PP (PewPew) and PP2 (PewPew 2) haven't been compatible with modern devices for a couple of years now as I focused on PPL (PewPew Live), but the persistent stream of emails and comments from folks wanting to play them made me want to re-release them.
A re-release was almost ready (thanks SKPG!), but then it occurred that maybe we shouldn't take the easy road of "simply" shipping a new build of the game.
PewPew was written back in 2009 (17 years ago...), when phones had at most 60Hz displays, no camera notches, and offered no support for resizable windows. CPUs were single-core, GPUs only supported OpenGL ES 1, and we only had C++03.
As a result, the original PewPew was locked to 60Hz, couldn't adapt to dynamic window sizes, and barely leveraged multithreading. While I eventually migrated the engine to OpenGL ES 2, the process was painful, and moving to modern APIs like Metal or Vulkan would have been even worse.
And without C++11 features like std::unique_ptr, the code was not as clean as it could have been.
In addition to these limitations, platform APIs changed. Handling audio playback, haptics, and window creation is different today than it was back then, especially on Android.
Meanwhile, PPL already addresses all these modern standards, and will continue to be maintained for the foreseeable future
Taking everything into account, I decided to port PP and PP2 directly onto the PewPew Live foundation. To achieve this, all non-game-specific code was extracted into a reusable engine, and then the 2 games were reimplemented on top of it.
Now the build system, platform abstraction layer, rendering engine, UI framework, and some assets (like the font) are shared across all games. Maintaining PPL will automatically lead to maintaining PP and PP2.
Beyond making the original games playable again, the biggest win is high-refresh-rate support. 120 FPS PewPew 2 is delicious.
The remasters of PewPew and PewPew 2 should come out as a free update to the original games within the next month or two.
I replayed the game and campaign many (MANY) times to iron out the bugs, and I would say the game is still fun and aged well, so I'm excited about this release.
