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Plaorm: iPhone/iPod Touch (iPad version available separately)

Price: $.99

Developer: Divine Robot

Publisher: Chillingo

Released: July 13, 2011

Blobster

What Is It?

Blobster is an iPhone/iPad-exclusive platformer with a control scheme designed from

the ground up to work well with a touch interface. e game opens with a few short

comic book panels that tell of the evil perpetrated by the “Big and Powerful Corpora-

tion” (not a very subtle reference to BP), which has been polluting the once-serene land

of Blobtopia.

Touching either side of the screen will move Blobster le or right, and players can per-

suade the stretchy fellow to go air-

borne by touching him and pulling

back to create a sort of Angry Birds-

esque slingshot eect.

Levels are colorful, spacious en-

vironments in which your goal is

to collect a dozen or so “blobules”

(they really get their money’s worth

out of this “blob” gag), which are

located at several dierent specic

parts of the level. You’ll have to ing

 33Blobster

your way past enemies, occasionally collecting upgrades and keys that will allow you ac-

cess to new areas of the environment.

I had a lot of fun with the game’s arcade mode, but it’s also worth playing through just

to unlock survival mode. is is a very fun, endless mode where you’re tasked with trying

to make it as far as you can before falling to your inevitable watery doom.

Blobster is a well-designed platformer in its own right, but what makes it a great iOS

game are all the things it doesn’t dolike not complicating things with tons of on-screen

buons or ham-sting in some sort of three-star performance rating system. It doesn’t

follow the blueprint that many other Chillingo-published games do, so platformer lovers

should give it a chance.

Behind the Game

One morning in February of 2010, Henrik Jönsson woke up with a fully formed idea for a

game. e game idea centered on stretching a piece of goo to ing it across an area. With-

out geing out of bed, Jönsson cracked open his laptop and called his business partner

Nils Andreasson to tell him about the idea.

By the end of March, Jönsson and Nils had a working prototype built around Jöns-

son’s game idea, and they set about gathering feedback from a variety of unlikely

places. “e prototype tested really well with random people in the pub,” says Jönsson.

is was a sign that things were headed in the right direction, as Divine Robot’s last game

hadn’t fared nearly as well in the pub test.

Initially the game was built around inging the piece of goo innitely through a pro-

cedurally-generated environment. Jönsson gured they could nish the app in around six

weeks. His prediction was a lile o target. ree months into the project, Divine Robot

decided to implement an arcade mode with more traditional, linear levels. “As there was

a certain environmental disaster happening that summer, we decided to make the back-

ground story of the game about saving the environmentand poke a bit of fun at those

responsible,” says Jönsson.

By July, Divine Robot had a build of the game that it was

ready to show o to potential consumers. It began beta testing in

August. “e initial feedback showed the levels we had designed

were too hard, and they made a lot of players frustrated,” says

Jönsson. “We went back to the drawing board and put together

another set of 20 levelswhich proved too easy. ird time

round we did beer and by then we had designed well over 100

levels, most of which were discarded.”

In January, Divine Robot brought the game to Chillingo, which agreed to a publishing

deal but recommended another six months of polishing and development. At this point,

the game had gone from an expected six-week development cycle to an eighteen-month

Stascs

• Development me: 18 months

• Total budget: $160,000

• Times downloaded: 200,000