Friday, April 9, 2010
Airport Madness Mobile

We are pleased to announce that Airport Madness Mobile has been submitted to the iPhone App Store and should be available by April 23, 2010. It promises to offer the iPhone community a truly addictive air traffic control game. Unfortunately we could not secure the name "Airport Madness" as it has been taken, so please be aware of which one you are buying on the App Store. There will be an announcement here, as well as in the newsletter (sign up above) as soon as this app becomes available.

Here are some more screenshots:

SUNday, March 14, 2010
The Ultimate Radar Game

When I was fourteen, I was introduced to the game of Chess. At first glance, I thought the game seemed like a waste of my time. I would never figure out the subtle differences between all of the various pieces. I would never brag about such activity to my friends at school. "Dude, I totally check-mated my brother with my rook yesterday!". However, I quickly fell in love with the game and a lot of my friends at school did, too. The game of Chess is similar to air traffic control games and simulations because of how addictive the play action is.

Managing a whole bunch of airplanes on a radar screen truly is one of the more interesting things you could ever try doing. It is such a mental rush to be responsible for thousands of lives at once, all of them hurtling through the troposphere at over 500 miles per hour, in a seemingly archaic fashion. Unlike air traffic control games or simulations, in real life the bottom line is safety. We don't "push tin" like they do in the movies. Instead, we "cautiously manage said tin in an organized manner, as though our very lives depend on it".

Air traffic control provides the world with a fantastic concept for potential new games, and this has yet to be truly explored by game developers. All of the popular classics like Risk, Monopoly, Checkers and Chess offer the same intellectual challenges as ATC does. What the casual game community lacks is an ATC game that invites everyone to the table to play. My mother tried our game Airport Madness 2 and really got into it, but she could not grasp our simulation. The world needs a radar game that starts easy and then builds, not just by intensity, but in complexity as well.

It is my vision to develop a radar-based game similar to Air Traffic Controller that maintains a reasonable degree of realism yet is simple enough for anyone ages 6 and up to jump in and start playing, without requiring 12 months' training at an ATC institute to even get started. I envision such game consisting of a variety of radar puzzle-like challenges. For example, one challenge may be to carefully vector numerous aircraft through a complex maze of terrain, and another challenge may require using only speed control to funnel enormous volumes of air traffic into an arrival stream for a busy international airport.

We may be getting rather ahead of ourselves, as we are still assembling Airport Madness 3, Airport Madness Mobile for iPhone, as well as a 3D version of Airport Madness from a tower perspective (no release date on that!). I'd like feedback on our proposal for a simple "puzzle-style" radar game. Please feel free to email us directly with your thoughts.

Thursday, March 11, 2010
Update for Radar Game "Air Traffic Controller"

Version 1.23 is now available for our radar game Air Traffic Controller. The full version of this air traffic control game now has much lengthier levels. In comparison to the free version, which has a total of just 24 arriving aircraft and a game duration of approximately 30 minutes, the full version now provides players with a full 60 minutes of game play. Updates are free to those who have previously purchased this ATC game.

Although we are mainly focused on our new games such as Airport Madness 3 and Airport Madness Mobile for the iPhone, we have not abandoned our existing products but continue to tweak them and make changes whenever we have the opportunity to do so.

SATURDAY, March 6, 2010
Airport Madness 2 iPhone Update

We are extremely excited about the release of our first air traffic control game for the iPhone. Airport Madness 2 should hit the app store by April 30, 2010. Here are some proposed screenshots of the game in action:

At first glance it seemed like porting Airport Madness 2 over to the iPhone would be relatively straightforward. Of couse, the challenges are embracing the advantages and minimizing the disadvantages of a small screen and a touch-based platform. Another challenge will be naming this iPhone application. Unfortunately the name 'Airport Madness' exists in the app store already. Naming overlaps do frequently occur on the web, but we will strive to find something unique yet familiar to fans of the Airport Madness series.

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2010
Airport Madness 3 Screenshots

Development of Airport Madness 3 is well underway and we have included screenshots of the game in action. Click either image below to view the actual size of our upcoming air traffic control game.

Airport Madness 3 will have a much larger resolution. To be exact it will have 1000x725 pixels, which is more than 2 1/2 times the size of Airport Madness 2. It will be large enough to operate a busy airport, yet small enough for the 15% of you still running a resolution of 1024x768 on a 10-year-old CRT monitor. Airport Madness 3 uses the Adobe AIR Installer, which will automatically check this website for version updates. How cool is that?

We have wrestled with a variety of different packaging options. At first, we had considered releasing Airport Madness 3 as simply "more of the same", followed by an Airport Madness "Pro Version" which would introduce a bunch of new air traffic control features. However, we have settled on a single version of "Airport Madness 3" which will offer you the best of both worlds. The big decision that we have made is not to release a free "lite" version, but a full version only. There will be a time-limited trial version and demo videos available here on the website.

Airport Madness 3 will offer a variety of play options, including continuous-play, level-based play, as well as specific challenges like snow, low visibility, emergencies, and single-runway operations. We are ditching the radar idea for the moment. We have played Airport Madness 3 for several hours now, and we can't see a great advantage to having it. Radar would definitely be a CPU hog, plus there is the space issue. When you try to cram an entire air traffic control tower onto a single computer screen, it becomes quite busy-looking. We had considered a pop-up-then-hide radar screen, but honestly you will be too busy running an airport to ponder what's going on off-screen.

There has been great discussion in emails about realism. A number of people have asked that we make the game "real" in terms of range and size. Now, if we were to do this the aircraft would be too small to click on, for one thing. They would be difficult to see, as well. If we made the airport a realistic 2-mile width, the game would be painfully slow to watch. You would spend 8 minutes observing Slamjet Flight 326 taxi himself from the gate to runway 06, for example. "Realistic" is, well, kinda boring at times. To aim for "real" would not make a fun game. So we are trying to give you as big a taste of air traffic control as we can, while keeping it intensely fast-paced and exciting.

The more our Airport Madness 3 development progresses, the more confident I become that it is going to be a terrific game. It brings some solid new features to the table, most notably, airborne conflicts and a larger resolution. The control panel is much more dynamic than it was with Airport Madness 1 and Airport Madness 2. The menu options change depending on the scenario. For example, an aircraft that has just declared an emergency will not have a "reduce speed" button. You would never ever give speed assigments to an aircraft in such a situation.

The game will offer you some scenery options. However, adding scenic detail as you see in the provided screenshot introduces much visual distraction from spotting smaller aircraft. So, there will be an opt-out button that replaces the picturesque landscape with the nerve-calming green color that Airport Madness 2 was famous for.

I believe that the "Holy Grail" of Airport Madness would be to have user-designable airports. Users should be able to drag-and-drop runways and taxiways, and allocate airport space to park different types of aircraft. Unfortunately this will not be offered in Airport Madness 3. The flight paths and taxi routes in these air traffic control simulations and games are incredibly intricate and rather delicate. We cannot add that kind of in-game variation without compromising game performance, graphics and realism.

We are still saying May 2010 as our release date. If you have not already signed up for our newsletter, please do so at the top of this page. The newsletter is not spammy, just the occasional message of a new game release.

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 2010
Airport Madness 2 for iPhone

We are very excited to announce that Airport Madness 2 is being developed for the iPhone. There are already a number of decent air traffic control iPhone apps to be found, so we are working extra hard to bring something new to the table! Here are some screenshots:

FriDAY, FEBRUARY 5, 2010
The Free-For-All Airport Concept

We have a list of user requests that we are diligently working through, as we hammer out the code for Airport Madness 3. So far, many of these requests have been easy to add. You wanted to see emergencies? Easy. You wanted to give holds? No sweat. You wanted to assign runways? Hmmm...

Airport Madness 3 will offer the users a limited ability to assign different runways. As in the real world, there is always some flexibility but there are very few airports that operate in free-for-all fashion.

At any airport there are never enough taxiways. Whenever two aircraft stare each other face-to-face on the same taxiway, there is rarely enough room for them to pass, and turnarounds are difficult. It's not a dangerous situation due to the low speeds involved, but the pilots do have to stomp on their brakes, shut down and call for a tug. Many a real-world controller has inadvertently created this very scenario! And when they do, they are said to earn the "Golden Tow Bar Award".

As much as we would love to give users absolute taxiing freedom, I'm going to keep it realistic. When a 737 calls ready for taxi clearance, you will have the option of assigning a couple of different runways, but there will be a structured flow. For example, by default arrivals will come to you established on final approach for runway 06 or runway 12. You can cross them back and forth between the two runways if you like. Similarly, when a departing aircraft calls for taxi clearance you can taxi them for either runway 06 or runway 12. This maintains a natural flow of traffic.

If you get bored of the 06/12 operation, you can choose to operate the airport using runways 24 and 30 in the reverse fashion, still maintaining a natural flow. You will not be permitted to get any more creative than this, however. In real life, if you were to taxi an aircraft for runway 24 with arrivals using 06 your coworkers would hate you :)

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 2, 2010
Sign Up For Our Newsletter

We've received a number of requests from people asking, "Can you let me know when Airport Madness 3 is out?", or "Please email me when the next version of the air traffic control simulation becomes available.". So we have started a newsletter, something we should have done a year ago. It won't be spammy, just a friendly email letting you know anytime we have something new out, be it a new game, or bug fix for an existing application.

You can sign up at the top of this page.