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Submitted by , posted on 31 October 2003
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Image Description, by
It's been a while since I posted an IOTD, so I figured I'd show you some
things we've been doing at work.
Tapwave is soon shipping their first
device, the Zodiac, and we made couple of games for it. Bundled with every
device is Stuntcar Extreme (the pictures on the left), and one of the launch
titles is Spyhunter (pictures on the right).
Stuntcar Extreme is a racing game with fun physics factor and interesting
race tracks, and features a championship mode where you race against
different opponents to unlock cars and tracks.
Spyhunter is not a port from any other platform, but built from scratch to
take advantage of the mobile platform. It features an arcade mode which is
closer to the original Spyhunter games (while still being full 3d), and a
story mode which is closer to the PS2 titles.
Both games also support two-player wireless realtime head-to-head gaming
modes using Bluetooth.
The games are built with X-Forge, the
mobile 3d game engine we're making. A "lite" version of X-Forge is also
included in the Tapwave Zodiac SDK, which is available for free from
Tapwave.
X-Forge enables developers to do majority of their development with normal
desktop PC tools, which greatly shortens development cycles. While mobile
device emulators are nice to have, they're still a pain to debug with
(especially if the problem is something application-specific that has pretty
much nothing to do with the underlaying OS).
This also helped our artists and scripters, as they could simply plug their
changes into the desktop versions to see how things look, without having to
upload everything to the actual devices all the time.
The Zodiac itself is a great device, and it has so high-resolution screen
that I actually had to scale the above screenshots down due to Flipcode IOTD
image size limitations =). It also features analog joystick, touchscreen,
greatly expanded version of palm OS, rumbler, dual mmc/sd slots, and more.
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