Melbourne-based Firemint and Brisbane-based Halfbrick Studios have come out swinging at this year’s Game Developer Conference in San Francisco, with both companies announcing a new game. As two of Australia’s most successful game development companies they have collectively sold millions upon millions of copies of their games, and these new titles are sure to continue their success.
Firemint, the company behind the critically successful Flight Control games and the Real Racing series yesterday announced their new game Agent Squeek. In the game you will of course be playing as Agent Squeek, a wily and sophisticated secret agent mouse with a penchant for cheese (of course). The game will be released for iOS and your job will be to collect cheese and take it to your mouse hole, while avoiding cats who coincidentally would love to eat you, and will do their best to do exactly that if they spot you.
The game has a top-down view, and you control Agent Squeek by drawing lines on the screen using your finger similar to Flight Control. There are numerous power-ups, and mouse-holes to use to evade the cats, and throughout the levels you will find pieces of blueprints which fit together to reveal super weapons to be used in boss fights, as well as tips on how to win those battles.
With all the polish and quality that Firemint put into their games, Agent Squeek is sure to be a hit, and although there is no set release date yet, it will be out later this year. Firemint have set up a Facebook page for everyone to stay updated on the latest news about the game so go ahead and click Like. They have a demo video which was being shown off at GDC however it has not been released to the public yet, so keep your eyes peeled for that.
On the back of announcing 6 million sales of Fruit Ninja, Halfbrick have used GDC as their platform to announce that they plan to port the fruit-slicing sensation to Facebook as Fruit Ninja Frenzy. The game will use the same control mechanism of swiping, however this time it will use a mouse instead of a multi-touch system, and it will include some new features such as power-ups and more. It will be interesting to see what their plan is from a business/profits point of view with nothing hinted at yet, however it is sure to continue the worldwide success of Fruit Ninja. Fruit Ninja Frenzy will launch later this year.
Halfbrick also announced their new Monster Dash follow-up, Machine Gun Jetpack. The action hero protagonist Barry Steakfries returns in this game, which grows upon the ideas of Monster Dash, to continue his monster massacring mission.
It can be defined as a “runner” game much the same as its predecessor, however this time Barry’s main weapon is of course the Machine Gun Jetpack which allows him to fly along using the force of the machine gun to lift him up to avoid obstacles such as lasers, electricity fields, and rockets.
The game will of course have random objects to pick up as you go along including vehicles such as the Bad Ass Hog from Monster Dash, and coins to collect which can be used to purchase upgrades for your jetpack. Machine Gun Jetpack is slated for a release around the middle of the year and Halfbrick are aiming for a 99c price point in the US iTunes App Store, which means around AU$1.19. A hands-on preview video can been seen at the source link.
