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Premium Spotlight: Spawn Illuminati

by Eric March on November 25, 2008 at 11:35 am

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(5 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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App Name: Spawn Illuminati
Version: 1.1
Developer: Elements of Design
Category: Entertainment
Price: $1.99

I believe I’ve mentioned before that I like toys. I really do. Sometimes what you need is something to entertain that has no agenda, no plot, and no point. Something just to settle your mind, calm your nerves, maybe bring a smile to your face, whether it is simply because it is pleasant to look at, fun to play with, or both. Particle toys — such as falling sand or fireworks — have a particularly special place in my heart because they can soothe, calm, even mesmerize.

Spawn Illuminati is one such particle toy that has earned a top spot in my personal pantheon of mindless toys that hits all the bases: It’s pleasant to look at, it’s fun to play with, and it’s utterly mesmerizing. It falls into the swarming particles category, where particles fly and bounce around, occasionally congregating in orbital swarms.

Left to its own devices, Spawn Illuminati will give you a spellbinding display of particles flying about, bouncing off the borders, gathering in swarms, even exploding and splitting into a hundred other particles all flying off in different directions and then disappearing — much like fireworks. If that were all it did, it would be a nice screen saver — but it wouldn’t be much of a toy, would it? Naturally, it is interaction that makes this what it really is, and that’s where it earns its keep.

Spawn Illuminati uses a rather unique positional gesture system to change various parameters without the need to open a menu or even ruin the overall effect of the app with icons to access a menu. This leaves the entire screen available for your manipulations. The gestures are kept simple, and are of the standard pinch or tap variety, and are all executed in portrait mode. Pinching horizontally across the screen will adjust the speed — out speeds up, and in slows down. Pinching vertically on the left side of the screen controls tail length; through the center controls particle size; and on the right cycles through the colours. Colours tend to cycle on their own, but you can exert some control for a short period of time if you want them to take on a specific hue.

Control of the particles themselves is simple: Just tap and drag. When your finger touches, particles will immediately become attracted to it and will circle and orbit so long as you keep it there. Drag your finger around and you can lead them on a merry chase around the screen. Let go and they will break formation and fly around once again. Double-tap and they’ll all explode like fireworks in a hypnotic shower of particles.

The ability to control the particles and their attributes in real time gives you a wide array of possibilities to try without breaking the flow of enjoyment. It’s almost like a zen garden, but with constantly shifting, buzzing lines of variable size, speed and colour.

The more technical-minded of you may be wondering what performance is like, what with so many particles to track during those explosive moments — and you’d be right: It does tend to suffer some slowdown when the screen is brimming with stuff, moreso if you haven’t rebooted your device in a while. (Remember that kids: If an app crashes at launch or runs like crap, reboot. Some apps don’t do their garbage collection properly — that is, release memory they claimed for themselves while in use — and that can bog the system down, because the system won’t do garbage collection for them. Spawn Illuminati is not a poorly-behaved app though — actually it runs very well from what I’ve been able to test so far — but it can still suffer because of other misbehaving apps.)

The slowdown is noticeable but the overall effect is still hypnotic — just think of it like a John Woo-style slowmo shot. Overall I love this app. It’s a ton of fun to play with, and a fun app to help you decompress and relax and quiet your mind with something mindless. It was originally a buck, but evidently the price has gone up. I dont know if that was a special or what, but if you want to get your hands on a copy it’ll cost you $1.99 now. If my descriptiveness and those screenshots haven’t made up your mind as to whether that’s worth the price, peep the full gallery below along with a nice video of it in action (courtesy of EoD themselves.) In the mean time, this one has earned its 5 stars.