Screenshot of the game running in an emulator
At some point several years back I designed and partially developed an arcade-style vertically scrolling space shooter for mobile phones. This game was inspired by old shooter games like the final level of Star Wars on the Game Gear. I did not have a name for it, but the idea was to allow the player to reprise the role of a pilot in Fox Squadron. The current version is effectively little more than a clone/re-skin of the game Pong that I used to make sure I could implement the fundamental controller concept from my design in practice, and in fact does not even scroll yet.
This controller concept was one aspect which would have been novel at the time I started work on this: the player can control their craft by tilting the entire phone. This makes uses of the phone’s accelerometers, which gives a finer granularity of control. This results in smooth analogue-like control, like a joystick, instead of clunky all-or-nothing control, like buttons. Showing it’s age, this game runs on Java-enabled feature phones that have the JSR 256: Mobile Sensor API (amongst more common APIs). Today almost everyone has a smartphone so it would need a port e.g. to Java on Android 🙂
While I did not continue development work after I had proved the concept of the controller, I did have several notepad pages of designs for several levels, choice of user craft, weapons, upgrades and a whole host of enemies. Here is a scan-in of some of the design, with instructions below on how to download, install, run and play this game on your ancient ancient feature phone that you definetely own:
Installation instructions:
Prerequisites:
- You must have a phone with at least JSR 256: Mobile Sensor API
Install Pong:
- Download Pong.jar from here
- Move Pong.jar to your phone, e.g. by Bluetooth
- Follow the instructions that automatically pop up to install the game
Running instructions:
- On your phone menu, go to where you installed Pong e.g. games or applications
- Select Pong to run the game
Playing instructions:
In this version, you basically just fire laser bolts at the enemy craft and avoid the deflected shots to rack up a score. The enemy has basic AI to maneuver in front of you.
Fire: Ok (central button on d-pad)
Maneuver left/right: tilt phone left/right, or press left/right buttons on d-pad
Accelerate/decelerate: press up/down buttons on d-pad
Ferg's Game Emporium 