Reviews 1...Air Attack HD Lite

A first look at some of the shmups on offer on Google Play, starting with Air Attack HD Lite by Art In Games.

Action a-plenty

This is a vertically-scrolling shooter over a beautifully rendered fixed-perspective 3D landscape, very much in the mold of 1942, an arcade game I sunk a lot ten pences into when I got my first job cleaning a bakery for three hours every Saturday morning.

When I first booted the game on my HTC Desire S, what hit me immediately were the graphics...if only because they were exactly the kind of thing I'd imagined for my own Air Support game had it ever got off the ground. Crisp, smooth, highly detailed and very well animated, this is pro stuff. It looks even better on the larger-format Google Nexus 7, where you can really appreciate the attention paid to the level design.

For control, the plane stays on auto-fire and you drag it around the screen with your finger, dodging fire and peppering enemies ahead of you, high and low, with bullets and missiles. This is a staple control method and has the staple problems: on a busy screen where I'm forced up into the middle of the display by heavy fire from below, I often find myself having to lift my wrist out of the way so I can peek underneath and see what's going on. Particularly evident on boss battles where the enemy attack pattern uses all of the screen real-estate available, it's one of those silly compromises that shows the difference between designing a game to the control system or designing the control system to the game, and is by no means unique to Air Attack. (Speaking of boss battles, they're great and make particularly good use of the flexibility afforded by the 3D engine. One end-of-level fight has you drop down and circle strafe an enemy fortress.)

Everything felt fast and responsive on my HTC, as you might expect. Shoot-em-ups have to have high frame rates and pixel-perfect collision detection, and this has both. You never feel robbed of a kill or cheated of a life, two of the most egregious crimes committed by lesser examples of the genre.

The upgrade shop

Other systems employ a quick tap or double-tap. Powerful bombs are dropped by double-tapping the target location, although I would've have preferred my plane to stay put rather than leap forward to drop the bomb, while other significant upgrades like the lightning gun require tapping an on-screen button to activate. Overall, this works fine, since you never have to abandon control of your craft for very long, and there are a variety of interesting upgrades to play with.

Enemies come in traditional waves from one side of the screen or the other. The forced-perspective 3D and slightly-wider-than-your-phone levels often mean that you can be shot by enemies you can't actually see, something I don't like on the whole, but you can drag the plane quickly from one side to the other so it's no big problem really. Some kind of overlay to show threats which are out-of-view might have been helpful. Neat touches like the occasional dead enemy diving in flames to crash on the ground keep things interesting, although to begin with I assumed this was a new kind of enemy I just couldn't hit for some reason (dur).

Overall this is a professional product with a lot of passion behind it. The opportunity to try it out for free shouldn't be missed.

Game: Air Attack HD Lite
Price: Free (limited levels, ad supported)
Tested on: HTC Desire S, Google Nexus 7
Rating: 3.5 Neils out of 5

Opening Salvo

See what I did there, with the title? Superb.

I've started this blog to record the process of designing, coding, productionising, and releasing, a mobile shoot-'em-up game for Android, provisionally called "Artillery Support". (If I ever actually get to the point of releasing something, I'll think of a better name.)

Why a shoot-'em-up? Because back in the earliest of earlies, it was my favourite genre. The ancient and creaky among you will surely remember names like R-Type and Nemesis/Gradius (and its various sequels) from the arcades, but it was the outright classics on the Commodore 64 that dominated my days and nights. I invite you to download a C64 emulator and try any of the following: Uridium, Paradroid, Armalyte, Wizball (one of the greatest 8-bit games ever made), Parallax, Cybernoid, and/or Zynaps. They are all brilliant. No regret will be felt.

It isn't my intention to recreate these games (although I occasionally consider the virtues of that), or even develop a side-scroller (although I harbour a latent wish to one day do that), but I do want to create a game where gratuitousness is the norm: bullets, missiles, explosions, debris...utter chaos. I want the player to have three lives and the enemies to attack in waves; I want there to be levels, a score which can climb into the millions, power-ups, bosses, and the whole shebang.

But since I also want to do this on Android, a touch platform, a few compromises are going to be necessary. After playing many of the shmups on offer from the marketplace, touch interfaces just don't do it for me as a replacement for a joystick/joy-pad. Virtual joy-pads, not to put too fine a point on it, uniformly suck. The alternative method of dragging your craft around the screen while it stays on auto-fire is better, but still permanently obscures the action with your finger and hand and feels way too invasive.

I'll review a few of Android's offerings as we go, but with this in mind I took an old game design of mine called "Air Support", originally intended to be a top-down free-roaming shooter along the lines of the old MegaDrive classic Desert Strike, and re-imagined it for a touch interface. In my head, the resultant game plays out very differently from the original design I wrote ten years ago, but should work great on any multi-touch device whatever the screen format.

Now, I know myself quite well, and there's a danger that the project will falter even in the early stages, but the Android platform is enticing. I've done a smattering of work on it for my employer and it's a peach to develop for, with superb development tools and excellent documentation. There are open-source game engines out there of stunning depth and complexity, freeing the modern garage developer from worrying about anything except game design and player fun. There are people who want these games and better yet, people who will buy these games. It's really time to see what I can do.