The 14th of July 2016, brought together members of the gaming industry from all over the world to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Mobile Game Asia hosted by the Global Mobile Game Association (GMGC) is an internationally recognised gaming industry event. This year it was held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia where professionals shared their insights for the latest gaming trends in South East Asia. Held in conjunction with Mobile Game Asia was the Indie Pitch Arena where local game developers pitched their games in front of a panel of judges, for a chance to win a cash prize of USD$2,000.
We announced the winners of the Indie Pitch Arena here but there are games that deserve special mention. Uri – The Sprout of Lotus Creek, is a mobile game developed by DreamTree Games; a local Malaysian Indie Developer.
In the game, you follow Uri, a young prince who has always lived behind the walls of his palace. One day, he sets out to venture beyond the walls of the palace to embark on a journey of adventure and discovery. During the game, you aid Uri in his quest by overcoming the obstacles blocking his way.
Stepping into the game for the first time, Uri – The Sprout of Lotus Creek takes your common puzzle platformer and introduces a new core mechanic. As the player, you do not move the character instead, you have to interact with the environment to clear the many challenges that block your character’s progression.
This is done by the clever use of the game’s UI as the tools for you to utilise. For example, during our brief demo, the player would use the game’s mute button, to interact with certain spaces in the environment to create noise, in order to create a distraction or trigger some environmental action.
The character’s life bar that resembled a book and its’ pages would be uses to build bridges for the character to cross. Every time the player moved the element, it would lose one page, forcing the player to think strategically where to place the tool. A different stage, further into the game saw how the player could utilise different tools to complete the level, giving a sense of replayability and requiring the player to think of different solutions, as not all would work.
The concept felt simple enough for all players to easily grasp, whilst still being a challenge in the later levels that I played. The art style was vibrant, simplistic and resembled paper craft; giving a storybook likeness to it. The background characters were fairly sparse during our demo and hopefully, they are able to add more interactivity or NPCs, so the levels feel more alive.
DreamTree Games is made up of a 3 man team; Xteven Gan (Art Director), Cham Wei Chuan (Game Designer) and Zhiwei Tan (Game Programmer). Currently, the game is still in development and is targeted to launch in May 2017.
You can follow their Facebook and Twitter @dreamtreegames to keep up with their updates. We’ll post up more news as we get them! Just follow us at Unpause to stay updated!
