1167: How NimbleBit Finally Nailed It

If you own a modern mobile phone or tablet, chances are you’ve encountered NimbleBit’s games at least once, most likely in the form of their runaway success Tiny Tower.

Lest you’re one of the few people out there who never played Tiny Tower, let me explain: you run a tower block, presented in Commodore 64-style low-resolution pixel art. In order to progress in the game, you must continue to purchase and build new floors onto your tower, which can be assigned as residential or commercial properties. Residential properties hold, well, residents, while commercial properties must be staffed with residents and can then generate money for you even when you’re not actively playing the game. However, there’s a limit to how much money they can make, since each commercial establishment only has a limited amount of stock for each of the three items they sell, and when it runs out, you need to manually restock it by tapping on it.

Essentially, that was pretty much all there was to the gameplay. You booted it up, you tapped on a few things, you marvelled at how much money you’d “earned,” you felt a bit depressed that the amount you’d earned was less than a tenth of what the next floor costs, you closed the app only to repeat the process a few hours later. In terms of complexity it was little more than FarmVille, and the early comparisons to SimTower it attracted were most certainly not justified in the slightest.

Tiny Tower was a free-to-play game. That means it was free to download but you could purchase things with real money. For the most part, this took the form of “Bux”, a premium currency that allowed you to bypass anything in the game that would normally take a long period of non-interactive real time to complete, such as building a new floor. The game was fairly generous about giving out Bux for free, but it was still essentially a “pay to win” experience, whereby the more money you paid in, the faster progress you made. Exactly the same was true for Tiny Tower’s follow-up Pocket Planes, which adopted the exact same faux-retro aesthetic and was just as devoid of meaningful decision-making as Tiny Tower was.

NimbleBit are back with a new game. It’s still self-consciously retro in terms of both gameplay and presentation, but in terms of being a quality experience it’s a huge jump over the company’s past work. Nimble Quest is a curious combination of Snake and Gauntlet, it’s free-to-play, and it’s fabulous.

In Nimble Quest, you select one of a number of unlockable heroes to start the game and then proceed to use that hero’s style of attacking to defeat enemies. Different heroes have different styles of attacking — some are melee, some are ranged, and within those groupings there are variations, too: some ranged heroes fire fast-moving arrows straight forwards, others throw short-range bombs at anything nearby and deal splash damage, for example. As you progress through the game, certain enemies will release additional heroes whom you can “collect” — these are then added to your “snake”, tagging along behind your lead hero and performing their own individual attacks when appropriate. Heroes other than the lead can be defeated without penalty (besides losing them, obviously) while if the lead hero either runs out of health or ploughs into a wall or enemy they die immediately and the game is over.

To progress through the game, you have to defeat a particular number of enemies on each level. This number increases with each subsequent level, but so too do the number of enemies on screen at once and the different types of assailant you’ll have to deal with. The further you manage to get in one playthrough, the more types of hero you’ll unlock and the longer your maximum “snake” length becomes in all subsequent games. Heroes also gain experience when they’re used as the lead, and level up through three distinct levels. They can also be levelled up early by paying with the gems you find scattered around the levels.

The “free to play” bit primarily comes in the form of “Tokens”, which are Nimble Quest’s equivalent of “Bux” from Tiny Tower and Pocket Planes. Here, though, they’re not used to bypass inconveniences; instead, they’re used for actually useful things. They can be spent on buffs before each level starts. They can be spent on continuing after death — and pleasingly, this prevents itself from becoming a “pay to win” scenario by forcing you to restart the level you’re on with your score and team as it was then rather than simply magically resurrecting without penalty — and they may also be spent on competing in the social “Arena” leaderboards in cooperation with friends. Like Bux, they’re awarded at a healthy rate through normal play, so there’s absolutely no obligation to pay for them unless you’re a bit spend-happy with them. Crucially, though, the game never stops you from playing if you don’t have any tokens — it never forces you to sit through long wait times or anything like that; it just means you need to earn some more before you can use what effectively amount to very slight “cheats”.

It’s this “monetising without inconveniencing the player” thing that makes me look very favourably upon Nimble Quest. At no point do I feel like I’m being punished for not purchasing currency — in fact, the game has more longevity if you don’t pay, because it’ll take you longer to level up all your heroes and get good enough at the game to survive the very challenging later levels. Nothing in the game feels like “pay to win” — even the continue feature is well-implemented so as to allow you the opportunity to correct a mistake while still running the risk of actually doing worse than you did on your previous attempt.

Most important, though, is the fact that Nimble Quest is actually a good game. No-one really wanted to admit that Tiny Tower and Pocket Planes just weren’t very interesting or fun once you got over the aesthetic and humour in them, but Nimble Quest has been designed as a fun game first and foremost rather than a monetisation vehicle, and it really shows. It’s a top-quality mobile game, and one which every iOS owner should have on their device. This is how you do free-to-play right… and this is how you do mobile gaming right, too. Please download and support it to send the right message to NimbleBit. More of this and less tap-tap-tap-snore nonsense, please.

#oneaday Day 737: Attack of the Clones

So it seems that Zynga, lords of the social gaming space, are cloning Nimblebit’s Tiny Tower. This isn’t the first time Zynga has ripped off someone else’s game and removed all trace of personality from its visuals, and it certainly won’t be the last. The different this time is that people are actually taking notice, because Tiny Tower, for all its faults — and it has many, that not even its glorious retro pixel art aesthetic can counter — was extremely popular, made Nimblebit a fair amount of money and was even chosen by Apple as its iPhone game of the year.

Zynga’s new game is called Dream Heights and one of the guys from Nimblebit conveniently compared it to his game here. As you can see, it has pretty much all the gameplay of Tiny Tower with none of the visual appeal.

Now, in the mainstream games market, this sort of thing is generally frowned upon quite a bit. For all of the complaining that the big shooter franchises all look very similar, they at least try to differentiate themselves with how they play, the modes they offer and the like. Battlefield 3 offers a very different experience to Call of Duty. I don’t care for either of them, but I can appreciate that each appeals to a different subsection of the audience,

In mobile and social gaming, however, developers and publishers seem to have no such scruples. In my current position writing game reviews for Inside Social Games and Inside Mobile Apps, I regularly see games that are almost identical to each other. Most of them follow the FarmVille model to one degree or another — you click on things, there’s a countdown timer before you can click on them again to get a reward, there’s a list of insultingly simple “quests” on the left side of the screen, you get experience points every time you exhale and, generally speaking, the game is designed to be a series of not very well disguised Skinner boxes.

Other popular genres include the growing hidden object genre, where you’re sent into a cluttered room/street/train carriage and tasked with locating lists of completely arbitrary items, with scenes tied together by an often flimsy excuse for a plot. Just in the last couple of weeks, Zynga released Hidden Chronicles on Facebook, only to be followed this week by the almost identical World Mysteries from Brazilian developer Vostu. See, it’s not just Zynga doing it — it goes both ways, too.

Fans of Spry Fox’s fun puzzle game Triple Town on Facebook and Google+ may also want to check out Yeti Town on iOS by the obnoxiously-named 6waves Lolapps. This game has drawn criticism for ripping off Triple Town completely and releasing on iOS before Spry Fox were ready to release their own iOS version of their game. You may argue that Spry Fox should have been quicker off the mark in getting their iOS version to market, but it’s hard to believe that 6waves Lolapps came up with an identical concept (not almost-identical, identical) completely independently of Triple Town.

Independent developer Vlambeer ran into this issue last year when, like Spry Fox, they were beaten to the punch on an iOS game. Gamenauts’ Ninja Fishing hit the App Store shortly before Vlambeer was ready to release its own title Ridiculous Fishing, itself a reimagining-cum-sequel of its earlier Web-based title Radical Fishing. I’m very pleased to see that Vlambeer will be speaking publicly about this debacle at GDC this year.

Where does it end, though? Games are a creative art form and for all these clones to hit the market is to do the medium a disservice. You don’t get books hitting store shelves where an author has simply done a Find and Replace on all the characters’ names from someone else’s work, nor do you get movies which are simply shot-by-shot reconstructions of another movie. We get remakes, sure, but at least those are usually reimagined for a contemporary audience — and they’re being honest about their source material rather than attempting to pass themselves off as a completely new product.

This practice needs to stop. Unfortunately, cloning, it seems, is already an established part of mobile and social game development. In the long term it will only hurt everyone’s business.

So devs? Be bold. Come up with an original idea. Don’t call your game “innovative” if it’s the same as something someone released last week, and the week before, and the week before. Try something new. Break out of established conventions. The most memorable games in the mainstream are the ones which tried something new. The moment we see a successful social game break out of the market’s conventions is the same moment we’ll see people willing to be a bit less cynical and a bit more enthusiastic to see what this burgeoning industry has to offer.

#oneaday Day 529: You Have a Tiny Tower

Have you played Tiny Tower on iOS? This is one of those games that should be complete shite but actually ends up being strangely compelling.

Why should it be shite? Well, because it incorporates a ton of the features that make Facebook games particularly obnoxious — real-time waits for things to happen, monetization allowing you to “buy victory” in the game and no real strategy or depth.

Despite this, though, Tiny Tower manages to remain addictive, compelling and entertaining, even though your interaction with your little people is limited to restocking floors that have run out of arbitrary products, carrying people in your lift and occasionally playing an impromptu game of Where’s Wally when someone bursts in demanding to know where Tammy Walters is.

A big, big part of the game’s appeal is surely down to its excellent pixel-art graphics. I say “excellent”, but they’re actually pretty primitive, being deliberately lower-resolution than even the older iPhone screens. The graphics are reminiscent of the late 8-bit to early 16-bit era and have a lot of character about them. The little “bitizens” who populate your tower are all based on the same basic model, but the sheer number of hats, moustaches, crazy glasses and whatnot that they walk in wearing makes each and every one of them seem like an individual — particularly once you get some residents staying in your tower and you find out what their names are. Because then not only do you assign them to a job, but you can also spy on their Facebook… sorry, Bitbook page, filled with the sort of vapid inanity that your average Facebook user spouts on a daily basis along with occasional gameplay hints that you don’t really need. (The Mexican restaurant is closed? No shit!)

One of the more appealing things about the game that makes it less obnoxious (though probably less profitable) than anything Zynga has ever put together is the fact that the game’s premium currency of Tower Bux can be earned rather than just bought. Sure, you can pony up some real-life cash to get a wad of Tower Bux to make your life easier, but through actively playing the game and participating in its silly little Where’s Wally challenges you can get a reasonable income of them without having to pay a penny. This is a Good Thing.

Then there’s the fact that you can ogle your friends’ towers at any point, with them organised by order of size, so you can get all frustrated when the person you’ve been several floors ahead of suddenly leapfrogs you.

In short, it’s an excellent example of an iOS game. It’s simple, easy to play, friendly to both long and short play sessions and, best of all, free. So, err, buy it.