You may be wondering why we are releasing demo videos of old games, and not demo videos of new games, like the 3D version of Airport Madness that I keep promising. To answer your question, we’re still very busy with our six existing Airport Madness games. Last month we submitted all of our games across all platforms, including iOS and Android. We even created an Airport Madness bundle for crazy cheap! USD $19! I recommend you own this collection for your iPad or iPhone.

Anyway, we plan to be full-steam-ahead with AM3D very, very soon. However, we’re giving our existing products one more good push before we move on, and this includes submitting several titles to Steam.

After three days on greenlight, I was feeling confident about eventually getting Airport Madness greenlit, having already reached 43% of the way to their Top 100 list.  Years ago I submitted Airport Madness 4 to Steam, but was told they weren’t looking for games like mine.  Steam has grown tremendously since, to the point at which they seek the community’s help in choosing their games through a voting site called Greenlight.

Here’s a cool animated gif I created to attract voters on Greenlight.

I’m extremely impressed with their system – every game gets an opportunity to get discovered.  Some make it, some don’t. It’s been a slow week on my Greenlight campaign… very few new votes now.  I’ve got my fingers crossed that, by some miracle, my campaign will get a huge traffic boost and push me into the Top 100.  Achieving this does not guarantee that my game will be accepted by Steam – it just means I’m on their radar.

They expect a great deal of effort on my part, outside of their site.  I’m supposed to torment and harass my existing customers to go and vote for my game, despite it being a somewhat painful process.  Not only must you sign up for a Steam account, you also must buy something on their site in order to have the privilege of voting.  Here’s where I’m at, as of two minutes ago.

As you can see, I’m still quite shy of getting accepted by Steam.  So what’s the big deal?  Getting accepted would deliver a huge sales boost, and seriously motivate me to get working on my Next Big Thing, a 3D version of Airport Madness – the thing people have asked me to do since 2009.  Did you know AM4 was originally supposed to be a 3D game?  Back then I didn’t have a decent tool for developing it, and plus, most people seemed to just want more features added to the existing “flat” versions of AM.

On April 12, we will be adding a new app bundle to the iTunes App Store.  This bundle consists of four super-fun games, at a fraction of the original cost. Big Fat Simulations traditionally sells air traffic control games. However, we sometimes get goofy and experiment with new ideas, always pushing the envelope of our creativity. The Island of Misfit Apps is a collection of games that never made it to The Big Time.

BACKYARD BRAT is secretly one of our best creations ever, but unfortunately it never got noticed by anyone. It offers decent helicopter flight physics, beautiful parallax scrolling scenery, and ridiculously funny missions.

We’re ashamed of BATHROOM SIMULATOR. It’s not a new concept, but indeed a funny game with decent graphics and audio. We don’t even mention this game on our website, for fear of tainting our reputation as one of the top air traffic control simulation developers (at least, we think so).

SKY MADNESS was a 2009 sequel to Airport Madness. I find the game play extremely addicting, and testers found it very easy to pick up and play, with no learning curve. However, it failed miserably on the app store, and was the reason we pressed on to build Airport Madness 3, 4, 5, and 6, with number 7 coming in late 2015.

MIDAIR MADNESS only took 5 weeks to build. It was a quickie experiment, to see if anyone out there liked that kind of thing. It basically pumps an unbelievable number of aircraft onto the screen, and the player must see how many they can manage before the inevitable midair collision occurs.

Each of these four games was, at one time, our labor of love. We had high hopes for each of these, but instead learned a lesson: We must stick to building air traffic control games and simulations.

Dear valued customers and fans, today for the very first time ever, I submitted a game to Steam, the world famous game distribution platform.  However, Steam will not accept a game until it gets enough “votes”.  I rarely ask for favors, but I humbly ask that you visit the link below and vote up my game if you indeed enjoy playing it.  Thank you!  -BFS

Here is a project that I originally published as a flash game, and today decided to distribute as a mobile game as well.

There are several versions of this urinal game circulating the app stores, so admittedly it is not an original concept. Here is my version of this great game idea, and I hope that you enjoy it.

The idea here is to test and improve your public washroom etiquette. You choose the most appropriate stall in a variety of 

situations.  The Bathroom Simulator was inspired by several other games that are based on this concept, but mine has enough “extras” to hopefully get your attention.

The other urinal games are fairly basic, offering the player a variety of situations such as, “There’s a guy on the left and a guy on the right, so which urinal will YOU choose?”. I’ve really tried to pimp things up by adding sit-down stalls, busted urinals, and scary bikers. The game is loaded with graphics, sound effects and music.

I had long forgotten about this game, until I found this YouTube video this morning, which has had 1.3 million hits.

We released a second update for Airport Madness World Edition this morning, adding London Heathrow to the mix.  When I designed this level, I was very concerned about the fact that it lacked crossing runways.  It seems that the popularity of an airport is tied to the amount of complexity that it offers.  I tried a couple of new things with this level, one being additional flight paths. Some aircraft will cross over midfield, while others will join directly into the “downwind” leg.  I’ve also shaken up the taxi patterns, to keep players guessing.  These changes helped, however the airport still lacked something.  So I increased the traffic intensity to a rate that would “bury” you in any other sector. The result is one of my favorite airports so far.

Upon release of this game, I held the record for highest number of airplanes moved under the “time trial”.  We’ll see how long I last 🙂



I’ve never liked reading apologies from bloggers who are “sorry for not blogging much lately”.  Sometimes there’s just nothing to say.  I do have a long list of stuff to do, and an always-full mailbox with customer questions and support requests.  The customer requests always come first, before all of the facebook, twitter, blog, and newsletter stuff.

I’m really excited about the coming updates for Airport Madness: World Edition.  I’m designing levels as fast as I can, and our artist is working long hours to get the job done.  Below is a screenshot of our next update, which adds London, Heathrow.  This is a free update, and will be available March 2.

Looking ahead, we have some really cool levels to add.  In May, we add Dubai.  In July, Amsterdam Schiphol. And in September, Barcelona, Spain!  We will likely be adding these same airports to Radar Chaos: World Edition in similar bi-monthly fashion.  Should be a busy year for us.

I’m extremely excited about Airport Madness: Tower Edition, our first 3D perspective game, due in October 2015!  Look for details here.  I promise to get a screenshot up next month.

I sincerely apologize for issues we’ve had this past week with our support and email system, which silently failed.  The issue has been resolved.  If you’ve tried to reach us lately, please try us one more time at support@bigfatsimulations.com. Thank you.

In October 2015, we will release our first 3D-perspective air traffic control game.  Development is coming along nicely, and the Unity 3D development platform is a pleasure to work with.  We will likely have screenshots to share with you as early as March.  I’ve been scratching my head for a good name.  I sent out a newsletter survey this morning, and here’s what I came up with, based on 183 replies to the question.

Have a better idea?  Send me an email at support@bigfatsimulations.com !

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.