Game:

The Drowning (2013)

Duration: 7:34

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A fresh approach to shooters on mobile and tablets - The Drowning launches soon.

Ben Cousins' career spans companies ranging from Lionhead to Sony and DICE, but his next project is DeNA owned Scattered Entertainment that's attempting to evolve the mobile and tablet shooter experience with a game called The Drowning. We met up with the Scattered Entertainment's studio manager during GDC to learn more about the game.

"A lot of core gamers have got smart devices, they've got smart phones or tablets, but the games that are available for them, kind of don't really suit their taste. There's really only a few game titles out there that suit their taste for deep, beautifully graphics, kind of adult, violent, serious experience. What we wanted to do is looking at shooters create a shooter for smart phones and tablets which kind of respects the restrictions and opportunities that you get with a mobile device but which also has the feel and the tone and the story and the visuals of a console game."

The game refrains from relying on additional controllers or virtual d-pads instead utilising a click where you want to move and use two fingers to aim and shoot system.

"One of our kind of philosophies from a design point of view is that we don't believe that external controllers for mobile devices are the way forward. And I used to work at Sony and we were working in the peripheral business on things like EyeToy and we were always very clear that if you expected someone to buy a peripheral before they can play the game that's always going to slow down the adoption of the game. That's why Singstar had the mics bundled and that's why EyeToy had it bundled. These are a digital games so we can't bundle any physical things with them. So right from the outset we said let's not concern ourselves about the lack of controller, let's just try and make a control system that works on these touch devices. And let's have a belief that this is a solvable problem. And we took great inspiration from the Halo team actually. Back in the early 2000's noone would have believed you could do a triple-A shooter on a console and they basically solved all of the design problems with Halo 1 on Xbox 1 and since then the console has become the biggest platform in the world for shooters."

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