Retrospective – Balloon Headed Boy in China

mark — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 21:09:49 +0000

Once upon a time the mobile phone games market resembled the wild west. Brave pioneering types strode forth to create the best games they could across the wilderness of screen sizes, control interfaces, heap sizes and the countless ropey implementations of J2ME across 100’s of devices. Then Apple’s iPhone was discovered and for those who remained, the gold rush started.

Our first panning of that particular stream (and I promise this is the last wild west/gold rush anaology) was with Balloon Headed Boy, which is now available for FREE from our friends at Gimme5games.com. The game has a long and rich history, and among that history was the incredible popularity the game enjoyed in China.

Back in 2005 when the idea of Apple producing anything other than an expensive CAD machine wrapped in white plastic would’ve been silly, us lot were still part of Morpheme, a rather innovative little mobile games company, and we had just finished Balloon Headed Boy on most of the major mobile devices, at the time it was something of a bun-fight to get stuff placed on major operators without a) Branding and b) Support of a large publisher, so we were keen to place BHB in as many places as possible. We were fortunate to be in touch with the UK representatives of a company called MIG, which located games on behalf of China Mobile and they were blown away by BHB on mobile and immediately got behind it to promote it as much as they could.

We received many links to Chinese sites and magazine features with BHB featured in. Then they told us they were going to promote the game at a university campus in Beijing. We were chuffed to bits! They said that they would promote the game with T-shirts, playing cards (up there) and the usual stuff, but nothing could prepare us for the photographs of what they’d produced to display the game in. Check it out…

Old Big ‘ead is Back

mark — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 10:00:00 +0000

No, we haven’t made a football game based on Brian Clough’s 44 days in charge at Leeds United, apart from anything else, there’s very little unpredicability in how the game would conclude, instead we celebrate the arrival of Balloon Headed Boy on the iPhone and iPod Touch.

Balloon Headed Boy is supposed to be celebrating his birthday, with all his friends in Balloon Town, when a terrible storm scatters his balloon friends to all corners of the kingdom and dumps a load of no-good, hat-wearing frogs in their place. Faced with the prospect of the most rubbish birthday ever, he begins an adventure across 34 levels to rescue his friends.

Balloon Headed Boy (or BHB as he’s known to his friends and those who can’t be arsed typing his full name again) is a 2D platform game in which you navigate the titular boy rescuing balloon friends and avoiding hazards such as spikes, rising water and frogs wearing sombreros (!), however, BHB can’t jump, so how does he get up to those hard to reach, nay, seemingly inaccessible platforms? Well, he can pick up Farty Flowers which help him inflate his head so he can glide gently upwards, but inflating his head also allows him to break through certain things. Some blocks are unstable and if dropped on by deflating BHB’s head while hovering over them, he lands with a bump and dislodges the block to access other areas. Also, his friend the Helicat can be freed from its icy prison to push BHB up into seemingly closed off locations.

Here comes the science bit…Balloon Headed Boy has a long and rich heritage, originally a mobile Java game, he’s made the transition to PC downloadable format, Flash and now iPhone. Many of the challenges faced making a game for iPhone are down to user interface, the biggest USP of the iPhone, it’s lovely touchscreen and accelerometer (the tilt thing, non-tech types!), can also present their own unique challenges when transferring from more traditional button based control systems. Even when settling on a control system that works, you still have to bear in mind that the larger that control area is, the more it will obscure on-screen goings on. We worked closely with our colleagues at publisher Gimme5games.com to develop the control system which makes most sense, exploits the unique interface opportunities of the iPhone and impacts on screen real-estate as little as possible.

We’re happy with the solution and we’re sure you’re itching to part with a meagre £2.39 to find out. If you want to have a try out before you commit to parting with £2.39 (or 4 Greenbacks for our North American fans), there’s a fully playable Flash version on BalloonHeadedBoy.com as well as links to the appstore where there is also a Balloon Headed Boy Lite containing a selection of levels you can download and play for FREE on the iPhone.

Come on! 34 levels for £2.39! That’s *grabs calculator* 7p (or 11cents) per level. Get yourselves over to the Balloon Headed Boy Page where not only can you buy the iPhone game, you can buy BHB themed t-shirts, mugs and such like or download free stuff to adorn your myspace page. Bargains all over the shop!

Honeyslug » balloon headed boy

Retrospective – Balloon Headed Boy in China

Old Big ‘ead is Back