Puff Puff swims onto iPhone

Independent studio, 6th Mega, has just released its first game release, Puff Puff – an undersea extravaganza for iPhone and iPod Touch.

The idea is to take control of a Diodon Holocanthus (give yourself a cookie if you know the animal from its latin name), a spiny puffer fish, navigating around a deadly coral reef comprising of less-than-friendly tiger sharks.

Mastering the art of buoyancy and control is the key to keeping your prickly friend from, dare I say it, swimming with the fishes, in Puff Puff’s physics based gameplay.

3D animations, detailed underwater backdrops, sunken ships and treasures, power-ups and OpenFeint achievements / scoring, help ensure Puff Puff is more than a one trick fish.

When we reported on the game back in the spring, one element really stood out, and that was its charitable donations.

Every sale means 10 per cent is donated to ecosystem restoration - a particularly sore spot considering the large leak off the Gulf of Mexico.

Hopefully more and more developers will incorporate similar social missions to go alongside their games.

“Coral reefs provide important ecosystem services that support human life, and they are disappearing right before our eyes,” says 6th Mega, the developer named after what is known as the sixth mega extinction.

“If the present rate of destruction continues, 70% of the world's coral reefs will be destroyed by the year 2050.”

Whether that figure is true or not can be argued on until the cows come home, however, nobody can argue with the damage being done, which makes 'doing your bit' and getting some gaming in at the same time a bit of a double-whammy.

Interestingly, this app was funded by 95 peer-to-peer lenders in just 24 hours.

Puff Puff has been released on the App Store, and is yours for 59p.