Every game developer who has ever made a shooter for mobile devices has faced the same problem: coming up with a control scheme that isn’t terrible. And so far, it’s a problem that nobody has been able to solve satisfactorily. But Morning Star promises to change all that, thanks to a secret new control scheme that Industrial Toys President Tim Harris said is “very simple but feels really good.”
Every game developer who has ever made a shooter for mobile devices has faced the same problem: coming up with a control scheme that isn’t terrible. And so far, it’s a problem that nobody has been able to solve satisfactorily. But Morning Star promises to change all that, thanks to a secret new control scheme that Industrial Toys President Tim Harris said is “very simple but feels really good.”
Furthermore, he told GamesIndustry, the process of creating the control scheme “ended up having a bunch of cascading effects from everything we’ve done from level design to camera design to gun design to the way that we’re telling the story to the way we’re messing around with user sessions,” suggesting that the studio is taking an unusually holistic approach to the design of the interface.
The studio also has big things in mind for enemy intelligence, boasting that Morning Star will offer one of the first true AIs in a mobile shooter, and high-end visual effects like full-screen distortion, high-definition shadows and HDR lighting. The sci-fi story will also be appropriately epic: In the year 2134, humanity makes its first-ever contact with alien species, and it goes very badly. The announcement teaser shows what appears to be the destruction of the entire planet Earth, and now the last hope for mankind’s survival lies in your hands.
It’s a tale that obviously doesn’t stray far from Industrial Toys’ roots in Halo, but the studio is nonetheless aiming high, stating, “Our totally unreasonable goal is to completely change the expectations core gamers have for their mobile games.” It also plans to turn Morning Star into a “transmedia” project, with multiple products developed to support and draw gamers into the world.
There’s very little to see of Morning Star at this point beyond the teaser trailer (above), which in turn contains almost nothing of Morning Star itself. But with the pedigree of the development team, and the scale of the effort that’s being put into it, it’s definitely a game to keep an eye on.
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