Flaboo!

And so the brain drain from the console games development continues apace.

Dene Carter, the man behind new start-up Fluttermind, is the creator of the Fable franchise (together with his brother Simon). Incidentally, I once interviewed Dene together with EA Guildford's Glenn Corpes, now also making iPhone games such as Ground Effect.

Another émigré from the Guildford scene is ex-Lionhead coder Tak Fung, who developed the excellent Mini Squadron.

Unlike Ground Effect and Mini Squadron, though, Carter's debut Flaboo! doesn't appear to be the product of the more ambitious vision of the console game world on first impression. In fact, you could argue the Doodle Jump-style game is pure iPhone in terms of its scope.

Behind this simple description, though, the more rigorous thinking about design that working on multi-million dollar games requires is in evidence behind the scenes.

Of course, this isn't to say that Flaboo! will be anything like as successful as Doodle Jump. You only need one of these games on your iPhone and critically Flaboo! lacks viral features like Twitter and Facebook, not to mention integration of any of the social gaming networks (to its credit, a global leaderboard is planned for the next update).

In terms of extending a simple gameplay mechanic, however, Flaboo! takes some beating. It starts off with you taking control of the Fat Chick - bird, not girl - which you have to bounce on clouds to get higher and higher into the sky.

You can tap the screen at any time to get the chick to flap its wings, but it's so fat that it can't actually fly so will sort of hover for a bit, throwing off drops of sweat to show how hard it's working. If you keep tapping away, the chick starts to drop.

So, in the rhythm-action style, you have to tap when the chick is just about to land on a cloud in order to propel it up to the next set of clouds. Each levels of clouds scrolls horizontally, with a maximum of three clouds per level across the screen at any time. Tilting your handset provides lateral movement.

Your goal is to reach the maximum height you can, but in a neat twist, you only have a limited amount of time to do this - starting with 45 seconds.

Indeed, unlike other jump games, Flaboo! always ends because you run out of time rather than because you fail to find enough clouds to jump on and fall back to the ground.

For one thing, the layers of clouds don't disappear when you've jumped above them as happens with the platforms in Doodle Jump. Also, Fat Chick can't die.

Another important point is that every time you jump on a cloud it turns from being white and fluffy into an evil grey cloud. The higher you get, the more of these clouds you come across.

Like Sonic's golden rings, keys are the game's basic currency, which you collect when you bounce on clouds that contain them.

The more you collect, the more powerful power-ups are unlocked and made available to you. These range from clouds containing extra seconds, which are added to your current time, to multiple keys, and items to get you higher quicker such as balloons, space hoppers and rockets.

Whenever you bounce on an evil cloud, you lose all your keys, as well as access to the power-ups that those certain levels of key ownership entitles you to.

In this way, Flaboo! mixes twitch dexterity in terms of tapping and tilting with more tactical elements, as sometimes it makes sense to fall through several layers of grey clouds in order to maintain your key collection.

This is generally more important than your height as access to power-ups enables you to get higher faster. Of course, the complication is the ever ticking time.

The combination of these elements, together with the fluffy, humorous graphics, makes Flaboo! a fun and moreish experience. Indeed, the only reason it doesn't score higher is the lack of social features which now are de rigueur for any decent iPhone game.