Prometheus is an abstracted cross-platform engine
design and tool suite intended to ease game development on
today's diverse lifestyle devices. Game code built within the
engine's framework can be simultaneously deployed without
modification on, for example, both Windows-based PC and iOS. Prometheus
is the product of decades of experience in cross-platform
abstraction.
All major display, audio, input and even in-app purchase
transaction needs are standardised and portable. It can target
desktop computers (e.g. Windows, Mac, Linux), smartphones and
tablets (e.g. iOS, Android), consoles (e.g. Xbox 360, PlayStation
3), handhelds (e.g. PS Vita, Nintendo DS and 3DS), and even web
browsers (e.g. Internet Explorer, Chrome, Safari, Opera). Prometheus
is intended to be an ideal launching platform to take a game to
the broadest audience quickly, while minimising redundant porting
effort. With Prometheus, you just concentrate on making
the game.
What's more, Prometheus's adaptive display
functionality allows one to implement both GUI and game elements
that adapt fluidly to today's diverse array of display devices,
making a game look at home on any device, be it widescreen,
standard, or even portrait. (You can see this in action in our
titles such as Patchworkz and Lost Treasures of Infocom.) This
adaptation even works on-the-fly, allowing the game's
presentation to respond seamlessly to orientation or aspect ratio
changes. This feature is essential to modern gaming where
Android, iOS, PC and even console present a broad range of
display offerings on a single platform. With Prometheus,
the one platform binary can cover it all.
Prometheus leverages familiar tools, too. For
example, a "WYSIWYG" pipeline allows one to lay out the
GUI within Photoshop exactly as you want it to look and, with a
straightforward export, see the result in the game test build
seconds later (even without restarting the app). Adaptive GUI
features can be annotated directly within Photoshop itself,
putting the full design-test-revision cycle under artist control
without any technical participation. Audio and game assets may
similarly be modified using familiar tools and viewed within the
game test build without a restart. Prometheus is
extensively data driven, with many game parameters easily exposed
via spreadsheets that may be directly edited within Excel or
similarly popular tools.
If you're looking for a game developer and want to learn more
about what our technology can do for you, contact
us!
Emulation technology is used to bring classic games back to
life. Our team members were pioneers in the retrogaming genre, in
1994 creating the technology that became the foundation of
retrogaming developer phenomenon, Digital Eclipse. Prior to
forming Code Mystics, our coders have been responsible for nearly
100 classic gaming SKUs, from Namco Museum: 50th Anniversary
to Midway Arcade Treasures and beyond.
15 years and millions of sales later, our team has built upon
this expertise to create a new breed of emulation. FOCAL (an
acronym for Flow-Optimised Code AnaLysis) marries the efficiency
and accuracy of emulation, with a new data-driven approach that
can achieve solid frame rates on modest platforms and still take
advantage of the cross-platform efficiencies of our Prometheus Engine.
FOCAL can target any console, desktop or handheld gaming
platform. Its data-driven architecture is even capable of
embedding in other scripting languages and engines such as Unity. Thus, emulated games can
now be deployed with arcade quality within web browsers, for
example, and then ported to PlayStation 3 and iPhone alike with
lightning speed.
FOCAL's unique architecture allows us to adapt the emulation
to platforms unreachable by traditional techniques. It forms the
foundation of many of our novel retrogaming products from Atari Greatest Hits on Nintendo DS to
Taito's classics on Jakks' TV Games
plug and play standalone gaming device to the PlayStation Home
renditions of Atari and Konami classics to the in-browser renditions of classic Atari
titles. It is also the same technology behind our retrogaming
products on mainstream platforms, like iOS's and Android's Activision Anthology and
multi-million seller, Atari's Greatest
Hits. FOCAL has quickly established Code Mystics as the new
torch bearer for accurate quality recreations of the classics.
And we don't just aim to support arcade games... FOCAL is the
ideal technology for efficiently rejuvenating any platform
back-catalogue for the 21st Century market. For those timeless
classics people are itching to play again, talk to us about FOCAL and how we can
bring your beloved games to an audience like never before!
Over the last decade Code Mystics has been perfecting
its netcode in the highly discerning arena of
online fighting games since its release of Killer Instinct Classic in 2013, an Xbox
One launch title. These days, Code Mystics'
proprietary rollback netcode, featured most recently in severalSNKtitles, is considered by many
fans to be "state of the art", offering a seamless
online competitive experience that feels as responsive as local
play, even across continents and pings exceeding 150ms. We're
humbled by the enthusiasm of our fans, with many players lauding
an experience superior to the previous de facto
fan-favourite solution for long-distance online multiplayer in
these fighting games, Fightcade.
Of course, this netcode has application to all genres, with
earlier iterations being featured in the console versions of Atari Flashback Classics, Risk of Rain, Nidhogg, and more. It is also
compatible to all platforms from desktop to console to mobile.
For partners interested in such features, the full Gemini
suite includes multi-user (more than two-player) online
experiences; cross-platform matchmaking; leaderboards; NAT
traversal solutions; and, coupled with our FOCAL Technology,
the capability of "join-a-game-in-progress",
spectating, tournaments, and "play-while-you-wait"
(i.e. play a local game while waiting for a matchmaking partner,
and return to it after your online game is done).
To learn more about rollback netcode in general and Code
Mystics' offering in particular, check out this instructive
video:
