Independent game development company Overdose Caffeine creates cross-platform, real-time multiplayer games with fast and intense environments. Pocket Fleet, the company’s first cross-platform, free-to-play, multiplayer game, invites players from around the world to create or join a space dogfight and test their pilot skills against real people or CPU-controlled enemies.
With a small development team and the goal of making Pocket Fleet available quickly to a wide audience of casual and hardcore gamers, Overdose Caffeine sought a solution that offered cross-platform compilation—Android, iOS, and any computer with a browser—and rapid development.
Developers chose Adobe Game Developer Tools including Adobe Flash Professional, Adobe AIR, and Adobe Scout. “We had our own multiplayer gaming framework called Coffee Pack coded with ActionScript, and it was ideal for building a game like Pocket Fleet—so using Flash Professional and Adobe AIR was the best technology solution for our new game. We also knew the game had to be cross platform, and with the Adobe solution, we have a single code base to easily publish the game to multiple platforms,” said Tolga Ozuygur, Overdose Caffeine’s co-founder and lead programmer.
Benefits of Adobe Gaming Solution components for Ozuygur include:
- Rapid authoring and remote debugging with Flash Professional was essential for mobile development;
- Adobe AIR allowed developers to push the game to mobile, while offering smooth interfacing with underlying mobile device APIs through Adobe Native Extensions;
- Adobe Scout for optimizing the game, which is essential because some mobile devices have limited hardware and the game needed to perform fully on a large variety of devices.
Ozuygur notes that “Adobe Flash has created a market for browser-based games, and Adobe AIR is doing the same for cross-platform gaming. The great thing is that developers can carry over their experience with Flash to other platforms,” he says
The pre-alpha version of Pocket Fleet took just two weeks to build from scratch, with the game officially launching three months later. Pocket Fleet was recently featured and passed the 500,000 downloads mark on Google Play with almost 320,000 monthly active users on all platforms. Overdose Caffeine is now working to add more social features to the game including a friend list, private messaging, and teams. A large galactic map is also planned that will let players see the big picture on how their race is doing in the war.
Pocket Fleet:
