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Let your fingers play football footsie

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FIFA's now at hand. The confetti, curve, and cheering is all Apple-touch ready, courtesy an Indian-developed App. It's a 2D football experience that lets you play football with your fingers -- on your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch. Sunday MiD DAY meets the man behind it

Can't go to South Africa for the FIFA World Cup? Bring it home. Or at least bring home the experience of kicking the ball along while mad crowds cheer you on, using just your fingers.

That's what Finger Footie, an app designed for the Apple iPhone, iPad and iPod touch, that released on Friday, aims to give you. "It's intuitive game play -- where you can swipe to kick the ball away, and touch a player to pass the ball to him," explains Shailesh Prabhu, director, Yellow Monkey Studios, a Santacruz-based studio which published and developed it.

How does it work?
That's different from most other football games, that have a pad on the side with which you can direct gameplay, and pass the ball back and forth. "This is more casual and fun simply because you can make full use of the touch interface. Plus, the yellow tracker makes it simpler to plot your path to the goal. There are lots of strategic advantages with Finger Footie," he adds. A single game will last 6-10 minutes, because, as Prabhu explains, "you won't play longer games on a portable device."

The 9MB (approx) game also has built-in social networking, which means you can use it to log on to your Facebook and/or Twitter account, and update your scoresu00a0 every time you win or lose a game. It's a great way to compare scores with friends and take competition to another level.

Finger Footie has the usual frills -- you can choose the colour of your team's jersey, and cheering crowds accompany you as you choose to slide tackle (by swiping sideways) or complete a golden goal. Victory is accompanied by confetti and a trophy. Neat.

App store happy
What has Prabhu really excited though, is that his team managed to break into the App store with a relatively simple two-dimensional (2D) football game. "We worked on this for about four months, and when we felt ready, we sent it to the App store. The process is fairly simple -- once we'd submitted it, Apple checked it for consistency to see that the game doesn't hang too often, has no offensive material or pornographic content, and that it delivers on its promise of being a football game. Once that was done, we received a notification in about a week that it had been approved for sale," he smiles.

The logistics seem fairly simple too -- it's the developer's prerogative to set a price, and once he/she does that, a 30 per cent slice of sales goes to Apple, while the rest comes to Yellow Monkey. "That's better for us developers than what we face with Indian operators -- here, there are too many men, and ultimately you end up getting only a 15-20 per cent share in sales."

What's next?
Upgrades planned include adapting the game to a multiplayer format, improvements in the graphical, technical and animation departments, and building in a tournament structure. Until then, it's time to bend it like Beckham, with your thumb.