ngmoco talks about LiveFire's in-app commerce system
Buy yourself better armour and upgrades
One of the great things about iPhone developer and publisher ngmoco is its openness about game design. While most companies like to keep everything under wraps, ngmoco apparently feels that the communal nature of the iPhone demands a different approach to game design, and has been explaining its progress with the online FPS, LiveFire, revealed at Apple's 3.0 software unveiling.
Use of the new iPhone firmware's microtransactions feature was one of LiveFire's most intriguing additions, and a new blog post over on ngmoco's official site details how this will work in relation to your avatar's armour.
Each character will build a very specific identity both inside and outside of the game. This identity - based on statistics and rank - will help the LiveFire system to perform more suitable matchmaking, but will also be reflected in your character's appearance.
Armour will be shaped and coloured according to your abilities, though you'll be able to buy a shortcut to better defences. Using the in-game commerce system, you'll be able to purchase new sets of armour with different aesthetics and abilities. You'll be allowed to own several sets of armour, and change them at will between games.
The design team is also experimenting with different attributes for different types of armour, so heavy defences will mean you character moves more slowly, for instance. The decision hasn't been made as to whether this will be included or not, but it's an interesting idea.
To help with the armour designs (and presumably make them more tempting to buy) artists from the original Halo game have been drafted in to create a range of different styles for LiveFire.
The ngmoco blog promises more details on how the commerce system will work with weapons and gameplay, so stay tuned.
