As we march towards the beta (code complete + final assets) build of Little Soldiers HD, I've had to start wrapping my head around what makes Little Soldiers HD compelling and differentiates it from other games.  Here's an initial pass at what I think will make Little Soldiers stand out.

1. Intuitive touch interface designed for the iPhone
2. High definition 3D graphics
3. Not your moms physics puzzler, Little Soldiers HD is...
   • ...action oriented with a smart camera that follows the action and explosive chain reactions.
   • ...character based, lead your team of soldiers to complete missions by escaping levels
   • ...rewarding, earn medals and unlock levels & vehicles as you progress though the campaign.

I think games that are designed from the ground up to have a iPhone friendly touch interface have a competitive advantage over ones that aren't. You wont find any virtual d-pads or virtual joysticks in little soldiers. The menus, the settings pages, the level map, and the gameplay were all designed to work intuitively and naturally with touch input. In some cases a lot of time and iterations were spent to make this as fluid as possible.

The game does have polished 3D graphics (or will have when we hit beta). This takes more effort and production time then the 2D graphics that a lot of 3 month development time iPhone games have. I believe that 2D can look better then 3D in many ways, but there is also an impression of quality and professionalism that you experience with 3D graphics that is sometimes hard to duplicate with standard 2D graphics. Still with incredibly high quality 3D graphics like the ones that are seen in the Gameloft games, I wonder if the bar is set so high for 3D that it may not be possible for games like LS to create that experience for players.

The rest of the description focuses on what differentiates Little Soldiers HD from your standard Rube Goldberg style physics puzzler. Having real characters instead of an abstract object like a ball or cube invites players to be more engaged in the game. The same is true of the object interactions which are more explosive and volatile then a lot of physics puzzlers that feel more like a science experiment.