iPhone app and game programming is taking the Flash community by storm. The latest entry is iFly, a new game by my company, Infrared5. This was mostly coded up by John Grden, though most of the company had some hand in it – ideas, design, testing.
The premise is pretty simple. Fly the paper airplane through the black rectangles, avoid the red ones, reach the manhole cover on the bottom before the time runs out. What are the red and black rectangles? Why do you have to fly through them, or not? Why do you have to land on a manhole cover, and why do you only have so much time to do so? Stop asking so many questions! Just play it.
There are 9 levels in all. 3 each of easy, medium, and hard. The easy ones are pretty relaxing, kind of like a zen meditation… with a timer. The medium levels offer a bit of a challenge – especially the trench. And the hard levels have you just racing for the goal, trying to avoid red rectangles and hoping some black ones magically appear within reach. The last level, “The Crippler” will have you hitting the replay button over and over, I am sure.
What did you guys use for the rendering? Unity3D? OpenGL es? plain views?
This was built using Unity3D. The airplane was created in 3DS (exported as FBX). The jump to Unity to build this was very smooth indeed. Most of my time was spent on optimization of the room and obstacles etc, which was great. The UI was a bit more of a hassle than I’m used to, but that’s largely because you’re dealing with 2D textures and Unity’s set of controls.
Bought it!
Love:
– The zen level Names (Easy like sunday morning….)
– The sparse aesthetic (kindof like the Mirror’s Edge downloadable levels)
– Wind sound and Ding FX on landing
– Flying!
Wishlist:
– Bigger menu buttons – its Iphone – make them big
– More rewarding feedback when you get points (somethimg visual? think nintendo?)
– Free fly mode – i WANT to fly up as well without a timelimit since the whole thing is very very soothing.
The best part is seeing these games coming from the Flash community so quickly:)Im interested in how well it does at this pricepoint – on the high side of what i would pay but definitely inside the comfort zone – and if you have a sale if that affects things (i.e. do economies of scale mean more profit at lower prices due to more purchases or not). Many apps have a 3day sale or such. Is that data you would share with the community?
Congratulations!
@Robert: it’d be AWESOME if you could put those comments out on the app at the app store 🙂 SO glad you liked the game!! I like it for all the same reasons you mentioned 😉
Good job John it looked like Unity3D or OpenGL ES directly. Yeh I have the same beefs about Unity3D GUI it gets the job done but it is not really event driven but flag drive (an onGUI update runs ever tick which seems unneeded). I haven’t shelled out for the iphone kit for unity3d but I need to.
Incredible game. Relaxing and challenging at the same time. Suggestion for next version: visual cue (or vibe) for successful fly-thru so that the game can be played silently.
Hi, I stumbled upon your sites, and I’m loving your work. Question, Considering how easy it is for a brilliant person such as yourself to make apps for the iphone, why do I only see a handful of free apps to download on itunes? How does one get listed?
PS- you have some amazing stuff.
Mark Kaminsky
Not sure what you mean, Mark. There are thousands and thousands of free apps on iTunes.