Remember Gravitar? Thrust? Lunar Lander? Levitar - Vector puts you in control of your own powerful spaceship. Fight gravity, defeat the enemies and save the spheroid. Vector graphics, lots of ship upgrades, a variety of enemies and unlimited levels! Subscribe to the TouchArcade YouTube channel Full support for MFI controllers and iCade! Coming in early May to the App Store. Runs on all devices with iOS 5.1+ including iPad 1 and iPhone 3Gs.
Actually it's a universal app. I said it runs on iPad 1 and later but that's not very clear. I meant it runs on all devices from as far back as iPad 1. It will support iPods and older generation iPhones, like the 3Gs, too. - Les
Super pumped for this one! I was a big gravitar and Oids fanatic. Does it use old-school controls (left/right/thrust/fire/shield)?
Hi Ubi, I adapted the controls as best as I could to the iDevices. It uses a custom filtered accelerometer algorithm for rotating the ship and left-side touch to thrust and right-side touch to fire. Personally I'm not a big fan of virtual buttons for games because (1) they take up too much screen space and (2) you can never tell by feel if you're touching the button or not. With that said, I do have virtual buttons for bombs and smart bombs although I thought long and hard how I could do them without buttons, but no good solution came to me. If you have an iCade or MFI controller, then the weapons are separated out to the different buttons, including shoulder buttons, and there are separate buttons for thrust, fire, left and right. Shields, however, will always be active as long as they exist. By default each shield protects you from 5 direct hits but by using in-game credits that you earn while playing the game (or via an IAP purchase) you can add as many shield hits as you want. Also you can upgrade the shields to add anti-gravity (pushes projectiles away from you) and/or deflector (bounces projectiles back to where they came from). - Les
Thanks for iCade support I haven't seen many (any?) games use buttons rather than stick for steering, but this is the kind of game where the stick would just feel wrong for that. Glad you went with left/right buttons. (Makes me want to dig out the Amiga and play some TurboRaketti II.)
Adam, my apologies for clearly mis-wording that. The left/right controls are still using the stick (for compatibility with other controllers) but thrust and fire are on separate buttons. Also, I think your post in the iCade thread about standardizing the controls is a great idea. I will see if I can adapt that to my Levitar - Vector game and push out an update for it. - Les
Levitar - Vector is scheduled for release this Thursday, May 8th. The cost will be FREE with NO (as in zero) ADs. IAPs for ship upgrades and for buying fuel are completely optional - you can earn credits to buy this stuff by completing levels but if you want to support the game and/or are in a hurry to upgrade your ship then you can use IAPs. - Les
Cool--I guess I did play TurboRaketti with joystick, so I'm sure your game will work fine that way too. Look forward to seeing it.
I used to have an Amiga (actually I still do, A1000) but I don't remember TurboRaketti. I YouTube'd it and it looks pretty cool. I probably would've really enjoyed that game back in the day. - Les
How is it with mfi . The touch controls are kind of hard cause it is combo tilt and touch, is it better for you?
Do you think the game would benefit from virtual touch controls (left/right/thrust/fire)? It just seems to me like it would consume too much screen space by doing that. Would love to get some feedback from others so I can push out an update to fix the flaws. Also, are you running out of fuel too soon? I'm thinking I might need to reduce the rate at which fuel is consumed but not sure if that's an issue. For me, I can make it to about level 20 with the basic ship and farther with ship and weapon upgrades. - Les