Fuel Tiracas – Twitch-On-Touch Done Properly

INTRODUCTION

What would you do if you made a public dig at the mobile gamer about their thumbs wasting away, and then one of the biggest games companies in the world kindly asks you to make some ‘Slick and FuturLabby’ touch-based games for their new mobile platform?

Well, you’re not going to say no, and whilst some might brush their comments under the carpet and pretend it never happened, we decided to try and help the poor thumb-whithered folks by getting twitch gaming working properly on touch devices. Yay for us :p

Fuel Tiracas represents our first stab in that direction.

INSPIRATION

Speaking of stabs, you remember that scene in Aliens when Bishop holds his hand over Hudson’s, and proceeds to scare him witless with his twitch gaming skills?

Well that scene has stuck with us for many years, and we thought it’d be cool to give people the opportunity to look and feel as awesome as Bishop might have.

As with all our games, Fuel Tiracas is simple, elegant and a little bit clever, and it takes everything we’ve learned about addictive mechanics from Coconut Dodge and Velocity, and boils them down to their absolute core essence, building the simplest game possible (we only had 8 weeks!) that adequately challenges the following faculties:

– Use manual dexterity to create fast paced action
– Use memory to take ownership of repeated patterns
– Make fast decisions in response to random events
– Look really cool doing all of the above competently

These are the things that make Coconut Dodge and Velocity fun and addictive, and it’s these things that we have literally put right at the player’s fingertips – in their purest form – in Fuel Tiracas.

CONTEXT

The game takes place on Planet Tiracas, which is a Toron Nebula Outpost. The planet currently has no atmosphere, and the player’s job is to use Tiracas’ natural resources as Fuel to power giant atmosphere processors!

Shameless J.C. fans ahoy…

GAMEPLAY

Fusing together ‘Whack-A-Mole’, ‘Spinning Plates’ and ‘Simon Says’ gameplay, the player must quickly collect fuel (coloured circle) as it appears in one of the six fuel pods (three each side), to raise the fuel level in a selected fuel gauge (strips in the centre), making sure to balance each gauge within its threshold (the coloured area within each strip) for long enough to generate 100% power to the atmosphere processor (the ‘xx/100’ at the top of the screen).

This would all be really easy if the fuel didn’t slowly deplete over time, and that’s the kicker…

It’s simple, fast-paced action with a resource/time management slant, and it’s addictive as hell because…

…as with Coconut Dodge, the combination of random and predictable elements gives the player the opportunity to memorise and master the patterns that appear, whilst being kept on their toes by random events, leading to Bishop-level exhibitions of skill and speed; and people looking and feeling cool whilst playing 🙂

BANG FOR BUCK

Fuel Tiracas has 12 levels (and 12 trophies) that slowly introduce players to the various different Fuel Types included in the game, and the real value is in the huge amount of replayability as players learn the patterns and improve their best times, competing for the top spot on global high scores!

And… it’s going to cost £0.40p.

A PlayStation Vita game for 40p.

Hello PlayStation Mobile!