Porting EspGaluda II to the iPhone was no mean feat. Cave already felt that the Xbox 360 wasn’t the ideal console of choice for bullet-hell shooters as they felt it wasn’t optimized for 2D graphics.
As a result, when Cave decided to port the title to the iPhone, which suffered from the exact same problem, Cave programmer, Yuma Matsuda, thought someone at the company had “gone mad,” he shared in an interview with Edge Online.
“The iPhone is not very good at 2D,” director, Mamoru Furukawa, explained to Edge. “When it came to danmaku [the barrage of bullets] it rapidly became a burden to the performance so we had to work hard to find the right solution, graphically, to ensure enough resources to allow the game to run smoothly.”
Interestingly, the graphics posed more of a problem than the controls, despite the lack of buttons on the iPhone.
“I was really concerned with delivering the graphics. I wasn’t concerned about the controls,” Matsuda revealed. “Taito’s Space Invaders for the iPhone had proved it could work. Their slide controls were quite well adapted for the needs of a shooter.”
According to Cave, the iPad suffers from the same problem as the iPhone, due to which Cave are taking their time to study the platform, rather than jumping right aboard. “We already see a few technical obstacles, again with the amount of memory,” producer, Yukihiro Masaki, revealed. “Only Apple can solve that one.”
