ANTI-ARES

The game

Five stages, three difficulties

Each stage ends in a boss that changes form as you break it down. Clearing the highest difficulty unlocks a loop that re-arranges what you have already learned.

Build your loadout

Choose your weapons before the game starts, then power them up as you play. Sub-shooters, five kinds of energy weapon, and a shield that costs you everything you have saved.

Yours once you buy it

No in-app purchases, no advertising, no accounts, no data collection. The game never touches the network. It runs on a plane, in a tunnel, anywhere.

Behind it

A 2010 Windows game, brought forward without being rewritten.

ANTI-ARES was written in 2010 in C++ for Dark GDK — a Windows- and DirectX-only library that is closed source and long discontinued. There was no path from there to a modern platform.

Rather than rebuild the game in an engine, I wrote a compatibility layer on top of SDL3 that reimplements the ~80 Dark GDK functions the game actually calls. All 30,716 lines of the original game logic then compiled for iOS with no changes at all, holding a steady 60fps. The touch controls were designed for the device rather than bolted on, adapting to each screen size.

The pixel art, the music and sound effects, and every line of code are the work of one developer.

Read the full write-up on how the compatibility layer works — retained vs. immediate mode, colour keys that stopped working, and an App Store rejection caused by a library the game never calls. (日本語版)