How Lumines creator Tetsuya Mizuguchi is bringing his beloved franchise to mobile (update)

Puzzle games lend themselves to mobile’s touchscreen controls. And they’re profitbable, too — look at how King Entertainment has been a top-earning app store title with Candy Crush Saga. Cookie Jam has been making SGN Games the big bucks for years.

But when it comes to puzzles, it’s really about match-3. One of the best puzzle game franchises has yet to appear on smartphones. That changes later this year when Mobcast releases Lumines on mobile for the first time. The series fuses beat-driven music with the block-clearing action of Tetris, and it’s been a mainstay on PlayStation consoles since its debut in 2004.

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Mobile games rule Mobcast’s home country, Japan. But nothing like the series exists on mobile. Lumines creator and founder Tetsuya Mizuguchi sees this as a great opportunity to branch out.

“Lumines just seems like the perfect fit for mobile — it’s a casual-feeling game that can be played in small bursts, and the connection with music makes it perfect for people who walk around with their headphones in all the time anyways!” Mizuguchi said in an email interview with GamesBeat. “The reception from the Lumines player community so far has been humbling, and we can’t wait to bring the game to our loyal fans soon.”

Lumines fans may worry that the touch controls of mobile may not fit the past-paced gameplay. This would’ve been a concern in the past, but Mizuguchi has watched the evolution of touch, and he sees that it’s ready for Lumines.

“Fortunately, touch controls have come a long way, and we were able to learn a lot from the experiences of other developers and the many games before us since the dawn of touchscreen smartphones,” he said. “Ultimately, it’s a challenge that we wanted to take on in bringing Lumines to iOS and Android, and we’re confident that we’ve created something that works really well with touch controls while retaining the original feel of the game that people love.”

Mobcast spent months tuning these controls, learning from its failures along the way — and the lessons from other developers.

“All told, it took us about 7 months to get the controls to a point where we were happy with them. But the process is never-ending — we will continue to calibrate the feel of the controls to make sure they’re as good as they can possibly be,” Mizuguchi said. “The development process was constant trial and error — we experimented with individual factors like swipe speed, angle, and distance, as well as hold times. We were trying to find the best balance of factors to make the controls feel good, and we’re confident that we’ve done precisely that!”

Correction, 9:45 a.m. August 10: Mobcast, not Mizuguichi’s Enchance studio, is making this Lumines. Mizuguchi is collaborating with Mobcast. GamesBeat apologizes for the error.