro gamers dont have much interest in mobile gaming due to virtual buttons not being responsive enough, and the free to play model offering endless games with no goal other than to pay more money for more unnecessary features. JumpNShoot Attack has been designed and built with these people in mind, the two-touch control scheme is perfect for a touch-screen, the game has a beginning, middle and end, the challenge is high with no loss of responsiveness, and the game is to be sold at an upfront price with no IAP or ads. Coming March 2015!
Graphics look great. Shame this isn't a platformer and is a runner though Buttons work fine for platformers. As shown in your last two iOS games
I personally love the style of controls. Makes for very precise gameplay and challenging difficulty. There are many great iOS platformers but it is difficult to pull off quick precise movement and jumps with a virtual d-pad, you can't recreate the same kind of intense gameplay. Very similar to the game my brother and I are working on that was also inspired by Kid Tripp and games like the iOS Rayman games. Love the level of detail. Reminds me of NES Megaman as well as the strange/awesome level art in many old games. Will definitely purchase right away!
Thanks guys! Yeah, the Kid Tripp thing was very much intentional here, as virtual buttons just aren't precise enough for truly challenging retro games (and if you do want to make a platformer with buttons, you're probably better putting it on a system which has buttons, right?) so I've put a lot of time into working out control schemes for them on mobile. I have some pretty crazy ones planned for future! In this case, it's less 'runner' and more "Mega Man if right on your D-pad was taped down". Running into a wall doesn't mean death, for example, and gravity is set quite high so you can stop your jump and land as soon as you need to; very accurate. The goal was to never have anybody think "I wish I had physical buttons right now" at any point during the game. Also, anybody who has tested so far has gotten really addicted and fallen in love with it, so I really hope this rings true for the public when it is released too!
Just to chime in real quick: Sam kindly provided me with an advance beta version of the game, and, well... this is definitely something old school platformer fans will want to check out. It just looks, sounds, and feels amazing. And it's definitely got some challenge to it too -- I spent about 20-30 minutes on a particularly devilish level, and I couldn't stop because it was just. so. much. fun. The difficulty curve is also quite a bit more forgiving than my game's (Kid Tripp), which I think is probably a good thing. Haha, yes! This was the driving idea behind Kid Tripp in the first place. (Except it was more like Super Mario Bros./Adventure Island instead of Mega Man.) I've seen quotes like this and I just want to address something that's been kind of bugging me: "Platformers" and "runners" aren't mutually exclusive. A runner is a subcategory of a platformer, and nowadays "runners" are often mistaken for "endless runners" in the vein of Temple Run and Monster Dash, which this game (and Kid Tripp for that matter) certainly are not. (I do enjoy both those games, by the way, but apples/oranges.) Early games like Adventure Island were crazy fun, but what struck me about that particular series is that if you ever stopped or slowed down, everything would kind of fall out of sync and you'd just have to sit around and wait for stuff to fall back into place. For instance, if you're running towards a moving platform, and you stop, you'd usually have to wait for it to come around again. Realizing that was kind of an "AHA!" moment for me, because after that what I always thought was fun was never actually letting go of the d-pad and trying to nail the timing on everything. Because even if I did stop and wait for stuff to fall back in sync, I'd usually end up dying anyway because the rhythm of that run was completely ruined. I gradually realized that this applied to most linear platformers, and after I watched some amazing speedruns on YouTube of games like Super Mario Bros., I realized that that was an integral, deliberate part of the level design. The point I'm trying to make here is that this old style of platformer is making a (glorious!) comeback, and if a developer chooses to make one an autorunner then it doesn't inherently make it inferior. It's just cutting out the option to babystep your way through levels that, in the end, really weren't designed to be played that way. It also allows us to design more intense, complex, and interesting levels, since with the tap-on-the-left-to-jump/tap-on-the-right-to-shoot control scheme, players can jump and shoot simultaneously. With virtual button controls, that's simply not possible. Your thumb can't push two virtual buttons in the same way that it can push two physical buttons. This scheme also completely eliminates the possibility of tapping the wrong button (or missing it altogether). All that said, I actually have enjoyed quite a few iOS platformers that sport virtual buttons. I think the Mikey games in particular did an exceptional job with that. ...wow, this post turned out waaaay longer than I had intended. TL;DR: Jump'N'Shoot Attack! is awesome, and just 'cause you can stop running doesn't mean you should.
Those reasons are why Kid Tripp remains to be my favorite iOS platformer, and why I am extremely excited to play Jump'N'Shoot Attack. There just aren't enough of these style platformers on iOS. These are what inspired me to take a shot at developing. Hope FreakZone games gets a ton of downloads, I loved climbing the leader boards on Kid Tripp. The two button argument is a great point. Mario you had to hold the sprint button and hit the jump button at the same time, Megaman so often would require hitting the jump and shoot button at the same time. Many iOS platformers that try and do the same thing end up with very slow and floaty controls to allow players the time to pull off jumps and shots with virtual buttons. Looking forward to this release!
Wow, fantastic post, Mike! Thanks for chipping in dude! Thanks for everybody else's comments too! As mentioned, Kid Tripp was a huge inspiration for the game, though I have had something like it planned for quite some time, even from before I played Kid Tripp, mainly inspired by an auto-run NES game called Gumshoe. Gumshoe was a platformer controlled by the NES Zapper... Believe it or not... You'd shoot the character to jump, shoot enemies to attack them. There was also a lot of inspiration from Rayman Jungle Run in the early stages of planning this one. Kid Tripp however really showed us all just how well this could be done. Tripp was, in my opinion, the first time we got to have a true Mario Land-like platformer on iOS without actually losing anything due to the touch screen. Perhaps that's due to how I play platform games, though. If any of you guys remember my first iOS platformer, AWESOME Land, it was a Mario 1 tribute, and it even borrowed the fact that you can't turn back, as the camera will only move to the right. I always quite liked that, if you missed something, you straight up missed it, why turn back when there's so much in front of you? My problem with the 'runner' genre is not the automatic movement, but rather the structure. When was the last time (not including Kid Tripp) you played a "runner" game which had a beginning, middle and an end? When you could say "I finally beat this level!", or when you could look forward to seeing what the next level looked like? For me, that's the essence of platform games, and that's what's missing on iOS, not d-pads! I think that if enough developers can move away from the endless freemium idea and start applying cool mobile control schemes to full-on video games, mobile gaming can truly replace the likes of Game Boys, DS's and PS Vitas. Testers are falling in love with the game at the moment, so I'm pretty excited, and I hope the public enjoy it just as much. A publisher I'm very fond of have taken an interest, and I know that they won't make me change anything, so I might be able to boost this thing's reach and popularity, but it may mean an early March release instead.
Hey guys, just a quick update to inform you all of the changes! Jump'N'Shoot Attack has been picked up for publishing by my guys at ScrewAttack, who worked with me on Angry Video Game Nerd Adventures! This means a hell of a lot more coverage, and a lot more people on the leaderboards. This does mean it has been delayed until March, but the game has been given some improvements too! New trailer: Subscribe to the TouchArcade YouTube channel
Damn it, this looks fantastic! Like Vovin in another thread I'm a little pissed that I'm only learning of this game now but better late than never, hey?! Besides, the upshot is that I only have around 12 hours to wait til it's out in the UK. Also, thanks for the excellent posts Mike and DistantJ.
