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.