For a certain type of mind, these sorts of challenges are irresistible. I haven’t made it far enough to know what that means (not even close, I imagine), but Ziggurat’s constant insistence that there are parts of itself I haven’t experienced is driving me nuts. Ziggurat, by contrast, has an achievement for staying alive until the end of the universe. If you’ve played ten total minutes of most other small-setting, high-score-based iOS games, you’ve played the entire game (not a bad thing). Besides creating a neat sense of grim inevitability, the motion of the sun and moon also telegraph a sense of progress to the player. If the player lives long enough to see the sun disappear, the moon begins to rise. As the player dispatches the alien freaks, the sun slowly sets. When a game of Ziggurat begins, the sun looms high in the sky. This balance is where Ziggurat excels, and why it retains a type of replay value that practically all of its iOS brethren lack. (Just ask the guys who made 100 Rogues.) It’s much more difficult to balance features and gameplay until everything the player does seems to progress the game in some meaningful way. This sort of design restraint is admirable: It demonstrates a trust in the player by encouraging improvisation, and God knows it’s all-too-easy to ratchet up complexity until you’ve got an otherwise-good game that’s completely ill-suited to the typical iOS scenario. Even in a short burst of play, it’s pretty easy to discover a permutation of the gameplay that had previously gone unnoticed.
Keeping the action set minimal while providing a wide variety of gameplay situations forces the player to get creative. Ziggurat thrives on these types of edge cases. Big head + big energy ball = big explosion = more dead aliens. The size of the explosion is a function of alien head size vs. If you shoot an alien with a sufficiently-charged bullet, they explode, killing aliens within the blast radius. The two most common types of alien have heads that oscillate in size. 3 with their eyes closed and the television on mute.) (Muscle memory, timing, and video games: The fact that many people of a certain age group can, to this day, make Mario fly in Super Mario Bros. It’s somewhere between three-and-a-half and four beats, just awkward enough that muscle memory will resist learning it, thereby keeping the player on his toes. The amount of charge time required to fire the optimal shot is excellent. As it’s being charged, the gun gets stronger, reaches its strongest point, then gets weaker again and stays there until it’s fired. The best part: When charging the gun, you can’t just keep your finger parked on the screen until the perfect shot presents itself. The gun is aimed by sliding that finger from left to right, and fired by removing the finger. They can be charged by holding a finger down on the screen. It’s no surprise that the aliens wiped humanity out: Their touch is fatal, and they can (presumably) only be killed by the effects of the player’s energy gun. The rest of the human race has been eradicated by “alien freaks,” and it’s up to the player to kill as many of them as possible before dying. Ziggurat casts the player as a human atop a mountain tall enough to reach above the clouds. He’s created a game that falls roughly in line with those mentioned above.
Tim Rogers, who writes about games and is probably a smart guy because he gets made fun of in the Kotaku comments section a lot, has long argued that an infinite mode, with no apparent rewards other than being able to continue playing the game, is the sign of a truly good central mechanic. Bumpy Road and Pix’n Love Rush probably fall into this category, too. Super Crate Box has been turning a lot of heads over the past couple of months. Of these, Canabalt is probably the best-known. Your performance will be judged on how many times you do the fun thing before you die.” (Now that I’ve written that out, that’s sort of profound.) A number of excellent iOS games have come out recently that can be summarized by the following: “Here is a thing that is fun to do.
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