Infect the World
PlanetMoon's first Playstation Portable
It's Christmas time in New York City. A strange virus has appeared in the city, turning seemingly normal people into insane, violent Infected. Rookie Officer Stevens is one of the first victims of the Infected. But unlike others, Stevens is stangely immune and doesn't lose control. The mysterious Dr. Schaeffer discovers that Stevens' immune blood can be used to destroy the otherwise unkillable Infected. Schaeffer creates a special "viral gun" that fills shells with blood from Stevens' arm and blasts them straight into the Infected, causing them to splat spectacularly.This game brings a couple twists to the first person shooter genre. The first is the the concept of the viral gun- you weaken zombies, and then when their energy is low enough, hit them with the gun, creating "splat chains" of zombie death.
Well, Jason, how else is this different than any one of other bazillion Playstation Portable games out there? If you check the game credits, i5labs gets props for the web development. It's the first handheld game which utilizes Ruby on Rails on the server. Sweet.
The PSP's WiFi allows multiplayer action. When a game's done, upload your stats, and the people you beat carry your virus (or the one you're carrying). Using an XML feed from Gamespy we provide rankings, vital statistics and maps of who you've defeated, where your virus has gone, how the top ranked players and their viruses are fairing, and more. The virus maps are generated dynamically using rcairo, and all of the data is gathered from XML feeds from Gamespy.
The biggest design challenge for us was really working within the limitations of the PSP. Beyond size limitations, the PSP processor isn't nearly as fast as a PC's, and the browser's proprietary, with javascript, tagging and compatibility limitations. If you're going to be creating a site for the PC and PSP, you'll NEED to create two different versions, or the PCs will get the short shrift.
Working within those limitations, development doesn't have nearly the same constraints. The sticky wicket is scalability. There's over 6 million PSPs, and only a few hundred games. So a hit game could swamp servers. In addition to that, we're dynamically rendering maps. Cache what you can, real time render what you must.
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