Developer Hunter Hamster Studio has made four games in its Snail Bob series for the web, and now the company is teaming up with publisher Spil Games to go multiplatform with HTML5 versions of the titles.
Snail Bob 1 through 4 are Flash-based games that have players guiding the snail through a series of levels by helping him use tools and avoid obstacles. The titles are available through Spil Games’ online network of game-distribution sites that currently reach over 180 million players. Now Spill Games and Hunter Hamster Studio want to reach out from the web to mobile using HTML5.
“Spil Games is investing heavily in HTML5 because we believe this is the future of mobile gaming,” Spil Games senior director Dan Prigg said. “With increasing competition in the fragmented mobile gaming space, developers are being forced to invest in multiple game versions for platforms and fight for space and recognition on saturated app stores.”
Prigg noted that more gamers were accessing Spil’s sites from mobile devices and that instead of forcing indie studios to program their games for every device, they could tackle every platform at once using HTML5.
“The developers we work with believe that one language for their games is easier and smarter, especially with mobile surfing for games,” Prigg told GamesBeat. “We’re still a web games publisher and believe in HTML5 for the web; however, mobile over Wi-Fi is quickly becoming a norm for those who are moving around various strong Wi-Fi spots. As people want instant gratification and the ability to hop from game to game without having to find a native app, they’ll be opening and playing games from their mobile browsers.”
HTML5 is different because browsers and mobile devices can all understand it. This is opposed to iOS or Android native apps, which developers need to build specifically for those operating systems.
“As we move toward an even more instant-gratification world, gamers care more about how quickly they can get into a game,” said Prigg. “Being platform agnostic helps us deliver games more readily to more people.”