by ·Comments Off on Make bad decisions in space with Crisis, Captain!

Cover art for Crisis, Captain!Everyone has had a fantasy of commanding a star ship on a mission of exploration through the galaxy. Now, you too can experience the thrill and the tension and the stress of starship command in Crisis, Captain!

Wormholes, abandoned space stations, arguments with your officers and hostile warships are just some of the things you are likely to encounter in an average mission. Can you complete it without your ship exploding, your crew dying or your officers revolting? Well, no, you can’t – one of those things will definitely happen, but how much can you discover before the end inevitably comes?

I’m soft launching my first game into the internet today. Crisis, Captain! is a free Android game and is still in development with new content and fixes being released semi-regularly. This is pretty much the first thing that I’ve ever created that has a certain degree of completion to it, the first finished project I’ve managed in Unity and the first game I’ve built for mobile.

Update: There is now a PC build available for Crisis Captain over on Itch.io – it is very much the definition of a lazy port, but it took me about five minutes to throw together. Basically I can see how tempting it must be for developers to make bad ports now.

You can download Crisis, Captain! for free from itch.io for Android and PC.

by ·Comments Off on Zombies, Run! An excellent way to keep fit and look paranoid

Zombies Run!As far as motivations to run go, being chased by zombies is a very compelling one.

Zombies, Run! is an app that blends fitness tracking with some light gamification to create a more interesting way of staying in shape. Pitching you into a standard zombie apocalypse scenario through audio snippets piped into your headphones, the game feeds you instructions and updates whilst your phone keeps track of how far you have run and how quickly you are running.

The gamification elements come from supplies that you ‘find’ whilst out for your run. Once you’re back at home and collapsing on the sofa in a sweaty mess, you can spend these resources to build up your virtual survivor town with new buildings to help other inhabitants of your post apocalyptic world.

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by ·Comments Off on One More Line: The lonely smoker’s perfect game

One More Line logoOne More Line might very well be the best cigarette break game on the market right now.

Taking on a neon art-deco Atari-esque aesthetic, One More Line gives you a small dome-shape to control and sets you the task of travelling as far as you can without crashing into discs strewn in your path or the walls to either side of you.

The reason that this makes for such an excellent cigarette-break game lies in its extraordinarily simple controls. Easily controlled one-handed, pressing your thumb onto the screen locks your little ship (we’ll call it a ship for lack of a better word) on to a nearby disc and spins you in an arc around it. Releasing your thumb makes your ship let go and beetle off in the direction it is now facing, mostly like directly into the path of a wall or another disc.

One More Line is surprisingly difficult to master. A single run takes a matter of seconds and how long you play will probably depend on how long you’ve got. There is admittedly a bit of a compulsion to keep playing when you first pick the game up, but once you’ve got used to it it’s very easy to put down again and get on with your life.

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