Battlestar: Fate of the Galactic Commonwealth

For those not in the know, my upcoming iPhone game "Archangel: Fate of the Galactic Commonwealth" was actually thought up over five years ago as "Battlestar" and was originally to be developed for Windows Mobile devices.

However, due to the varied hardware specifications of various Windows Mobile devices on the market - some devices having an anemic TI OMAP CPU at 200MHz, while others had an Intel XScale CPU over 600MHz - it proved very difficult to make the game work cleanly across the different devices (notice the frame rate drop during the heavy battle scenes). Also, software piracy was more rampant and the distributor's cut was averaging 55% at the time for those devices, so many developers couldn't make a decent return as they are able to do now with the iPhone, whose hardware is similar enough across all current models to make it enjoyable, and a singular distribution point with an acceptable 30% cut has made it very lucrative for developers.

I simply provide this video as a way to look back to what might have been, had I continued development on the Windows Mobile platform. You can see there are many similarities, and Archangel took the best of those features while looking much smoother, more sleek and detailed now.

Battlestar: FGC was developed with Game Editor (www.game-editor.com) which is still available now for multiple platforms. They are attempting to create an iPhone port as well. Thanks, Makslane Araujo Rodrigues, for creating an awesome development kit.

And, thank you Apple, for making a device so wonderful and powerful, and a platform where many developers can really go out on a limb to making fun things with it.

FYI, the animated cut scenes were actually dozens of GIF files, since Game Editor did not have a method of playing videos. Consequently, the current version of iTGB for iPhone (1.2) does not support inline videos either, so the initial release of Archangel does not have any heavily animated cutscenes. Once they are implemented, I will definitely be incorporating detailed cutscenes and videos into the game.

Category:

Gaming

Tags:

• battlestar
• fate
• galactic
• commonwealth
• archangel
• iphone
• game
• windows
• mobile
• ipod
• pocketpc
• space
• sci-fi
• star
• trek
• galactica
• stargate
• firefly
• serenity
• babylon
• enterprise
• tactical
• combat
• simulator
• arcade
• action

[GhillieCombine]

that looks cool!