Rock Milk entered “What the hell we do next” phase. And since the whole point is to keep moving forward we gave ourselves 24 hours to decide our next prototype.

First we narrowed it down to three game ideas we think are fun and could be be a fit for the next 2.5 months development cycle. Since one of them is loosely based on Space Invaders I decided to check out what currently inhabits the Play Store. (If you know any cool Space Invader inspired Android games, please link us on Twitter)

My main focus here is to check currently explored design spaces and check the final experience for Space Invaders games in the store.

IMPORTANT to notice that many of the games discussed here have 100k more downloads. Impressive as Reakt, our first game, is just reaching it’ 200 install. Hurray!

Input

This was one of the features I was more interested in. Translating console games input to mobile touch most often lead to really bad game feel. But since, Space Invaders input is so simple (move and fire), I was optimist. This are some of the variants:

Movement

• Accelerometer: I just cant wrap my mind around the idea of turning the game canvas while playing.
• Input mapping on screen: This is ok. I don’t like it though.
• Half screen touch: One of the best solutions since you can accommodate your finger where it feels best.
• Follow finger: Super common on space ship games. But your finger is covering the ship and sometimes most of the screen.

Firing

• Auto firing: I like the solution when the game do not implement the original Space Invaders barriers. If there are barriers, this is very stupid.
• Tap anywhere: This was straight forward and works fine.
• Input mapping on screen: Again, ok but bad.

Summing up, I could not find any innovation in input as this are all very common interactions. Worth mentioning that I did not play Arkanoid vs Space Invaders from Square Enix because of pay wall reasons.

Shooting

Shooting is core to Space Invaders and I could not believe how frequent the feature is screwed with. From the 10 games I played, only 3 had good shooting feel.

Space Invaders have a reload time that leaves you waiting to shoot again. Space Intruders have bullets that fire at the speed of one legged turtles. Invaders Deluxe have HUGE barriers in front of you, leaving a very small gap to shoot, leading to end wave HUGE downtimes and overall claustrophobic experience. And, of course, bullet sprite ranged from invisible to random MSPaint lines.

On the bright side, I found ONE game design modification here. Many games had many Power Ups Aero Fighters style. This enabled some variance in gameplay, from slow fire rate laser beams that hit a column of enemies to huge fire rate small space pebbles. It’s nice.

Enemies

Another very important feature of Space Invaders but this one gets more consistent implementations. Mostly have simple movement animation and some FX on death and shoot. One had accelerating animations that gave me a headache.

The coolest implementation I could find was the Voxel Invaders, playing with different enemy types, movement patterns and health values. Nothing fancy though.

The bonus enemy is also present in most implementations, but little creativity there.

Aesthetics

I’m a programmer, so take this with a grain of salt, but most of the games look bad. Like bad bad. It baffles me that such a simple game with bad art can reach 100k installs and probably win some cash. Anyway, not my place to be discussing this.

Monetization

This one have some variation. I found two premium games, one by TAITO (original developer) and another by Square Enix that looked fun. Outside of that, most games use ads to monetize.

Where they use ads varied too. One had the AMAZING splash screen ad we know and love. It’s almost like a cover charge. A couple had ads on game over and another one had constant banner ad on top of the screen. Aside of the Splash Screen, nothing too invasive.

Found it interesting to see no IAP, not even for Ad removal.

Other (Crazy) Features

• Spinning battlefield: There as actually one game where the whole screen span. Yeah, at one moment your ship was on top of the enemy ships. Not the best feature though.

• Crazy random weapons: Space Space Invaders gets the prize here. You could get, from power up, an “ultimate” weapon of sorts. Then you access a drawer inventory (while the game is running) and tap on it to use. At some point I smashed all enemy ships with mechanical closing walls or a destruction ball. All that happening in space.

Overall, this simple research was nice to corroborate with a belief we had about mobile game: Quality is not proxy to moderate success. Many games had very low production values for the amount of installs and probably dollars they made. Of course the big hits have HUGE production value and some are even cool games (like Cats), but it is interesting how very low budget games can make money on this market. Or at least could.

If you read so far, thanks very much! To connect with us, please reach out on Facebook and/or Twitter. Also, if you want to check my full review spreadsheet, click here (strong language, viewer discretion is advised).

Matheus Almeida, best half of Rock Milk.