Games: Free Stuff, No Matter What the Cost?

XCode's In-App-Purchase API doc

As an Indie game developer my livelihood depends on being able to sell what I make.  What I make has to be good, and then - so the theory goes - people will pay what its worth and I will be able to make rent and go on making games.  In this little article I am not posting because I have the answers - I guess what I'm more interested in hearing about is what people feel about the issues.  In-App-Purchasing - which is made drop-dead simple by technologies and API's like Apple's iTunes one shown here - make it easy to make money, but if people feel that is evil, that then is a thing.  Feelings can't be fixed by technology.

Thing is, a lot of people don't want to pay for games.  This is the so-called "race to the bottom" in game pricing.  One way to deal with the desire for free games, while still making money, is via In-App-Purchase - but there is a lot of contention out there amongst gamers about IAP.  I agree that there ought to be some rational perspective on IAP, but it can cause media spectacles like the kid in the UK who spent thousands of dollars buying virtual donuts on IAP.

I was having a discussion yesterday with a friend about how badly we as human beings do our calculations on what is good value.  We'll crawl over broken glass to get something "for free", even though it would actually be much better value to us to pay up front for it.  Why IAP works is that we "get something for free" and figure we'll have the judgement to not fall for the mechanisms that lie in wait to get us to pay for it.  So why is the games industry so hot on IAP?

IAP as an Anti-Piracy Mechanism

Here's another way to look at In-App-Purchase - as a response to "piracy" of games.  Below I mention the SimCity fiasco and a mention of it in an interesting article by Tommy Refenes which I link to.  That was ElectronicArts trying to do "DRM" by making SimCity players connect to a server - IAP requires connecting to a server to access game content too.  But IAP is not DRM and its not the flash-point rage causing issue that DRM is.  It's like "DRM-low-tar" and we can sort of deal with it, so industry is turning to it big time.

So let's look at this: what is "piracy"?  Note that I put that word in quotes because I think its a poor choice of word but one we seem to be stuck with.

I have some acquaintances who pirate movies.  I smile and shake my head.  One of my friends downloads her movies via torrent and when the file arrives burns it onto a DVD for watching later.  She downloads the color cover art for the movie, and prints it out on her colour printer, and tucks it into the DVD jackets she buys for the purpose.  She feels she has "got something for free" then because she has the same DVD she could have bought from JB HiFi in town, but didn't have to pull out her credit card for it.

But she did have to pay.  All that printing and stuffing about.  Even if you're not a high-rent computer pro your time is worth something.  My point is doing that downloading is not nothing - its a personal investment.  Those bytes come out of your quota.  When you torrent you advertise your IP, and expose yourself to malware.  Then there's the cost of whatever else you have to do to install and maintain the software to do the downloads, and manage and store the content.

My point is that with all these costs, why would folks do it?  Answer: our desire for free stuff.  IAP is clever because instead of defeating the human urge to get stuff for free, its exploiting it.  So - with IAP if we get stuff for free, what's the problem?  Answer - its not free because we shoulder risk.

Risk is a Hidden Cost

Downloading also involves a small but not inconsequential amount of personal risk.  When I was at the University of Queensland doing my degree (far too long ago) the RIAA showed up one day at the IT center with a bunch of lawyers, and a court order demanding the computers at a given set of IP addresses and the hides of the students & staff using them.  I know some people were identified in that fiasco, and I don't know what happened to their careers - I would not want to be part of that.  Regardless of what you personally feel the morality is of downloading, you cannot say that the personal risk is zero.

Risk is a cost.  If you shoulder a 0.1% chance that you have to pay $100,000 - then a statistician or an economist will tell you the expected outcome of that decision is $100.  Its just that as humans we are absolutely lousy at seeing this.  We are crap at figuring out if we really got something for free or if we wound up paying in some way that we did not expect.

I know some of you are pretty clued up when it comes to downloading stuff, and you know how to use torrents and other warez services so that you're not at risk: you can manage all that stuff, and make out like a bandit.  I'm impressed - I would not know how to secure myself against those risks.  I guess I could learn.  But when it comes to getting warez there's lots of folks cleverer than me, I freely admit.

But you know what?  A lot of people feel the same about IAP - they can download the free game and not be hooked in by the IAP.  But plenty of people do fall foul of these things.  I guess all those folks who wound up paying felt they would not be the ones to be hooked - but they were.  Maybe we'll be the clever ones - but we need to ask, how good am I really at assessing the chances?

Maybe I'm drawing a long bow here, but my argument is that whenever we think we're getting something for free, we should be saying "if its too good to be true, it probably is".  Google search is "free" right?  "I never click on those adverts!"  But guess what - millions and millions of people do.  Maybe you've clicked on them and not realized?  How confident are you really that a "free" app won't cost you in the long run?

Buying Up-Front versus the "Never-Never"

I don't have time to muck around searching for warez and freebies - I find it much easier to buy stuff.  I'm not rich, in fact I'm not well-off even - but I can afford to buy a movie or TV program if I want.  Certainly I can afford to buy more than enough for the time I have to watch them.

My friend that downloads stuff - I don't judge her for that.  I just smile and shake my head in wonder because the once or twice I have been at her place and seen some of that stuff the quality is pretty awful.  I know if I'm watching a 100 minute movie I don't want the key part of the movie to have some guy with  big hair stand up in front of the cam, and obscure the best part of the show.

I know its possible to get much better quality pirated stuff, but why should I bother?  I can spend a fraction of the time and buy stuff on line - in and out in seconds from Amazon or where-ever.  I have only once had issues with quality on some DVD's I bought that way - and it was a lousy cardboard jacket that a collection of X-Files DVD's came in.

But the point for me is that watching DVD's is a relaxing and fun thing to do - I don't want to be stressed out trying to deal with all the issues around pirating stuff.  LifeHacker has this interesting article about how to torrent safely - man it sounds like a lot of work.  Some of the best suggestions like using a VPN service may actually cost money, and still don't guarantee your safety.

I just feel a lot more comfortable with my nice crunchy shrink-wrapped thing I bought for some $$$$ and if there is any quality issues I know exactly how Amazon or whoever can fix it for me.

Paying for Games

Does this carry over into games?  

For me it does - I know I personally would much rather just pay up front for a game.  I just don't think in general that I am clever enough to monitor how much I would spend on IAP on games that work that way.  One $0 game is "worth" about the same as any other $0 game - but if I pay $7 for a game - like I did with Bulky Pix's "Yesterday" recently - then I know some things about what I'm buying.  I have some expectations about its quality, the amount of content, and I know if I'm not satisfied I can hit up iTunes for my money back.  That's not really an option with IAP.

Maybe this is a weird analogy - comparing downloading a free game with IAP, to "pirating".  What I am really trying to say is that what we do as humans and as gamers when we "go for free stuff" is always driven by the same desires. 

It's like loans with "pay nothing for 6 months", and credit cards with high limits.  Some people do well on those things.  Most people don't and pay a fortune.  Corporations and fancy marketing guys know how to abuse our desire to get free stuff.  They are awake up to how poor our decision making can be in that regard, and now they're in digital media gunning for our wallets with the same techniques.

As far as "piracy" of digital stuff goes - I think that word is idiotic - it is stupid to compare attacking ships on the high seas to downloading digital content.  I think it is not a crime, its just bad karma.  I think that if companies need draconian laws to protect their business model they are doing something wrong.  And I think that if they make it easy enough and cheap enough to buy good stuff, people will do that rather than pirate it.

No Harm, No Foul?

However: I think "piracy" is not innocuous and its not harmless.  I strongly suspect it hurts you and me more than it hurts Electronic Arts.  I suspect that faster than we can profit from it clever corporate types can turn the urge for free stuff into profit for them.

There is an interesting article about piracy of Super Meat Boy, from Tommy Refenes who was one of the creators of Super Meat Boy, and featured prominently in the indie movie "Indie Game" about the lives of indie game developers.

Tommy is pretty philosophical about piracy, and I agree with pretty much all of what he says.  I agree that if someone pirates 1000 copies of your game you still have infinite copies.  Tommy says "there's worse things than piracy:  like DRM and refund requests".

True that.  However I have a couple of comments.

First I think that the best industry response to piracy - "easy enough and cheap enough" - when driven to its logical conclusion means IAP and things like it.  I don't think IAP is evil, but I do think its very easy for people to spend a lot of money on IAP without being aware of it.  You need to be pretty clever to avoid paying out large on those things - I don't trust myself to be that clever and so I mostly avoid such schemes.  I'm lousy with my credit card - so I have a low limit.  And I just know I'd be lousy with IAP in my games I buy.

I think that our desire to "make out like a bandit" can be used against us by corporations to make a profit and IAP is an example of that.  We can outsmart ourselves too easily this way.

Secondly - you know what?  Ripping off digital content is Just Wrong(TM).  Do you really want to be that guy?  When something is wrong that doesn't make using DRM or laws to try to stop it right or justifiable.  "Wrong" doesn't mean - "let's bring in the DMCA and the goon squad".  Wrong means bad karma.

Play Nice with your Friendly Neighbourhood Indie

Developers of games are people, people like you and me.  People like Tommy Refenes and Edmund McMillen.  Pirating our games is just lame.  Go ahead and do it, why not?  We can't stop you.  Like Tommy in his article all I am going to do about it is say "WTF really?" and write about it.

I understand Tommy's point that there are worse things to worry about than piracy.  But just because you can find something worse, doesn't mean that its harmless.  Just because there's other stuff going on that's bad doesn't make it totally fine.

I'm going to sell my games with an up-front price and hope that folks are OK with that.

I doubt my game will be as successful as Super Meat Boy, and if I fail to make enough money to keep doing games then it won't be piracy that causes that problem.  In fact if I ever get to where my game is pirated that probably means I have finally made it to the Big Time.  :-)

But we're all gamers and I just think that our desire to Get-Stuff-For-Free-At-Any-Cost(TM) is just making our world a worse place to be in, but worse we're outsmarting ourselves when we follow that instinct without watching our hip-pocket.

Game screen design in Google Docs

Looked at Google Docs lately?

If you're like me you probably think you know pretty much what there is to know about Google Docs: its a web-based thing that tries to be like Microsoft Office, right?

Well its been getting better - a lot better.  There's a really good Draw app now.  Combining Google Docs Draw app with the Google Sites features allows you to create a real-time game screen-flow sharing/co-development tool.  The cost is $0 and there's not much you have to do without compared to some commercial apps.  Here's how I use it.

Quick note: these are mocked up development shots for this post, but based on real work from my private Google Docs/Sites - please don't make any judgements about this based on its current state - "Oh I saw the game from Sez and she's making this thing about a room with nothing in it...".  Examples only guys.  :-)

What I discovered is how awesome Googles suite of apps can be as a platform for doing game design, especially if you're an indie and trying to work with others who are not in the same location as yourself.    If you have mentors or friends you want to get reviews from same applies - its a great tool for sharing development ideas in a quick mock-up form before you spend ages coding them up or paying out for finished artwork.

When you work from your spare room, and need some who's remote, doing art-work or some other part of the game to be able to see your ideas, it can be a pain to try to get the latest version of your stuff and drag it into DropBox, or share it on some kind of paste-bin site.

The Draw application is not good enough in itself to do finished work, but its great for quick mockups of screens so that you can get the general proportions, colours and most importantly the flow or sequencing of screens right.  You can import artwork including sprites and backgrounds (like the room background below) and combine it with graphics created with Draw's basic vector tools.  It has a palette of predefined shapes you can use, and you can fill them with color, or make them transparent - even alpha blended, like the Map HUD above.

What is great about Google docs is that you can edit the document right in the web-page and who ever you're working with always gets the latest version when they open it.  In fact you can collaborate in almost real-time.

But even better with Google Sites you can then embed your Google Docs - graphs from the spreadsheet app, or in my case drawings from the draw app - right into the webpage, creating a flow of screens for different use-cases.

When you update the Draw doc, folks visiting the screen-flow page with your use-cases on it get the latest version - since its a live link, not an embedded render of the drawing.  This makes the Google Docs & Sites a very powerful way to collaborate.

Sites also has very good sharing features so you can make collaborators have writer levels of access, and provide others with read-only, all while keeping the whole thing private while you're still in development.

One other quick tip - if you want some great general icons that are good for doing development mock-ups and use as placeholders, but do not have the commercial limitations of some icon sets, have a look at the Tango project - I've used some of them in the above shots.  There's around 180 icons with standard sorts of things, like "Save" and "Quit" and so on.

The direct link to download the tar.gz of their icons is here:  http://tango.freedesktop.org/releases/tango-icon-theme-0.8.90.tar.gz - on Mac you  should be able to open that archive up without any problems, but on Windows you might need a special archive tool.

Have fun designing your screens!

Game Mythos

Working on the intro animation for my game has led me to do a bit of development of the game mythos.  What I mean by mythos is basically the rules and background that governs what goes on in the game world - other than normal world stuff which we already know.

When it comes to normal stuff like "how big is a loaf of bread" - that is certainly the rules and the background, but where it does not differ from our  normal world you can just take it as read.  Where your game world is different - magical, super, silly or just plain weird - that is where you need to start work to figure out just how different.

Think about any game that features vampires for example (no vampires in my game by the way - this is just an example).

• Do the vampires get to go out in the sun?  
• Does garlic or crosses work on them?  
• What about their powers - are they super strong, or super fast or both?  

When you ask those questions for any game, about the characters, the world and so on you are defining the mythos.  I chose vampires as an example because it seems like almost every game, TV show, movie or book that deals with them has a different mythos.  Just saying "this game character is a vampire" doesn't answer all the questions - and its always good to answer them upfront.

Pragmatics also comes into it.  Sometimes in your game you want a particular mythos element but it is just not practical for the development of the game.  If your vampires (to extend the above example) cannot go out in the daylight does that mean absolutely all your game scenes/rooms/levels have to be at night?  That might be a bit limiting.

It's important for any game to nail down the mythos elements early on to avoid continuity problems.  This is especially the case if you are building the game with help from others.  Keeping and updating a mythos document can help do this.

In my game, EthEx 2080, the setting is a near future planet Earth.  At this time, medical technology has advanced so far that almost any ailment or weakness - real or imagined - can receive treatment, at a price.

Many of the problems this brings about exist today in 2013: trafficking in body parts, illegal sales of medicines and therapies, illegal or ill-advised cosmetic and surgical enhancements.  And of course performance enhancing drugs and therapies - such as blood doping, and steroids.  You don't have to look far to see this stuff in the news today.

The hero of my game is an Agent in the Ethics Executive - she is an Eth-Cop.  Their motto is Dignitatem tutando Hominis which translated from Latin is Defending the Dignity of Man.  The dignity of man is a key idea in the field of Bio-Ethics.  I came up with the ideas for the crest above, and the motto from my reading.  Then working them up like this using my tablet and a vector drawing program starts to make the idea of the Ethics Executive come alive.  By the way the above is just the basic design - I have not added any color or lighting to this - but you can see the idea.

I used Google's translate service to go through a few variations on the English version of the motto until I got one that came out sounding good in Latin.  I'm planning for one of the cut scenes that the camera will zoom right in and come to rest on the crest so the detail is not just an exercise.  And likely it will also probably feature on an Eth-Cop's badge which will be an inventory item in the game.

Working on some elements for this globe-spanning bio-ethics justice group has involved trying to nail down who they are, what their powers are (legal rather than super) and what kind of an appearance they have.  In the crest you can see some of these elements: the UN style globe & wreath - symbolising peace and international reach; the medical profession (although the staff of the Caduceus is replaced with a sword) - also the hand (symbol of human rights) and the scales (for justice and the legal system) appear here.  Interestingly there is some history around whether one snake or two should appear - one snake is actually correct for the original Greek mythology, but recent history has led us to use the two serpent version.

It's good when looking at mythos to examine other great mythos makers in the same genre.  For the dystopian sci-fi near-future you can't go past Phillip K. Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" which was realised in movie form as "Blade Runner" by directory Ridley Scott.  I've been watching a great documentary on sci-fi writers which has a good discussion of Dick and his writing.  In particular the paranoia and ethical conflict that Dick was trying to portray.

The thing about the future world of Blade Runner is that there was no new special group of cops, or legal framework for dealing with the massive scientific advances it depicted.  Dick's hero Rick Deckard was an independent; a bounty hunter, although he took his work from the Police department.

I will need more structure in my game.  For EthEx 2080 I want collecting evidence to be an important game mechanic.  Also I love procedural cop dramas and wanted to capture some of that too.  So I needed to know more about the Ethics Executive and what they stand for.

So far I'm thinking of some thing a bit more like the real-world FBI, but with a bit of the British MI6 thrown in for good measure.

I took the above shot of the MI6 building from the Lambeth Bridge when I was in London in 2004 on holiday, and this building has captivated me for ever since.  Looks menacing, secretive and bunker-like doesn't it?  It's pretty impressive in real life.  Makes you wonder what goes on inside.  I'll probably never know for sure, but soon I plan to lift the lid on the Ethics Executive and give us all a view of the life of an Eth-Cop.  :-)

I am hoping to have the title animation done this week with any luck so stay tuned for updates.

Adventure Games on the iPad

Broken Sword is a genre defining title for the modern adventure game, proving that point-and-click adventure games are still with us, and didn't die with the upsurge of gaming in the last decade.  What's interesting to me about Broken Sword as a game is the way it moved from its origins on the desktop and console platforms to iOS, and in particular iPad.

The above "Let's Play" video is the first in a series show-casing the recent reboot of the game franchise "Broken Sword: Directors Cut", played in this video on the Windows PC platform, I think.

The 2D visuals, that is the lovely background images and Dave Gibbons outstanding comic-style 2D animations, are the big investment (not being 3D or requiring fancy mechanics) and make it a no-brainer as a business proposition to port to new platforms.  Check the Wikipedia entry for lots more interesting trivia about the game including its first publications in the late 90's.  Broken Sword was released on iPad in 2010 in a HD version, and in 2012 on Android.  It's available on the Mac OSX desktop store as I write this for $AUD8.49 - not bad for a game that's been around for over a decade.

On the PC the cursor based hot-spot interaction makes sense - part of the challenge of the game is moving your mouse cursor all over the rich images on-screen looking for objects to interact with.  When you find one, the cursor transforms into a gears icon to tell you that you can "Use" the item, or a eye icon to indicate the look command.  There's similar UI idiom features for other gameplay aspects associated with classic point-and-click adventure interaction.

"Proves the iPad Ultimate for Adventure Games"

Not much of this PC interaction works very well on iOS, or touchscreens in general.  Not only do you not want to be dragging your finger around the tablet and seeing a cursor change, as it would be a horrible UI usage, you also don't want to spend that time.  That's not how you use an iPad.  However according to Chris Reed's review in Slide to Play Broken Sword demonstrates how iPad is the ideal platform for Adventure Games.  So clearly when they ported to iOS and the touch-screen interface they must have gotten something right.

Well, as it happens I agree with Mr Reed, and that is why my current game under development EthEx 2080 is targeting the iPad.

As Reed points out it is not all upside - the constraints of game size meant that the magnificent voice acting that is seen on the PC game does not make it to the iPad, and I guess not to Android either.  Those constraints don't just come from the storage on the iPad, they are a function of download times as well.  If you're on a packet-data connection with your iPad you don't want to be downloading massive sound files and the store has its own ways of dealing with game authors who want to put up huge games.

So what is it that the iPad can offer writers (like me) and players of the modern adventure game?  And how is it that these game designs can still attract premium game buyers on the AppStore over a decade after they were first inked?

Immediacy 

I think this is why so-called hidden object games are so popular on iOS devices: as a player you can just reach out and touch the objects in the scene in a very intuitive way.  I love adventure games and because of that I don't like hidden object games - they seem like a dumbed down version of a genre that means a lot to me.  But hidden object games seem to do very well on the AppStore and on mobile in general.  I think a big part of this is because of the "reach out and touch it" immediacy that object-interaction on the touchscreen gives you.

Other games which involve moving a character around the screen always have to have some indirect way of controlling the character or camera movement.  Racing games can use the accelerometers, the screen can show virtual joy-pads - there's lots of ways to use the touch UI to approximate interactions from console and PC on a touch device.  But in my view, adventure games are the native ground of the iPad and its touchy-feely cousins.  Really the point-and-click adventure game becomes just the touch adventure game.

Iconography

Another feature of adventure games for iPads and other tablets is iconography.  Typically with a game if you have some UI feature that you want to expose to the player you need to come up with some clever graphics to indicate to the player how to interact with it.  You need trash-can icons, up-arrows and so on, or worse you need whole tutorials to explain it.  Where adventure games win is that the screen can show an actual door, nicely rendered, and its totally obvious that tapping on it can cause the character to go through it, to the next room.  As well as being part of the scenery the door is also automatically part of the UI, in a very seamless way.

Of course as the designer you have to be aware of expectations of interaction that  you are setting up when you put things like this in the scene, and if its not going to work like the player expects you better be ready to handle that.  For example, if the door is locked your UI must show this clearly with some suitable in game text, maybe a "clunk - its locked" sound effect, and so on.

Then it can be part of the game for the player to over come that "Huh?  I tapped the door and could not go through - where is that damn key!" if done properly.

Hot-Spots

In the iPad adventure game Yesterday, by Pendulo Studios which I played through recently the issue of on-screen hot-spots was handled in an interesting way: with a "find hotspots" button.

In this 3D (Unity I think) point-and-click game you can highlight all hot-spots visible by pressing a "cross-hairs" icon button at the bottom of the iPad screen.  This causes a visual ping effect to be displayed for each hot-spot.  It's a little bit irritating because you press it, the effect activates in some random order for one hot-spot, then the next, then the next - when there are a lot of hot spots it is hard to see where all of them are, and to know if you've visited them all yet.

If the guys at Pendulo were wanting to make it a bit harder to find the hot-spots they achieved it by making the hot-spot-target button feature quite a bit harder to use than it could have been.  It does make it possible to locate that hard to find hotspot, and less likely that you'll leave a room having missed some crucial clue.  Still I did exactly that on one or two occasions.

Character Animation

In Yesterday as in a number of modern adventure game titles they have chosen to use 3D animated models for the characters.  Since today's modern mobile hardware is pretty capable in the OpenGL hardware department you might think this would be a good way to get beautifully rendered characters that are far more compelling than their 2D counterparts.

Not so much.  As with other games simple models have to be chosen, so as to get smooth animation on mobile, and also to reduce the size assets take up on flash.  To make this work, even with a involved and dark title like Yesterday, the characters are exaggerated and cartoony.  I think this is done in part because with an exaggerated character, we are less likely to comment on the blocky polygons they are made up from.  Don't get me wrong, I think Pendulo have done an amazing job with Yesterday, I absolutely love the game.  But going for 3D does not buy a "cure-all" pill for character animation.

When you compare it to the animated ink and cel-colored style characters of Broken Sword, the immersion and compelling nature of the characters is a feature of both games.  Despite Yesterday coming from a larger Indie studio (I think Pendulo is around 15 guys) and being over a decade more recent, the characters are very comparable to Broken Sword.

Characters Explain Scene Changes

Can you get away without character animation?  No, I don't think so.  The Slender man indie games meme shows that with enough atmosphere and the right type of game you can explore from the first person without showing a protagonist character.  Old games like Myst and the Seventh Guest did the same.  However these modes don't translate well to modern expectations.  In a recent review of Riven for iPad, Jason d'Aprile is very critical of the game and how poorly it translated to 2013, and the expectations of iOS game play.  Of course Riven is the sequel to Myst put out by Cyan World after the huge success of that unique adventure game, with its beautifully pre-rendered 3D scenes.

As d'Aprile points out the game feels very empty (Myst and Riven had no protagonist character) but more importantly the scene changes seemed clunky - if you have no character then your cues for moving to scene to scene are gone and the change of view point rather than feeling cinematic, start to feel arbitrary and jarring.  When you see your animated character walk to a window and turn to look out, its completely natural when the scene changes to show what is out the window - but without the character the change does not work.

Again, you don't need 3D characters for this to work.  Check how beautifully the 2D characters in Broken Sword take you through the door into the next scene in that game, by viewing the "Let's Play" videos or playing the game itself.

Casual versus Hard-core

I just had to come back and edit this article as I had previously used the term "serious games" to refer to those more involved and deeper titles like Yesterday and Broken Sword as opposed to casual games.  Apparently the correct term is "Hard-core" game, and the usage "serious game" has come to mean something more like "educational game".  Confused?  Me too.  Anyway, now edited for correct usage.

I would love to see more real point-and-click adventure games on the iPad, and I mean not just hidden object games, with a bit of window dressing.  In that category I put games like Valerie Porter and the Scarlet Scandal:

The writing, creative assets and even the UI & animations of the hidden object games are such a pale imitation of something like Broken Sword that I cringe to mention these games in the same breath.  In Valerie Porter for example when two characters are interacting on the screen their un-animated portraits slide in from each side of the screen, and exit the same way.  It is visually very disappointing.  But really, this is just Sudoku with salad-dressing.  This is a popping bubble-wrap kind of game where you tot up the number of items you can click on crowded screens.  There is no "use the paper clip on the door lock" kind of logic here.

What I do believe is that the existence and popularity of such hidden object games means that there is an audience of players out there waiting and hungry for the next quality adventure game titles.  Games like Broken Sword show also that 3D is not necessary:  consider putting aside your Unity engine guys and go back to basics.  As Dave Gibbons showed you can do awesome character animations that are darker, richer and more compelling in 2D than many 3D offerings.

To date games for iPad and iOS have been by default casual games.  These games are easy to put down and pick up, play on the bus, and not get too involved in.  But for real adventure games to come to the iPad players must be ready for more hard-core games.  The fixation on casual gaming on iOS is why hidden-object games are so far the big preponderence of "adventure games" on the AppStore - and in my view its something that good game developers need to break through.  Games like Yesterday (see above) are part of this redefinition of what an iOS game can be.

So bring on the iPad adventure games!