Tag Attack available for the BlackBerry Playbook

Gently swipe your finger over the screen of your Playbook to wipe out the enemy forces and enjoy the colourful explosions. For the first couple of levels, that is. Soon it becomes a frantic battle against an unknown enemy in an unknown universe for an unknown cause. That's the arcade way - you don't get to ask questions.

Fireworks, moody music and starry galaxies, honestly, this game has it all. Go have a look at the App World, only $0,99 for this awesome game. We must be crazy!

Tag Attack on the App World

After a couple of desperate attempts and failures to port Tag Attack to the Playbook, I recently stumbled upon an incredibly important configuration node that allows Air to use the GPU of the Playbook. Overall this appears to be a bit buggy and not everything works as it should, but holy moly, what an impressive speed improvement!

Running on the GPU seems to provoke mainly vector and text object glitches, luckily Tag Attack is almost entirely bitmap based, so there was relatively little that couldn't be ported. In the end I got near 30fps performance only sacrificing the monitor overlay effect and the rotating 3D transition between levels. For some unknown reason, after rotating the play field, the game never got above 20fps any more, and I decided we'd have to live without the transition.

All in all I'm very happy with the performance of Air on the Playbook, although porting games is still quite a hustle ( changing the resolution, adapting the control scheme, etc ). It would be really nice to code something specially for the Playbook and take full advantage of its strong points. Maybe if time permits...