If you’re one of the few hundred who received the activation code for the Toki Tori 2 development build, you’re probably done looking at the waving Toki Tori graphic. Perhaps you’ve wondered how Toki Tori will move through the levels in future builds? Well that’s what I’m writing about today.

With the elimination of the inventory of items and weapons, we had to come up with other ways for Toki Tori to influence his environment, in our case the game’s flora and fauna. We tinkered with the idea of building the entire game around pointer-based controls, which would work well on most commercial platforms these days (finger, stylus, mouse, Wii-remote). We said to ourselves: “Let’s see if we can make something that is only possible on pointer based systems and run with it!” We came up with a few ideas that would work well, but it never quite reached a level where the trade-off was worth it.

Some of the ideas - the new telewarp for instance - have since been incorporated into the normal control schemes. What we also got out of those brainstorming sessions was a set of moves for Toki Tori that would work well with controller and touch-screen. We decided we’d take the defining characteristics of his body as a guide, resulting in the whistle (he’s a bird) and floor stomp (he’s fat). You can view the whistle and stomp as magnets of sorts. Usually a whistle will result in a creature being drawn to Toki Tori, while a stomp will send off a shock-wave that can scare creatures such as our beloved bubble frog. Not every creature will react the same to Toki Tori’s moves, meaning you’ll have to be careful where and when you use your moves.

I think this simple control scheme will keep things simple and it allows us to keep the foundations of both the controller and the pointer based controls we had for the original Toki Tori. 

Questions? Worried about what we’re doing to Toki Tori? Sound off in the comments below.