tangentalizingly delicious

Friday January 9, 2009

So, this is something I thought of this morning.

It’s an iPhone app, and it doesn’t exist and probably never will. I give it to the universe freely and will claim that it is “practice” and an “exercise in design” or some such, instead of just me being a lazy fuck who doesn’t do anything.

Except blog, but that’s the same thing.

So, there you are holding your iPhone (or iPod Touch of course but that’s just more to type, unlike this entirely unnecessary parenthetical) but you’re holding it horizontally because that’s important for this game.

On the screen are some number of entities, moving at varying speeds from the left side to the right. They are competitors in a race, and I think they are blobular but I am not bound to that. Animation and art style are important here though, they are amusing and probably cute.

There is one in particular that you are a fan of, but you do not have direct control over any of them. You want the one that you are a fan of to win, because that is the purpose of this thing: to help your blobular thing win the race.

I haven’t yet decided what constitutes a win, maybe it is just making it all the way across the screen or maybe the racecourse is longer than the screen and there is some amount of side scrolling afoot. There is a start point and an end point to this course however, and in the base concept there is very little in terms of geographical obstacles between the two, just distance.

You can interact with the environment. You have these big pudgy fingers you see, and one or more of them can touch the screen to make things happen. If one of the other blobs is ahead of your blob you can touch the screen and pin it to the wall. If you time it right you can pin multiple other blobs to the wall (since they can overlap each other in position) but if you keep holding your finger there the other blobs need to get over your finger.

Once you remove your finger, the blobs you have pinned against the wall will become unpinned, but that takes a bit of time (perhaps in proportion to how long they were pinned!) and of course those who were climbing over your finger maybe suddenly fall.

You can touch your finger to the screen and quickly drag it in one direction or another to fling the blobs, they might bounce off the ceiling and after they land they will be dazed for some amount of time.

The goal is to run interference in such a way that your blob wins.

The challenge is that the rest of the blobs have someone doing the same for them.