teaching machines

kozuchaj homework 0

September 15, 2011 by . Filed under cs491 mobile, fall 2011, postmortems.

Name:
PewPew – http://pewpewgame.blogspot.com/

Images:

Discussion:
There are several ways to learn how to use the app, there is a short tutorial that you can do which takes you through the basics of ship movement,
Shooting, powerups, and shields (lives). Other than that there is the tried and true way of picking up the sticks and figuring out on your own.

The controls are floating joysticks, the default is left for steering, right for shooting however they are map-able to either side. Also in the menu structure the user selects where to advance based on using the touch screen in landscape mode.

The app uses the quick, enticing nature of games on a phone. When you want to kill time for 5 minutes you don’t want a long drawn out storyline or an extremely complex game, you want to play a simple, fun, engaging game. This is the niche that PewPew falls into. It uses retro graphics, quick shooting, and scoring with upgrades to reward players.

The developer is: Jean-Francois Geyelin

Other users have rated the app very positively. It has had relatively few crashes since porting to Android OS. It is a well constructed game with a good user following.

In the bracket of quick pick up games it performs quite well. It hasn’t quite reached the legendary status of Angry Birds but it still has an impressive amount of downloads and is a common knowledge app.

Through all my efforts I could not break the app, tried most everything I could think of. (and of course after I write this the app freezes my phone, I can select buttons etc but nothing will launch the game).

The app is free, there is no paid version for this app. The second version PewPew2 is 2.72$ but that isn’t the app I’m reviewing.