Windows Phone 7 Apps - Retrospaced

When I first blogged about Jonathan Jong’s game Retrospaced I’m sure he’d agree that it still needed *a lot* of work. It was such early days in fact, I don’t think he’d even decided on a name. We did a bit of testing and went around the loop a couple of times with Jonathan optimising his code and me deploying to a device to try and get an acceptable and consistent frame rate.

Imagine my surprise when he turned up at the DDD Windows Phone 7 event in Manchester with what looked like an entirely different game! Well, it looked similar but everything was richer, faster, better and more complete. And imagine his delight when he found it ran at the maximum 30fps on the device. There’s still some work to do (notably sound) but it’s looking like an awesome game.

This is Jonathan’s own video, taken on his iPhone at the DDD xapathon. Note his nice debug overlay and the rich cityscapes created by his girlfriend. These are modelled in 3D then rendered as 2D bitmaps but the parallax effect of the clouds etc creates a very powerful 3D illusion.

Love it. Want it. Can’t wait to get it on my phone.