Having spent over two years of my commuting time making my latest game, I’ve finally finished and it’s now live on the App Store, for iPad and iPhone.
Now I’ve always wanted to make computer games and as an 18 year old back in 1992, when I chose my career, the idea of joining a 20+ person development team wasn’t my cup of tea – I wanted to make my own games.
Insight is key
I’ve always known the power of real insights to lead to great creativity. Back in 92′, playing Starfox on the Super Nintendo round my friend’s house, I realised something: Watching other people playing games, their bodies were moving as their brains were screaming at them to avoid lasers, asteroids and space ships all hurtling towards them on the screen.
Now the insight was this – we can’t help but move our bodies playing games, yet the game controllers didn’t respond to your body’s movements. The joysticks at that time just had buttons or sticks you moved or tapped. So how could this natural body movement be used to help players?
The answer needed a technical revolution that was many years away, just we didn’t know what was coming…
The making a new kind of game
Wind forward 23 years and I had a double brainwave on how I could finally make a game.
I remembered the old insight I had when I realised that mobile devices had accelerometers that measured the tilt, speed and angle of the device.
Secondly, I realised I only had spare time on my daily commute, so I needed a way of coding on the go.
So I found an app called Codea and finally my game reality would start to take shape.
Coded directly on my iPad, Starsceptre would become a classic pixelated retrogame, the first of a series of ‘commuter-made games’ that use a unique control system for mobile devices: an intuitive tilt-mechanic that responds precisely to your every movement making for a fast and furious shoot em up.
And now that it’s out, I’d love to know what you think.
Check out our trailer here:
You can download the game here:
Starsceptre 