My latest game, Infiltration, for Windows 8 is live in the Windows Store.
This is a game that I’ve wanted to make for a long time. One of my favorite old time arcade games was Gravitar. I’ve played it a bunch in the last year or so on MAME. It’s such a difficult game, but very addicting for me anyway. Infiltration is a homage to that game. It has a lot of the same basic game play – you fly a ship into an area, avoid getting shot or running out of fuel while achieving an objective. In Gravitar the only real objective is to destroy all the guns. In Infiltration there is a target or multiple targets you need to capture. When all targets are captured, the exit appears and you use it to complete the level. Destroying all the guns and collecting all the fuel is optional, but worth bonus points.
The game has 30 levels in the full version, which sells for $1.49 US. There’s also a trial version which gives you a sampling of several levels. In keeping with the spirit of Gravitar, some of these levels are very hard. The full version also supports loading of custom levels which can be created with the free Infiltration Level Editor, another app which has been submitted to the Windows Store just today and which should hopefully be available soon.
I wrote Infiltration (and the level editor) in HTML and JavaScript, with a mix of canvas and DOM elements. The Visual Studio JavaScript profiler was crucial in optimizing the game to run smoothly at 60 fps with quite a bit of collision detection and animation going on. It was a blast to use, digging into bottlenecks, fixing them up and seeing a marked improvement.
I originally wrote the level editor just for myself to facilitate creating of the official levels for the game. But I had so much fun making it and spent so much time polishing it that it wound up being a full featured app that I had no reservations about releasing.
As for the submission process of the game itself, this was the smoothest and fastest process I’ve ever encountered for an app submission process. I wrapped things up Sunday night and submitted it to the store. Monday morning when I woke up, there was a rejection notice. This had to do with submissions to foreign stores, namely Korea, Brazil, Taiwan, and South Africa. These countries currently require actual certification of game ratings. I’ll be looking into getting such certification for this and future games, but I wasn’t going to hold things up so I had to take those off the list for now. Anyway, I unchecked those countries, resubmitted, and a few hours later the app was approved and live in the store! I don’t know what the iOS App Store process is like now, but back when I was doing apps there such a situation would have meant a week and a half setback. This time I had submission, rejection, fix, resubmission, and approval – all within 18 hours! I’m hoping the level editor goes as quickly.
My previous app and game were free. This is my first attempt at the try/buy scenario. I’m not expecting to get rich, but looking forward to seeing what can be done in this environment. I’ll report how it goes.