Massteroid is an Arcade style game with delightfully retro graphics that will definitely give you a laugh.
In an age of games about superheroes, war and epic battles to save humanity, one small team of students from the University of California, Irvine, (UCI) created a game they call ‘outrageous’.
You are a rogue asteroid, hurtling towards earth. Your goal: mass destruction.
You control the asteroid as it plummets towards the planet below, collecting space debris as you fall to grow as large as possible. Avoid space mines and blacks holes as you try to create maximum impact on the planet surface. Keep an eye out for missiles as you get closer to earth!
Massteroid has many gameplay modes with different and interesting mechanics, including a hilarious gourmet mode where you are a pizza base flying through space and must pick up specific toppings before you get to your hungry customer.
Massteroid was originally created by a team of UCI students as part of a week long game jam event, hosted by UCI’s Videogame Development Club. The team received first place for their game and then took the next step of releasing it on the Xbox Live Indie Games Market.
I sat down with Philip Mayes (or King Philip as he’s known around Mighty Kingdom) to get the full story of how Mighty Kingdom came to adapt a game that is currently unavailable in Australia, for mobile devices.
Philip was reading through a list of the top games of 2012 that well-known developers love to play when Massteroid caught his eye.
Upset by the realisation that Australians don’t have access to Xbox Live Indie Games store, he pondered how many others had shared this disappointment. You can almost imagine the glowing light bulb above his head now can’t you? It was then that Philip decided to contact the Massteroid development team.
After much discussion with the students who created Massteroid, he decided that taking Massteroid mobile was a logical next step to launch the game on a global scale.
In keeping with Mighty Kingdom’s rapid development process, work was quickly underway.
I know what you’re thinking... how on earth do you take a game that has free range of a button-filled Xbox controller and make it work on a touch screen?
Good question!
Firstly an Xbox controller has 11 buttons, 2 joysticks and one D-pad.... compare this to the limited buttons of modern smartphones, which in most cases can’t be used for gameplay.
At the moment the team at Mighty Kingdom are experimenting with taps, drags and turns to guide the asteroid through obstacles and pick up space debris.
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By Kim Turner for Mighty Kingdom
kim@mightykingdom.com