Godzilab explains the fun of explosions in iBlast Moki

One of the iPhone games I'm most looking forward to is Godzilab's bomb-based physics puzzler iBlast Moki.

It's shaping up to be the sort of game that is perfect for iPhone, both in terms of aesthetics and gameplay.

Throw in the fact it's a debut title from an indie developer and it's plugging into the new social networking features now available, and it could be a poster child for the third generation of iPhone games.

Heady with anticipation, we launched some questions over the Channel to land in the email inbox of designer Thomas Lachartre.

Thomas Lachartre: Godzilab is a micro studio recently founded by Moleki and me. We are both French and living miles apart, so working together was kind of fun. On this project we were also helped by Romain Gauthier, an excellent French musician. He made some of the music for iPhone game Edge.

The original idea came from Moleki. He always wanted to do a game based on physics, and I love puzzles.

Our inspiration comes from lots of different puzzle games. The first would be World of Goo. It's an amazing game with a brilliant game design. Everything in it is perfect from the ideas and effects to the level design.

Others games such as like Bridge, Incredible Machines, and Crayon Physics were definitely a great source of inspiration as well.

We love LocoRoco and Rolando. Graphically LocoRoco is a piece of art, everything is so polished. But while there might be some graphical similarities, I would say our original source of inspiration comes more from games like Mario and Yoshi which I grew up with.

In term of gameplay, I think iBlast Moki is unique. It's not a platform game like Rolando or LocoRoco. It's a physics puzzle game with unique gameplay elements.

Our development was greatly accelerated by using Box2D - an excellent physics SDK. Everything else we did from scratch.

We wanted the player to be surprised by their own creations - that's the magic behind a physics game.

During the beta test we were asking testers to send us their solutions, and we were often surprised by how different their solutions were from the ones we were thinking of. We achieved this by iterating the level design over and over again. Some levels went through several months of iteration.

In the first week of the production the controls of the game were not intuitive, so we decided to focus our effort on the controls based on a ton of feedback. We were implementing and improving the controls, sending the build to our friends, getting their feedback, and repeating that cycle over and over again.

I think now we have achieved a result we are proud of. The controls are really intuitive and we don't even have a tutorial in the game. You can see that anybody playing it for the first time is interacting instinctively - even someone who has never touched an iPhone before.

As you progress through the six different worlds, new items are unlocked as are new puzzles that require those items. The more you progress, the more you will have to solve puzzles combining all these different physics items [ropes, balloons and wheels].

We are also planning to add more items, as well as new worlds with their own graphics in future updates.

We have a scoring system based on how much time it takes for the Moki to reach the spiral [the goal of the game is to blow the Moki into the spiral] and the number of flowers you collect in the levels.

This score is saved in a global scoring leaderboard so you can compare your results with your friends and the iBlast Moki community. All of this is possible with the social platform Plus+ from ngmoco.

We evaluated Plus+ and other social platforms, and I must say Plus+ is a high quality social platform. As well as this, Plus+ is associated with ngmoco, which is making great games.

We mainly use it so players can compete with each other and try to achieve the best scores. We have a global score leaderboard but also a leaderboard for each one of the six worlds. We also added awards you can unlock and earn player points.

The level progression. This is one of the toughest parts and we didn't realise it would be so difficult.

A game where the progression curve is really steep will frustrate the player. On the other hand, a game where the learning curve is too shallow annoys the player quickly. Finding the correct balance is hard work, especially to satisfy both casual and hardcore gamers.

In the end I think we did a great job. We especially got a lot of great feedback from the beta tests. I hope a casual gamer will love iBlast Moki as much as a hardcore gamer.

We wanted to let players create levels, so having the editor in-game from the beginning of the development was important.

During the production, we were always challenging ourselves with new creations. That synergy worked well, and we ended up creating more and more interesting puzzle ideas.

When we had the beta test, it became obvious we needed a way to easily share the levels the beta testers were creating. That's why we added the ability to share levels online and rate them - a system that's similar to the way the App Store works.

This means the game will be released with a collection of the best puzzles from our beta testers.

We are not a well known developer and this is our first game on iPhone so we don't want to sell the game at a high price. That's why it will be available at $1.99.

I think other big publishers would sell this game around the $4-$5 price range as there's easily five to ten hours of gameplay, plus a lot of extra hours with the editor and playing the levels created by other players.

The game was submitted to Apple a week ago, so we hope Apple won't take too long before approving it.

Let's wait and see how iBlast Moki is received by the players and then see what our next plans are.