NimbleBit has taken their massively successful and efficient casual game development approach and applying it to the top-down shooter genre in their newly revealed iPad game, Omium.
Omium is a top-down shooter that is meant to be played with two players locally on the same iPad. Each player is positioned on either side of the iPad as one controls the ship and its firing, and the other controls the spawning of the bad guys and the direction they head.
The ship is controlled by simply touching and dragging your finger around the screen. Firing is accomplished by tapping with your other finger. Your opponent is able to spawn bad guys by tapping and holding on the other end of the screen, where the longer they hold the larger the enemy. The bad guys direction of movement can be manipulated by pushing them towards the ship.
Each player is only able to unleash so many bad guys at a time or fire so many bullets. Energy bars are located on each side of the screen to indicate how much juice is left for each activity. The energy bars will refill automatically over time.
Surprisingly, the person who controls the ship is actually unable to "win" the game no matter how hard they try. The idea is to just survive as long as possible.
The game will include three game modes as described below:
Dodge - The Bad Guys win when one of them touches the ship. The ship can shoot Bad Guys to make them smaller until they pop out of existence.
Juggle - The Bad Guys win when one of them reaches the bottom of the screen or touches the ship. The ship must constantly shoot the Bad Guys into the air to make sure they don’t reach the bottom!
Infinite - Similar to Dodge except that the Bad Guys wrap around to the top of the screen once they reach the bottom. The ship has better ammo in this mode that destroys the Bad Guys faster but this ammo costs more so make sure to save it up.
The video embedded below features gameplay footage for all three modes and an explanation on how each one works.
Omium has been submitted to the App Store already, so it should be arriving any day as long as there aren't any hiccups in the approval process.
