Hey guys, a quick update on Defective. As you know, last week it was released on ShootingGamesFree.org – the sponsor’s website. After a week of exclusivity, you can now play the game on NewGrounds and Kongregate. Go check it out and don’t forget to vote, please – it helps me out a lot!
In other news…
So what have I been doing these past two weeks? Nothing terribly exciting. I have a really good grasp on programming games for Android using Eclipse/Java and Open GL ES 1.1.
As a result, I’ve been laying down the basic foundation for my first mobile game, which as of right now I intend to be a multi-directional space shooter, somewhat like Defective. The main differences being the art-style, which will heavily resemble older 8-bit games, as well as the actual gameplay, which will be much simpler and share many elements with arcade games like Galaga and Bosconian.
Right now I’m doing a lot of stress-testing and tweaking to get things to perform perfectly. The art you see in the screenshot is temporary, and I only drew it up just to get away from all the placeholder squares I had moving around. How similar the final game art will be to this art is still unknown.
Right now however, things look very promising. On a mobile device, I have 1,000 alpha’d objects flying around, rotating and everything, at a solid 50+ fps – this with no optimizations at all (aka batching). I’m really starting to love OpenGL – it makes me want to give Stage3D another chance now that I have a basic idea of how GPU-based programming works.