After playing iMob (a rip off of MafiaWars from Facebook) on my iPhone, I figured it can't be that hard to make a game for the iPhone. I've posted before about game ideas and now am wondering if the iPhone would be a better platform than the web browser. It's a smaller audience, but there's no worries of browsers and version and JavaScript being turned off and to start making money, just add features and release a 99cent version. So another aspect of most games has been lingering in my mind... DEATH!

Any game with combat or platforming or a timed objective has a "game over" or "death". And many games (or rather, game genres) have different ways to handle it. Some have you restart the level or from the last checkpoint. Some have you reload the last save. MMORPGs all handle it differently. World of Warcraft damages your equipped items by 10% and makes you run as a spirit back to your body. Asheron's Call 2 would make you run back to your body naked AND give you XP debt. City of Heroes just has the XP debt. The Realm would have you randomly drop some items (for anyone else in the room to take) and lose a percentage of your total XP, up to a certain number of levels lost.

So what's the best? The City of Heroes XP debt was the reason I quit the game. Losing your gear made death a VERY bad thing in The Realm. I certainly like WoW's method the most, but running back to your body as a spirit wouldn't apply in a game without a big map. It has to be enough of an annoyance that you'll avoid dying, but not so much that you'll give up on the game. In iMob when you die at level 5, you lose 5 XP, the equivalent of 25 minutes of doing missions. I uninstalled the game as soon as I saw that.

It's also important that the death handling in a game fit into the feel of the rest of the game. If my game involves zombies and you're the zombie master and you die fighting a lich, your surviving minions could drag you back to the lair. And if all your minions are dead, what then? Once you're back at the lair, what will your zombie minions do to revive you, and at what cost?