This game was almost insultingly simple. There was a weight attached to a stick. The stick was attached to a ball.  The goal – to merely right click on the ball with your mouse, spin the weight upright with a flick of the mouse and then balance the weight on the stick by moving the mouse.  The challenge – every few seconds that you could hold this in balance, the stick would shorten and it would become harder and harder to stabilize.  The reward – the longer you could balance the more points you scored. This was a PC precursor to the Wii games that we love to test our reflex skills with today.

As you know, we are now in a world where this kind of fun has to come through an iPhone, iTouch, or Nintendo DS app.  So, the nerds at AppCore and Design Iteration decided to make an iPhone/iTouch adaptation of this little Flash application from the past. How the team got to this point requires the brief telling of a backstory.

To give out props where due, I have to mention a sharp 17 year old guy named Christopher Smith. He is the guy who brought the idea to everyone’s attention.  Christopher is the son of AppCore’s Lead Dreamweaver and Design Iteration’s Founder, Jim Smith.

He caught his dad one night while he was sitting in his easy-chair staring intently into his laptop ;}. With some well-chosen, fast-talking line, he got Jim out of his chair and lured him to a website. This website was a well hidden URL where Christopher and his buddies played this little weight on a stick game.  After playing the game for awhile, Jim was addicted and birthed the vision of how this could be an iPhone app.

Now, back to where the app dev nerds enter the scene.  Within 2 weeks gameplay was laid down, physics algorithms banged out, artwork squeezed out of Illustrator, testing completed, and Stickit the app submitted to Apple.   The little balance game with big appeal had made it to iPhone prime-time.

The simplicity of the little Flash app’s gameplay had been preserved in Stickit. The goal was still to balance the weight on the end of a stick as long as you could. Instead of using a mouse to move the ball at the end of the stick, you slid your finger around on the screen.  Three levels of difficulty were added to allow the most uncoordinated of gamers to have fun as well as challenge those Jedi’s with iPhones and iTouches.  If you were proud of a high score and wanted to brag about you could submit it to a global leader board. Simple, fun, addictive. 

There is a video of Stickit being played in the iPhone SDK simulator on YouTube.  It really gives you a sense for the balancing action of the game.

Check it out on YouTube:

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqJxDQ2qbn4

Buy it on the App Store by following this link:

http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=322869352&mt=8