New AIR game - Saturate: A bullet-storm survival shooter
Hi all,
I've been working for over a year on game with a publisher (not this game!), and it is still many months away from release. In the meantime I was anxious to get something released to the public in the short term, so two weeks ago I started Saturate: A bullet-storm survival shooter as a tribute game to one of my fav PC games, Mono by Binary Zoo. Written in AIR 13 for iOS, Android and Facebook (iOS under review, and FB coming in a few days), with IAP for those who don't want to earn credits the hard way 
. I'll update the links as the other platform versions become available:
Available for Android right now!
Saturate is a Geometry Wars style two-stick single-screen bullet-storm survival shooter. There are lots of control schemes to try (and more coming). Keep in mind that this was a 2-week 'get it out there' marathon, so there are still plenty of features in the pipes (like highscore tables, sharing screenshots to FB and setting them as your wallpaper/bg, different game modes).
The aim of the game is to saturate the screen with color. Your score is the % of the screen that you fill when you die (and you will die). The enemies are R, G and B, and they splat the screen with color when they explode. There are some cool power-ups, and tons of weapons to collect. The sound track is pretty awesome too.
Some background: Pixelthis just turned 10 years old a few days ago, so we've been around the block! We started with Flash 4 and then Flash Lite 1.1 (way back when) on Nokia and Sony-Ericsson phones. Saturate is developed using AIR, using our proprietary games platform. The core of the system is a rasteriser that turns vector graphics to bitmap at runtime (including filters) so that we can run in GPU mode with very good performance, and a callback-based event and tweening system for very fast game loop, animations and messaging. Saturate uses Milkmangames ANEs for StoreKit and Android IAB, and GoViral for social integration.
The biggest challenges in development were (1) counting pixels to determine % of screen filled so that it didn't impact negatively on performance, and (2) tracking down and elliminating memory allocations during the game loop. There are still some optimisations to do, but I think it went pretty well! Unfortunately it runs a bit too slow on iPad1 when teh action hots up, so that device has been elliminated. A bug in Adobe AIR that has not been addresed yet also prevents facebook from working on iOS5.1.
Enjoy!
Peter
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