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Greetings everyone! I’m Ian, one of the artists at Sky Tyrannosaur. Up to now I feel we’ve been a bit rubbish about updating the world on what we’re up to and I would like that to change moving forward. Not … Continue reading
One of my favorite parts of Blowfish Meets Meteor is that the game constantly lets you pop sea creatures. You get to pop blowfish with a meteor — a meteor! — and you get to use the powerups that fall out of their withered balloon-skin husks to pop other things with even greater temerity. You pop electric eels with sentient oyster school supplies. Your mermaid daughters pop octopi with sewing needles the size of their forearms. You’ll pop piranhas — a lot of them — with torpedoes and dynamite and laser beams. At one point, you pop a straight-up Pinocchio whale — from the inside.
And we made it satisfying. Really, really satisfying. Because popping sea creatures is the literal, singular future of video games, and we built Blowfish Meets Meteor from the ground-up to be the best place in existence to do it.
Mermaid children carry tiny pins. Sometimes, they’re for sewing. Other times, they’re for mercilessly popping sea creatures.
Blowfish Meets Meteor is packed with little vignettes that tell a goofy little story, and we wanted to start showing them off today. This screen is from the opening cinematic, where we showcase the block-avalanche that traps your Mermaid daughters and set the scene for you to rescue them.
Blowfish Meets Meteor :: Screenshot Saturday
As always, we’re getting closer and closer to launch (you know it’s close when the story sequences start going in!) You can look forward to some gloriously story-centric block-breaker action on both iPad and iPhone.
Given that Piranhas are the primary grunt enemy for most of Blowfish Meets Meteor, it was only a matter of time before they infiltrated Mermaid Mondays. You’ll spend a lot of the game destroying these gigantic, villainous fish by any means necessary, be it with sentient sticks of TNT, gigantic laser beams, explosive torpedoes, or any number of other weapons. Sometimes, you’ll even drop zombies on them.
Giant piranhas positively adore the taste of mermaid flesh. Adore.
Blowfish Meets Meteor is coming soon to the iPhone and iPad.
Another week, another epic Screenshot Saturday!
Homicidal whale fires Bullet Krills.
Blowfish Meets Meteor is, as always, coming soon to both iPhone and iPad. Our Facebook page provides up-to-the-minute status reports on the progress of the game.
Today, we learn about a Mermaid’s best friend.
Mermaids keep sea lions as pets. They tried dogs once, but that didn’t last long.
Remember: Blowfish Meets Meteor is coming soon to iOS — that’s both the iPhone and the iPad! We’ll have many more announcements on the release of the game in the near future.
Because you can never make your game look too epic.
What does everyone think? Is this behemoth certifiably too massive to fit on an iPhone screen?
We’ve posted our first-ever gameplay video for the iPhone version of Blowfish Meets Meteor! We were especially torn on which level to post footage of, but in the end, we went with a level entitled “Colossal Carnage.” It’s an early-game level, so it hasn’t ramped up the complexity too much; as such, we felt it did a pretty good job at showcasing how the game is played and how the Mermaid daughters operate. And ‘splosions. What’s a video game without ‘splosions?
We’ll be announcing a release date for Blowfish Meets Meteor in the near future, so stay tuned! It’ll be launching on both the iPhone and iPad.
Game controllers are not intuitive or natural.
Experienced gamers that many of us are, we tend to take this for granted. After all, many of us were there from the start, when there were only a few inputs to keep track of – one button and a joystick, in the earliest cases. By learning a new button or two every few years for a couple decades, we took the easy road in, and growing with the technology has given us a lot of tolerance towards how artificial it really is.
It’s not that way for most people. Have you ever watched a new gamer hold a controller? Most new players can hardly manage to make Mario run and jump at the same time, much less combo an enemy in a modern game while wrangling a squirrely camera with the right stick.
At its core, the controller only separates us from the games we play. We can’t be there in the flesh to influence the game world, so we need an intermediary – something to step between us and let us guide our onscreen avatars. It’s an abstraction, and as such, it’s one step removed from the reality of the game.
Touch screens are an abstraction too. They’re arguably more intuitive than controllers, because touching an onscreen object to interact with it is at least closer to how things work in the real world than touching a button. That object is still intangible, though – it’s cold and flat and glassy, and most games are trying to make us believe the opposite by immersing us in worlds full of life and warmth and flesh-and-blood characters. A touch screen may be less of a barrier than a button, but it’s still a barrier.
Both options, however, are leagues ahead of virtual buttons. If a controller with buttons acts as a layer separating us from the game, and a touch screen acts as a layer separating us from game, virtual buttons act as two layers at once. With virtual buttons, not even the controller can feel lifelike – we’re touching something that isn’t there to manipulate an input that manipulates the game world. It’s doubly removed from the action on the screen, and it distances us that much more because of it.
The worst part is that there’s no reason for it. Since controllers are already so unwieldy, why try to mimic them with a touch screen? Virtual buttons aren’t solving any problems; they’re just blindly following tradition for tradition’s sake. Nintendo has proven time and time again, with games like Kirby’s Canvas Curse or The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass that serious, full-fledged games, full of action and enemies and abilities, can function properly with only a touch screen.
Mobile game developers are never going to push the medium forward if they think that making serious, genuine games means ripping off console conventions wholesale. By accepting the medium on its own terms and embracing what it has to offer – the strengths as well as the weaknesses – developers can push it forward and create experiences that are worth having, whether they’re bite-sized minigames or full-fledged adventures spanning dozens of hours. They just need to let go of some outdated conventions and be willing to forge some new ones in their place.