Suttree.com: Casual Games, Social Software by Duncan Gough

Brent has a new game up and I’m sincerely hoping that he’s thinking of converting this one to Flash.

Flatland is a pretty straighforward looking shooter. It starts off like a simple game of Chopper or BoatRider. and as Brent is well known for his full-on retro arcade games, it’s no surprise to see another fun and addicitive shooter start to take shape.

However, it’s not long before you start to understand the game mechanic at the heart of Flatland. The blocky effects play a crucial part in the game since it’s those same blocks that make up your ship and the enemy craft. Block up one of their ships and you’re rewarded with a shower of blocky sparks.

Given that, in most shooters, you have to avoid these kinds of explosions to stay alive, it takes a while for you to realise that collecting this debris is a good idea. Again, with a nice combination of visual effects and gameplay, each debirs block that you collect adds a bit of bulk to your ship. Of course, the bigger you get the more likely you are to gain some increased firepower and, conversely, the more enemies you run in to, bullets, lasers or otherwise, the more pieces of debris get taken off your ship.

It’s a nice, neat gameplay aesthetic that is perfectly in keeping with all of Brents’ games. Despite being a hectic shooter there’s a strict functionality to the underlying rules of the game that plenty of people will appreciate, not just programmers who see code reuse as the holy grail.