Chillingo and H.Grenade developer Shay Casey provided us with a new gameplay video and development notes on his upcoming shooter Circuit Strike One. We’ve been keeping a very close eye on this title since it was previewed. The first gameplay video was especially impressive.
They company has since signed up with Chillingo as a publisher.
We’ve included Casey’s notes here in full and embedded the new video below.
Damn, it’s been awhile. A lot of work has gone into optimizing the game engine and assets to run smoothly on the iPhone hardware and provide the best game play experience. It has been a constant trade off between new AV Sync effects and what can be done well with the current tools and SDK. A lot of content has been added, only to be deleted later when it just doesn’t work the way it was intended. Then new stuff goes in. Rinse and repeat. We are still tweaking this balance and will continue to, up to the very last second until release.
Those of you who have been following closely will see some new gameplay mechanics … like the wall hack! No more grinding the edge of the arena. Now, the ship just dives through, stalls the audio playback for a second and re-emerges on the exact opposite location just like Asteroids. Well, just like Asteroids if it had a follow camera and a super sexy 3D environment! : )
Bullet Time is fully functional on the iPhone and it is demonstrated a few times in the video. The audio warp that goes along with it makes it a blast to experiment with. Activate and deactivate on beat or just activate for a drum fill and then deactivate after the break. Does this add anything to gameplay?… no. Is it fun and a great way to waste time? Hell yes! We can only hope that you will enjoy it as well because it took forever to get it right.
You might notice the Achievements in the main menu as well. 36 in total of varying difficulties are planned. Some are there to help new players learn more advanced mechanics, others are there to give you much needed moral support during the phase where you basically, still suck ; ) The difficult achievements are there for the diehard gamers out there. People that are marginally OCD and just need to collect everything because they can. Additionally there will secret Achievements unlocked only by those that play it a lot or just like to experiment.
Of course, we are holding onto a few secrets ourselves! We can’t tell you everything, can we? You will just have to play it early and often if you want to be in the know. But notice that you don’t see any Arena variety or new enemies. That and a new seriously sick Bullet Time feature that we hope will make the initial release.
Note: The video and screenshots are compressed so some things actually look a lot better in real life. Then again, most of the textures in the game are compressed too, so some of it looks exactly like this : ) Either way, we can tell you first hand – it looks pretty decent!
It shouldn’t be much longer until it is in the App Store but just like id Software likes to say, “it will be out when its done." In other words, go big or go home.
