I have a confession to make. There’s a YouTube channel that I subscribe to that I don’t tell many people about. It’s not that I’m terribly embarrassed about it or anything. It’s just that some people might equate it to being an avid fan of Keeping Up With The Kardashians. The name of the channel is SoCalPolicePursuits, and it’s nothing but Los Angeles-based news broadcasts of those high helicopter shots of people trying to evade the police. It’s a severe guilty pleasure of mine. Luckily there’s a high-pedigree indie game developer start up team releasing their first game, Smash Cops, that is essentially the playable version of this YouTube channel.
I have a confession to make. There’s a YouTube channel that I subscribe to that I don’t tell many people about. It’s not that I’m terribly embarrassed about it or anything. It’s just that some people might equate it to being an avid fan of Keeping Up With The Kardashians. The name of the channel is SoCalPolicePursuits, and it’s nothing but Los Angeles-based news broadcasts of those high helicopter shots of people trying to evade the police. It’s a severe guilty pleasure of mine. Luckily there’s a high-pedigree indie game developer start up team releasing their first game, Smash Cops, that is essentially the playable version of this YouTube channel.
The developers of Smash Cops have grown weary of attempts to port console-like controls over to touch devices and have come up with a new “push” control scheme that uses one finger to control all the actions of your cop cars. You’ll be tasked with running felons off the road in a free roaming city from the view of the helicopter covering your every move. The combined experience of the developers is immediately apparent as soon as you see screens from the game revealing a nicely rendered cityscape.
Developers from teams that made Fable, Burnout and Battalion Wars (just to name a few) have come together to start the new studio Hutch, and Smash Cops is their first release. Set to release in January of 2012 to the iTunes Apps Store, I’ll gladly spend the wait catching up on my favorite YouTube channel to analyze how the pros do it.
