ios

New indie game project: hatchlight

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Other Pastures

Please check out my new project, hatchlight. We are focusing on rapid development of ios games. When I say rapid, I’m talking 2 week dev cycles. One level higher than a game jam, and with the same goal of creativity.

The games are complete, though lacking a ton of content or really expansive gameplay. But we are structuring them for a long slow build, where each game can get new gameplay and levels as needed.

RLR

Our first game is called Rescue Love Revenge, and is already out. The game is an “Episodic Retro Indie Three-Act Spaghetti Western Platformer for iOS”. We had a freaking blast making Chapter 1, and hope that we get enough support to really flesh out the story.

Indiana

Our second game has no title yet. Its code name is Indiana, and it’s an exploration and collection game. The vibe is similar to many puzzle and adventure games, though we are adding our own twist.

Building a Community

One thing we are doing with hatchlight that we did not do enough of at Controlled Chaos is talking. We actively blog and share development, and already have half a dozen web builds posted. We also plan to be active in the Dallas gamedev community, hopefully we can make it to the April GameDevDrinkUp!

We came so far..

For those interested, Controlled Chaos is still around, but had to lay everyone off. It was a great 4 and a half years for me, coming on at the very beginning as employee number 1. In my time at Controlled Chaos, I worked on so many projects and different types of projects, I can only say that I’m thankful for the experience.

We started cchaos when the app store was still in its infancy and people would look at you funny when you said that you were starting a studio “to make iPhone games”. In addition to our mobile work, we were busy:

  • prototyped a first person shooter (that’s a whole ‘nother blog post…)
  • developed a potentially ground-breaking location based Augmented Reality quest game that was heartbreaking-ly cancelled
  • created The Quest to Lava Mountain nutrition-oriented zelda / metroidvania

and so many other cool projects for clients. Plus, aside from some major ups and downs, working at and building Controlled Chaos was simply a lot of fun.

Now the task of starting over. As we say at hatchlight, “We won’t make the same mistakes. We’ll make new ones, and it will be spec-tac-u-lar.”

 

iOS, Android, and Maps – What’s STILL missing

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It’s a Map Emergency!

The Map Apps on both Android and iOS are missing a major feature- any sense of SCALE.

Maps are amazing things, abstracted or detailed, they provide an amazing amount of information to the user. So why has the scale been left out of mobile maps?

Below is an image of Apple’s new iOS 6 map app. It’s vector based, and provides turn-by-turn navigation. But it’s still missing a scale.

 

Recently, I was on a family vacation out of state. We were in the southern flatlands; coastal Alabama. There are almost no visible geographic features. Nothing to guide you.

This is what a glance at my phone’s map showed me:

 

  • How long should it take to reach point x,y from here? I don’t know! I’d have to type in directions and plot a course.
  • How far is our rental in Gulf Shores from a restaurant in Orange Beach? I don’t know!
  • I can’t just glance at the map and have any knowledge of the size of that wedge of earth that is being displayed. I can guess, based on the size of farm fields or runways in the satellite imagery…sure.

Remove the Branding and Add Functionality!

All I want is to know at a glance how far away something is, regardless of how zoomed in or out I am.