wee doors banging

You are a bird. Some pigs have stolen your eggs. This makes you angry. You are an Angry Bird. Thus goes the largely irrelevant back story to Angry Birds from Clickgamer and Rovio, an iPhone game I’ve been playing a lot lately. Like, really a lot.

Angry Birds on the iPhone

Angry Birds has been a huge success, selling half a million copies in the first month alone. This, I think, is down to the design cleverness that lurks beneath the polish, cutesy graphics and simple mechanics.

Firstly, it is very very easy to pick up the game and control the Angry Birds. However, higher scores and faster level progression are possible with greater skill, so practice with the controls is rewarded.

Secondly, once the controls are mastered, there are several ways in which to play the game which will appeal differently to different players.

The basic level completion mechanic is to kill all the enemy pigs on the level using Angry Birds, fired from a catapult, to either hit them directly or knock over the teetering constructions they inhabit. This basic progression through the levels will be enough for many players (I imagine), and of course is the mechanic through which the game is actually completed.

Layered on top of the catapult action, but unrelated to completing the levels or game, is a scoring system. Skilled players will be able to maximise their score with careful and clever aiming and suitable use of the different types of Angry Birds available. A per-level and overall score is maintained and recorded in a global high score table, providing comparisons with players around the world and motivation to replay levels and improve scores.

Playing for Perfection

A further layer, on top of the scoring system, is a ranking system where the score at level end is awarded 1-3 “stars” depending on high it is. This rank and the stars attained / stars available ratio are displayed prominently on various screens, providing motivation to achieve a “clean sheet” of maximum stars on all levels.

So you can play for levels, you can play for points or you can play for perfection.

Finally, collections of unlocks, secrets and achievements add further fresh challenges throughout the levels.

The basic gameplay is very simple, but couple these easy to pick up mechanics with high presentational quality, layers of complexity that widen increase the appeal of the game and replay value, add a sprinkle of special challenges as you go, and you go a long way to explaining Angry Birds’ popularity.

No matter what you think of the game itself, if you’re in the games business then you could learn a lot from it’s design.

Angry Birds is available for iPhone on the Apple App Store, and for Nokia devices on the Ovi Store.