Just for Kicks

This FIFA World Cup play Football on your iPhone,iPad or iPod Touch,says Shailesh Prabhu,director,Yellow Monkey Studios,Mumbai.

This FIFA World Cup play Football on your iPhone,iPad or iPod Touch,says Shailesh Prabhu,director,Yellow Monkey Studios,Mumbai. Prabhu will be launching his game Finger Footie on June 11,2010 on the Apple App Store on iTunes. With the worlds top sporting event,the Football World Cup also scheduled to begin on that day,he couldnt have timed it better. Events like these always capture the users fancy. People like having the ability to play out the matches in their own way, says Prabhu,who has been developing games for eight years now. Apple,on its part,is running a football section in the App Store where they are promoting all football related applications on the homepage of the App Store,and the game is one such feature.

Incidentally,Finger Footie was actually the first game YMS started work on when they started development for the iPhone. But being a small start-up and having a lot of client commitments and deliverables we had to work on it slowly and steadily in whatever time we could manage. So the game was delayed by six months,but with the launch happening now it all worked out quite well, says Prabhu,whose main aim was to make this game different from other football games available in the market.

We saw a whole lot of games on the iPhone which were just ports of existing gameplay. Most of them had a soft gamepad or buttons drawn on the screen and the experience was just like any other console. So we came up with the idea of a football game where you are actually playing football on the iPhone screen,but with your fingers, says the 27-year-old,who intends to deliver five to ten minutes of fast-paced but fun gameplay. The game allows players to zoom in and out,and tilt the phone while the ball is in the air to give it more curve. Besides,its top-down view enables players to plan their strategies and implement them with greater ease.

Despite the many user-friendly features,finding a mass market in India is a tough task for Finger Footie,feels Prabhu. India is not a huge market for two reasons- popularity of cricket and non-penetrations of Apple devices. There are pockets of India where football is big,but they do not constitute a big enough market for us to sustain ourselves, says the gamer whose company wants to cater to the global gaming audience. We want to show that the Indian game development industry,which has traditionally excelled at services,can make its own intellectual property too, says Prabhu,who is expecting good downloads from across Europe,South America and parts of Asia.

Assuming that the game finds its takers,Prabhu also reveals his future plans to us. If the game does well we have big plans for it. Apart from improving the graphics,and fine-tuning the gameplay,we plan to add a multiplayer feature, he says.

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