Gaming Horror – it's a Game Dev's Life

Flight Control is for the iPhone what Geometry Wars was to Xbox Live Arcade. A simple game with a single game mode which simply gets progressively more intensive and difficult. Easy to learn and hard to master at it’s best. Both have been megasellers.

What makes these games so special?

“It’s really simple. Try it!”

Both games can get you hooked by someone handing you the controller, or watching someone play it and wanting to try it yourself. Anyone can pick up the game and play it with a minimum amount of experience or knowledge. You directly see your actions on screen. The feedback is immediate.

Both games start very slowly and only after some time, typically 1-2 minutes, the game picks up pace noticeably. A slow start makes for a warmthy welcome, a feeling of beeing in control and gratification. Little does the player know that he is going to be overwhelmed pretty quickly, and lose. The challenge of these games then lies in pushing that imaginary boundary of one’s own skills just a bit further. And by playing repeatedly, even short sessions over a longer period of time, you DO get better and even if you don’t, sometimes you just have that lucky break. Usually success is recorded as highscore only that in these games, the highscore serves the purpose of being the reward of getting further, having survived longer – not necessarily playing more efficiently.

In addition, each new game plays differently. There is a certain amount of randomness, keeping you on edge (especially with the constant pressure) – even though the game elements are limited, the combination and timing of their appearance help to emerge new game situations all the time. Equal to both games is the feeling of what i would call “near death experience” – you almost “died” or lost the game but somehow managed to scrape by, just barely so, giving you a slight adrenaline rush.

And finally equal to both games is the desire to optimize. To become more effective. To plan ahead. “What would i do if this situation i just died in happens again?” You ask yourself questions like wether it is possible to plan your flight routes more effectively, or wether a certain turn-turn can help you escape a particularly annoying enemy combination. But there is no one best solution to any problem – you have to come up with your solutions, adapted to the current situation, and sometimes it just doesn’t work out. That just happens to anyone, however, even the best – which can be encouraging. Though most players will hit a wall after 3-4 minutes at most, there is enough room for really good players to make absurdly large scores – adding more interest to the game because one can only imagine what it must be like to get that far.

Losing in these games typically feels like one’s own mistake. You’ve been too daring, or you’ve just overlooked something quite obvious – if only you had paid more attention. Rarely, if ever, do players blame the game for being unfair – even though at certain situations it can be. It is part of the open-ended game mechanic to become overwhelming and eventually unfair, although never quite so unfair that it becomes absolutely impossible. Always can you trace back a few steps and see the mistakes you’ve made before. A wrong turn, or a wrong path.

And not to forget: both games introduced relatively new control concepts and all of the action played on a single screen – much like most early arcade games.

There are other cool games like Trials 2 which share some of these features and are equally addictive. Only that Trials caters more to a hardcore audience because the game is balanced towards micro-optimization and most levels are simply too hard to learn (let alone master) for the average player. Still, of the three, it is the coolest to just look over one’s shoulders and watch. I hope they are going to make a console version someday.