It’s been a busy 2014, with the release of our two biggest products to date: Airport Madness: World Edition and Radar Chaos: World Edition. We’ve also tidied up our website tremendously. Now, when customers arrive at the site, they are clearly offered our two game flavors, Airport Madness and Radar Chaos, with little other distraction.
I’ve talked quite a bit about our game development platform, Adobe Flash. The time has come to move forward with a more robust game engine, and we are excited to announce that all of our future games will be developed using Unity 3D. Our existing games will continue to be updated with Adobe Flash. However, we’ve had many users who are unable to successfully install Adobe software, which has forced us to create a variety of alternate solutions. This has increased our workload greatly.
This change in development platforms is really about Airport Madness, and where it will go next. I don’t think we can sell any more “flat” versions of Airport Madness, where the player sits in a chair in outer space, gazing down upon the airport from above. If that’s your thing, look no further than AMWE, which currently offers 6 airports, with 6 more coming in 2015. It has more functionality than the earlier versions of Airport Madness, and was intended to be the last “flat” version of this game.
Four years ago, a shift in the game market occurred, and it became obvious that our games should be developed for mobile devices. At that time, performance was a huge issue. Moving all those little planes around really ate into a phone’s battery life. Now there seems to be another shift, and that is towards 3D-perspective games.
How Do You Make a 2D Game Even Better?
We are very excited about our big project of 2015. A 3D-perspective version of Airport Madness. What can I say? It’s going to be awesome. I can’t really show much yet, as we are just getting started with its’ development. However, since we have created a few aircraft as well as an earth/sky environment, here’s a screenshot of a Boeing 747 overflying the airport, from the tower perspective.
Finding the right sky look was a bit tricky, and will be even more so as we create night, possibly even dawn and dusk. Fortunately, Unity3D gives us a great deal of control over lighting and shadows. This image was intentionally cropped to hide the earth, since we are still very early in our development, and our airfields are a mess with construction.
I really want to reach out and thank every person who has purchased our games over the years. That’s what keeps this pirate ship afloat, and allows us to spend so much time and energy developing air traffic control games.
Why are my blog comments not being saved on the blog?
The world edition is a great programming accomplishment.
Just a few comments.
1. I have played quite a bit of Honolulu.
2. I have gotten to about 63k score.
3. Issue 1: with over 100 planes moved, plane start to disappear when coming on the screen from the top left. You can see the plane coming in via radar. They actually appear on the screen, the just disappear.
4. My other issue that planes just keep coming in and can’t take planes off fast enought to make places for all the incoming planes that have landed.
Your comments aren’t being added because I’ve been lazy. Sorry about that, all fixed now. As for the disappearing aircraft, this is fixed now and you’ll get the update on March 2. As for the traffic rate issue – what game mode are you playing in? Some of these are designed to become impossibly busy.
Looking forward to the future tower sim/game! Do you plan on making it like current AM play style or will it be more of a sandbox style closer to realistic atc? Are you planning on making it voice activated as well? Thanks!
It will play very much like the current Airport Madness game structure, except you’ll be sitting in a control tower swivel chair. I’ve played tons of these air traffic control games, and although they feel immersive and real, Airport Madness is about near-misses. So you can count on crazy traffic levels and difficult situations. Hey, what’s Sandbox Style?
Sandbox is basically an “open” environment in the fact that nothing is really structured. Best way I can describe it would be like a real world VFR class delta tower. Planes call up from any direction with different requests (full stop, touch-n-go’s, transition,etc) and you sequence them accordingly. Now that I really think about it, that sounds very intricate to try and program and run smoothly ha. How about voice activation? Is that something you are planning on having or testing out?
I don’t like voice activation. Admittedly, I haven’t tried any games with it in over 10 years, but it was such a horrible experience.
Am really looking forward to the 3D version of AM this year. Like you said it should awesome. Can’t wait!
Thanks. I can’t wait to play it myself!
Are there any plans to release the game on Steam?
Yes. However, we are swamped with the platforms we have going right now. I’m thinking in March we’ll get our two World Editions onto Steam via Greenlight (hopefully).