- 17 hours ago
Today I am saying goodbye to 16 Bit Games, and taking a look back at the several games I released over the years.
From how I got into game development to Robotipede, to ElectroCross and Space is Not Invading, and why I stopped making games after She's Outthere. Plus why I delisted my games in August of 2025.
From how I got into game development to Robotipede, to ElectroCross and Space is Not Invading, and why I stopped making games after She's Outthere. Plus why I delisted my games in August of 2025.
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GamingTranscript
00:01Hello and welcome! Today is a bit of a bittersweet day for me as I've had to
00:06say goodbye and take down my games from the Android and iOS app stores. Well over
00:1510 years ago I started my adventures into amateur game development and made
00:20eight full games which were available until August 1st of 2025, ranging from
00:27fun tech demos to games which I supported right up until the end. So join
00:32me as I take a look back at those games and, well, let me give you a bit of a
00:39timeline and why I decided to make them.
00:48The hardest thing that I remember about getting into game development was just
00:52finding the right engine to use for me. Up to this point I've been making my
00:58ideas for games in the restrictive LittleBigPlanet creation environment. So
01:05moving over from that to a proper game engine wasn't necessarily the easiest
01:10thing for me to do. For years I tried to teach myself coding and Android
01:15development and for game development I even tried in my hand a game maker. But
01:21due to the frustrations of the former and the inaccuracies of the latter I didn't
01:25feel comfortable with game design until I taught myself how to use the Unity game
01:31engine. My first game in Unity was Tennis for One, released in October of 2014. It was a
01:39great learning tool for me to how to make a game with basic movements, collision
01:44detection, and everything that you would need to make a proper game and even publish it on
01:50Android. The code was and is simple but the results were, at least in my view, fun. I
01:59later refined my skills while in school and even taught myself how to use Blender
02:03enough to make a 3d game for a class I was taking. I called it Hover Maze and again my
02:11brother took it and released it in August of 2015. Hover Maze is important because it
02:18taught me something very powerful. How to code in another language that wasn't Java or JavaScript.
02:27In fact I still think C sharp is probably one of my favorite languages to this day.
02:33But it wouldn't be until Space is Not Invading, released in October of 2015 when I started
02:39taking this game design seriously. Around this time I really wanted to play mobile games since it was getting
02:46rather popular. But I couldn't find games which I found interesting. So instead of
02:53complaining I decided to just make my own. With what I learned while making Tennis for
03:00One and Hover Maze, I wanted to focus on making a good feeling game which could be
03:07played with a single hand. This led me to my control code which had been used in
03:14practically every game that I have made afterwards. With the basics controls sorted I started playing
03:22with some of the game modes, adding more features and trying out some different game designs. The
03:28ultimate goal was to turn it into a game collection of sorts but after getting bored of the idea I
03:36just
03:36gave it to my brother to release it again on Google Play and turned my attention to a much bigger
03:43project that
03:44popped into my head. This bigger project turned into my most popular game that I ever
03:50made. Robotopy, released in December of 2015. While developing Space is Not Invading, I felt that a
03:58touchscreen would work best with a trackball control. And the first game which came to mind which would be
04:08perfect to test the idea would be a game like Centipede. Learning to develop my own game on top
04:17wasn't easy. Everything about the game had to be rethought to get it to work well with touch controls.
04:25From how to get the game onto its move following as well as to get the ship to move and
04:30to shoot
04:31in just the right way so it felt intuitive. A big change which I made into Robotobeat over time was
04:38actually moving away from the traditional trackball and button control scheme which I originally set
04:44out with and moving to an auto fire system which most space shooters on phones were leading heavily
04:52towards. While I prefer the original control schemes, a lot of the people that I gave the game to
04:58highly suggested to keep the auto fire as default. So I compromised like everything and I just added
05:06the original controls as a toggle on the main menu. Due to its popularity, I've always kept
05:12Robotobeat up to date over the years. Even going so far as doing extensive code cleanups and updates as
05:21I improved my skills and added more advanced code and features into my other titles. Robotobeat was the
05:28first game that I had ads in it with the idea that one play was one full screen ad like
05:35putting a
05:35quarter into the arcade machine as well as one of the first games with in-app purchases being able to
05:41just disable the ads and just play the game as is. And with the success of Robotobeat, I looked for
05:48other trackball games that I just wanted to try my hand at making. I consider games like Crystal Castle
05:56to other shooters like Missile Command, but that year my brother got his hands on a new PlayStation 1
06:04game called Namco Museum Vol. 5 and he got obsessed with Metro Cross. I don't know what about that game
06:13made me think that it would work well as a trackball game, but hey, if it looked like it would
06:19work, why not?
06:21So I went ahead and tried it out and in May of 2016 I released Electro Cross. This would be
06:29the first
06:29time I actually went through the full development process from start to end. I was the one that
06:35published Electro Cross. This is also the first traditional game that I made in Unity with levels
06:42and a bit of a progression system. Music was made by my grandmother who played it on her midi piano
06:48and I
06:48mixed it to sound a little bit retro. The game itself is fun, but never was as popular as Robotopede.
06:57We tried doing a lot of things to see what we could do to promote and get it some attention,
07:03like
07:03using some free credits on Google Ads to advertise the game as well, or even paying Google or someone
07:10at Google to translate it into another language. But we had no luck in replicating the success of Robotopede,
07:17which kind of became an obsession of mine. I just had one quick little detour to finish up first.
07:24You see, there was this little tiny bug in the older builds of Robotopede, which really got under my skin.
07:32Shots would sometimes go through the enemies. I was really annoyed with this and decided to fix this
07:40myself. And hey, while I'm at it, why not turn these tech demos into just simple little games?
07:47The first is the Breakout-inspired Super Blockout, released in July of 2016. Then, Invaders from
07:56Space, released in August of 2016. The code behind this was very interesting, but Invaders of Space was the
08:06unsung hero here. It was both a practical implementation of my new collision code,
08:13as well as an experiment for how to make these games both look and play beautifully.
08:21And Invaders from Space turned into a little success story, showing me that if I make the right
08:27game with the right elements in it, I can have some success in my game-making endeavors.
08:35So, after I took the new code back into Robotopede, I was looking for the next title,
08:43that next success for my next game. I really wanted to do something bigger and better. I kind of wanted
08:53to
08:53make a real game that could be, let's say, put onto a console, which would eventually be called
09:00Robots of Rage, released in September of 2016. This was my first game with something that resembled a
09:09story. My first game with multiple enemy AIs and bosses. It was a short game, but I felt it had
09:16some
09:16charm. Unfortunately, Robots of Rage had issues, and I feel it stemmed from the MAR development that
09:24we had, especially after some ad partners started working with us. A lot of our conversations in
09:31consulting was about trying to add pauses and breaks, which would naturally lead to ads and
09:37interstitials that we could inject in there. For us, we wanted to make this as sustainable as possible,
09:45so the prospect of more money was good. We even moved over to their ad platforms. But it really
09:53didn't help the development of Robots of Rage. By the time the game came out, I wasn't really happy
09:59with it. I did what I could to balance showing ads with not interrupting the game, which eventually I
10:07would roll back to a more reasonable state. But even then, I did consider the game to be incomplete.
10:16But looking at it now, I really don't know what I could have added to make it a better game.
10:23I feel this game lasts about as long as my interest usually does with these kinds of games, so maybe
10:31that had something to do with it too. Though at the time, my mind raced instantly to the controls. I
10:39went a
10:39little more traditional with this game. So for my next title, I decided to go back to basics and try
10:47out a new idea for a control scheme that I thought of. This was another experiment turned into another
10:54app called Tap Berserk, or as it was originally called when it was released in October of 2016,
11:00New Berserk. I wanted to make a proper controlling game, which was designed from the ground up to work
11:08perfectly with touchscreens. Touchscreens aren't really designed to work well with traditional controls.
11:16It worked well with taps and holds, so I centered the entire game around that concept,
11:25and used basic AI pathfinding and all that good stuff for the game to actually play out itself.
11:33The results were interesting. Tap Berserk turned out well by my books, proper arcade difficulty,
11:40but you had to get past the slightly unconventional controls to enjoy it, and a lot of the feedback
11:45I got from it suggested that the controls were a sticking point to players.
11:52But enough people enjoyed it that I did consider it to be a successful game for my standards. It was
11:59also around this time that all of my games collectively were making enough that I was considering
12:05trying to get into this game design thing myself full time. But Tap Berserk would be my last successful
12:15project, as afterwards both my studies and what I wanted to do with games would both grow.
12:23This got me thinking of new ways to control games on phone screens, and after being roped into a marketing
12:30exercise from a local college, on February 2017 I released Dodgedom. The game allowed for a side
12:39panel which had your controls with a game view that had the action. It was a forgettable, even by myself,
12:47title, and it led me into some interesting things, but ultimately the game didn't really do that well.
12:54I was getting more and more obsessed with breaking the code for how to make touchscreens work as a
13:00controller, and I decided to finish it off once and for all that year. I tested it first in my
13:07Spring
13:08of 2017 Android class as its final project with Controller Test, which I eventually remade into Unity.
13:19I really wanted to test this controller with a game which would traditionally be difficult to play on
13:26a touch screen. The game which I eventually settled on was Donkey Kong, and I reworked it to be as
13:35legally distinct as I could while working on doing everything I could to make sure that it would work
13:40on phones. Color borders to indicate movement, digging into native code to activate vibration motors,
13:49and even add a dynamic viewport which would let the game work on any screen in any orientation.
13:58It was technically a beautiful game, but releasing it was such a pain that I don't want to ever go
14:06through
14:06that again. The fear that companies have regarding Nintendo and potential lawsuits is genuinely terrifying,
14:15and it most likely is for good reason. Apple flat out refused to publish the title on their store,
14:22while Google would eventually relent and let me release it on June of 2017. But it had to be stripped
14:29out of practically every single ad except banners, which actually let me put it as a kid-friendly label on
14:36the app.
14:38But man, Kid Kong's release was a mess, but the controls did the job that they were supposed to do.
14:47In my view, this was the best playing platformer on mobile. The game may have only just been okay,
14:57but that was more my skill as a designer and less of the controls. That said, even with the best
15:07controls on mobile applied, it still paled in comparison to just using an actual controller. The
15:16lesson I learned after doing all this work, trying my best to nail down controllers which works well on a
15:24phone. It's that a mobile phone screen just can't play traditional games, at least without a real
15:31controller, since glass is just a terrible input method since it has no way to give the player any
15:39meaningful feedback. After Kid Kong, I went on to finish my studies at university, graduating in 2018.
15:50Then, with the permission of my wife at the time girlfriend, I went on a few month crusade to try
15:57to make one more new game. It was going well until I had a brilliant idea. Why not make it
16:08with multiplayer?
16:10You know, use the built-in radios that exist in all phones to let it pair together and play your
16:16friends? Just like a Nintendo DS. I mean, the idea is not bad, and it morphed and changed and actually
16:25was working well on Android. However, I was both running out of time, money, and my wife's patience,
16:34and by the end of development, I hit a massive roadblock known as Apple's broken implementation of
16:43the Bluetooth standard. I had to scrap months of work, R&D, and when I finally got to finish the
16:53game,
16:53it resulted in August of 2018's She's Out There. It wasn't a very good game, but it was a fun
17:01and
17:02simple one. It's honestly my best attempt at making a game that's able to adapt to various screen sizes
17:09to date. In fact, I'm very pleased with how that worked. I'm also pleased with the collaboration I
17:15did. My sister helped me with the artwork, and before I went on the multiplayer binge, so it was
17:20my wife helping me refine the gameplay idea. But while She's Out There wasn't the success I was hoping for,
17:29it wasn't the reason why I stopped making games after 2018. The reason I stopped making games is
17:38sadly simple. My games just weren't making the money that they used to. At the beginning, they were
17:45making a shocking amount of money considering the amount of effort I put into it. Then the value of
17:52the ads just kept dropping and going down more and more and diminishing. Even if She's Out There was a
18:00massive success, the value which people put into mobile games just wasn't enough to just justify
18:09spending my full time on it. And while we had some sales selling the gold editions of the game,
18:16it wasn't the same as we were getting with ads even at the diminished value. However, it was making
18:27enough to justify their own existence on the app stores, so I just kept things going until Google
18:36or Apple changed their requirements and made the game obsolete. I was thinking that it would be something
18:43like the transition between 32-bit iOS to 64-bit iOS that would kill my apps. However, when I got
18:52a
18:52baseless cease and desist letter for trademark infringements, that kind of killed the whole thing.
19:00While I could entertain the idea and actually fight for this, with the amount of money that these
19:08halves are actually making, it's just not worth the hassle to go and fight this in court. Plus, my focus
19:17and my interest have moved on. I've absolutely fallen in love with cat designs and making 3D printable
19:26things to sell on eBay and Etsy, as well as making videos talking about games, especially with the
19:33knowledge that I have with how to actually make them. I would love to make some new games in the
19:41future.
19:41I do even have some ideas that I want to expand upon. But these aren't the one or two month
19:49experiment
19:49projects that I was doing before. These will be taking years of my life to actually develop and make,
19:56let alone refine to the point where somebody can understand my rambling. I am hopeful, though,
20:03that one day I will find the time where I can start making games again. But until then, thank you
20:13ever
20:13so much for watching and listening to me ramble about these old games. I hope you have yourself a good
20:22day. And as always, take care.
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