With the launch of TegraZone.com, we asked the two-man development team at Malmö, Sweden-based Mediocre to talk about their new Android game Sprinkle. It’s exclusive to Tegra-powered Android super phones and tablets sporting dual-core processors, and will soon support NVIDIA’s Project Kal-El, the next-generation Tegra quad-core mobile processor.
The casual gaming genre has taken off in recent months, what with simple, addictive games that have you snipping some string and flinging furious fowl. As popular as those games have proven to be, Henkrik Johansson, co-founder of Mediocre, believes that there’s room in this gaming space “for more interactivity, action, movement and more vivid environments.” That’s where Sprinkle comes in.
The idea behind Sprinkle is to use your fire hose to extinguish fires before they burn the cute, blueberry-esque villagers’ houses to the ground. To make things harder, the game places interactive obstacles in the way of your water stream and intermittently bombards the village with flaming rocks. Combine those elements with tricky maps that make you think before you douse, and you’ve got a recipe for a game that’s easy to pick up but hard to put down.
Sprinkle is available for Tegra-powered Android devices today on Tegra Zone, and it takes advantage of Tegra’s horsepower for some very cool graphics. The fluid simulation used to make the water look and act as it would in real life is “a very computing intensive task.” To pull off a realistic water effect, the game leverages both of Tegra 2’s two processing cores, along with specific Tegra optimizations, to deliver realistic fluid dynamics.
It’s clear that two processing cores deliver better performance than a single core. Add even more cores, and you get even more performance. To that end, Mediocre is preparing a future version of Sprinkle that will take advantage of NVIDIA’s upcoming quad-core Kal-El mobile processor.
As Mediocre puts it, “With Project Kal-El around the corner, these are interesting times for mobile game developers – especially for those of us who are making physics-based games. We think Sprinkle is a good example of how to use complex physics simulation for gameplay and not just effects.”
You can find this extended version of Sprinkle, with 24 extra levels, on Tegra Zone and Android Market for $1.99.
Check the video below to see Sprinkle in action.
Tagged: android games, Dual Core, Gaming, kal-el, mediocre, quad-core, sprinkle, Tegra, Tegra Zone, tegrazone
