Alien Blood Bath

Alien Blood Bath is an open source platformer game built for the Android mobile OS. To say the game's incomplete or unpolished (like Brain says in that video review I have below) is a mistake. Alien Blood Bath is a strong technical achievement in creating a solid, well written, and feature rich tile engine for the greatest mobile platform in the world. Google's Android hit the market late last year with the G1. It's open Google Market will relieve developers of restrictions to digital distribution like the insane filter Apple has on the iPhone App Store. That's why I think an indie game scene needs to start developing on this exciting platform. And Alien Blood Bath is an awesome start.

I checked out the code and wrote a game prototype in an short amount of time thanks to Matt's engine. The zipped project is up on Will Host For Food. I've been experimenting with the idea of backwards time travel in platformers as a mechanic to reduce at times of punishment player frustration and to create a procedural means to allow player learning by repetition but without the tedium. It's a mechanic I'm calling undoing. Every second or so the game state is saved. When you die, or rather, when you get hit, you return to the last game state. The prototype itself is extremely buggy, barely letting me experience the mechanic but it's close enough for something I developed mostly on a Sunday evening. There are huge side effects to the mechanic especially around disorientation though I'm confident that if I develop the idea I might have an incredible recipe for a simple DDA and simple mechanism for game flow in a traditional platformer and other game genres.