You read that correctly: Ron Gilbert and Clayton Kauzlaric, the co-conspirators who brought us DeathSpank, have collaborated on designing a casual free-to-play iPad game released by Beep Games.
The Big Big Castle! is a physics-based game in which you build large structures (castles, naturally, but also cathedrals) for your mighty king. While you arrange and plop down princesses in your castles, and provide shelter for the poor, you never have to commit to what you build and are able to destroy your structures with canons…or spaceships.
Kauzlaric, who used to work in art and animation, is now a designer and creative director who helped create Total Annihilation and put together a platformer known as Voodoo Vince.
His friend, videogame funnyman Ron Gilbert, famous for his work on the Monkey Island series and Maniac Mansion, wrote on his blog Grumpy Gamer,
"The Big Big Castle! stared out because I wanted to play around with Box2D, then Clayton brought up this idea he's had for the last 10 years about building stuff and watching it fall down, so we started working on that. Clayton's nine year old son said he'd like to blow up the castles he'd just built, so we added that, then we thought it would be fun if you could destroy castles your friends had built, so we added that.
The Big Big Castle! is the result of a few months of spare time on the weekends. It's just a fun little game. A labor of love we thought we'd share."
While the iPad game is free to download and play, you can purchase coin packs between $0.99 (for 10, 000 coins) and $3.99 (for 50, 000 coins), if, writes Gilbert, "you feel guilty about pirating Maniac Mansion, Monkey Island, DeathSpank or Putt-Putt Saves the Zoo."
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