iDef is a modern version of the original game of snake. There are three game modes built in but the game is not the conventional eat-to-expand game that first appeared in the eighties. This time you’re chewing up chargers on a power network in outer-space to prevent the shut down of the planets entire electrical network which will put the Earth back into the stone-age.
It’s a tricky game to master but extremely easy to pick up and play, a casual game to unwind – especially with the three different game modes that extend the play. Normal, Zen and Nasty play out pretty much how they sound.
Normal: Consume the dischargers to stay alive. Your power is constantly being drained by the grid and this is the only way to keep it up. Every movement will drop a deflector, which is your means to change direction, so you need to be quick with your fingers to preserve movement options.
Zen: Play is similar to “Normal” mode but deflectors that are destroyed around the explosion will also get you points.
Nasty: Is exactly that. Consuming dischargers won’t clear the deflectors on the X and Y paths around you so it’s a foregone conclusion that you’re on borrowed time. Here’s where you have the real challenge of trying to get a decent score.
iDef will store all your gameplay records in a handy statistics screen so you can have bragging rights over your mates who aren’t as good at it?
History
iDef was a game that I first wrote on the Commodore Amiga, it was written in C as an ASCII/ANSI game for the Xenolink BBS software. For a game that was played over a modem, it had to be able to run at very low modem speeds down to 2400 baud, a large number of readers wouldn’t even know what a modem is let alone the speeds, or lack of that we used to endure. Back then iDef wasn’t graphically fantastic but its gameplay was quite good clean, simple and fun.
Jump forward many years and I started to write it on my Apple iMac, for iPhone and then later the iPad. Progress was slow as I was playing with different frameworks and different development packages. Eventually, I settled on writing it in Objective-C and using Cocos2D framework. The game was released in 2015 on the Apple App Store.
Here’s a link to a review: Creative Gaming.
Download
Now available on the Mac App Store.
Also available on the App Store.
Source Code
You can get the source code for iDef, for more information click here.