Dublin, Ireland – April 17th 2008 - BitRabbit is proud to announce the availability of version 2.0 of its RabbitFactory middleware for all native smartphone and PDA platforms. The RabbitFactory is a full-featured, cross-platform, highly-optimized set of C++ APIs which provide a complete abstraction of native mobile platforms, offering extremely fast development and deployment processes.

Smartphones, and touch based devices in particular, have recently enjoyed a dynamic growth, with surveys showing that users play and spend more on mobile games than feature phone users. The benefits of native mobile games are huge, providing smartphone users with better gameplay and console quality gaming. However, the number of different platforms to support, coupled with the inherent complexity of developing native applications can quickly become major obstacles to this lucrative market. The RabbitFactory has been designed from the ground up to eliminate all these issues.

Building on almost five years of native development experience, the RabbitFactory already powers several native games with global distribution. As the RabbitFactory uses unique source code and assets, and produces a single SKU per platform, the fragmentation is greatly reduced. It provides desktop development tools, a reduced set of friendly C++ APIs dedicated to game development and a universal emulator so C++ developers with no previous knowledge of embedded systems can quickly and easily develop games on a PC. Deployment on devices is done in a matter of minutes.

The RabbitFactory 2.0 powers the latest Astraware published game, Platypus, a cult classic on PC, later ported to PSP. Platypus is a high octane ‘shoot’em up’, animating lots of parallax backgrounds and huge sprites, combined with simultaneous music and sound effects. It’s the perfect example of what the RabbitFactory can handle. In the porting process done by BitRabbit, all the features from the original PC game can be integrated in all mobile versions. Astraware’s version is a perfect replica of the desktop game previously enjoyed by so many. “We are extremely proud to have been chosen by Astraware to port such an outstanding game like Platypus. Astraware has a stellar reputation in the smartphone and PDA gaming market, especially when it comes to quality and customer satisfaction. It’s a testament to how robust and efficient our development tools have grown over the years”, said Michael El Baki, CEO of Bitrabbit.

“BitRabbit’s engine combines speed for an excellent framerate, and flexibility to support multiple platforms – essential for fast-paced games on a wide range of mobile devices.” added Howard Tomlinson, co-founder and CEO of Astraware.

The RabbitFactory will appeal to mobile game developers and publishers who want to extend quickly into the smartphone market, as well as PC independent developers who want to leverage their existing C++ code and competences on mobile platforms.