Announcing Carpl

Littleloud’s first iPhone/ iPod Touch game goes off to Apple for certification this week.

Produced by a team of three (an artist, a coder and myself as designer and producer) on scraps of time found in between the cracks of the last three months, it’s a game of collecting and survival.

The idea is that your finger (or at least its tip) acts as the protagonist in the game: you dip it in a pond and collect the lotus flowers which float around the screen while trying to avoid being bitten by carp and the other creatures swimming above and below the surface. If your finger is bitten by an enemy, or if you pull it off the screen or bump into the sides, then you lose a life (finger).

Players must sort the objects that must be collected from the objects that must be avoided and, as all of the objects on screen are moving, the maze you must negotiate constantly shifts. Like Tetris, failure is inevitable, the question then being how long you can delay that inevitability, and how many points you can score along the way.

We tried to make the game visually distinct to other titles on the platform, opting for a Japanese wood block aesthetic, all waterfall sound effects and lazy shamisen, in an effort to make something pretty and discrete.

I’ll keep you updated on the game’s progress through this final stage of delivery and, as soon as it’s live, put up a download link.

For the time being, here is the game’s official site.