Any time someone sets out to make a website, they envision that it will look like the best website ever created. Some people define their website’s beauty by the artwork, some by how user-friendly it is, and others by how tidy the back-end code is written. A wise old man once told me (That’s a lie; it was actually a 20-year-old know-it-all programmer) the customer does not care what’s under the hood. Make the website pretty and functional. Nobody cares if it has 300 lines of unnecessary php script on the home page.

This website began more than four years ago. The banner actually had hot air balloons all over it (anyone remember this?). This was before BFS had really ‘found itself’. The home page featured our newest game, Air Traffic Controller, for $5.99. Since then, the site has grown considerably. It has grown to the stage of an awkward teenager, who is half-way through puberty, wondering if he will ever grow facial hair.

Our website is like a house that keeps getting add-ons. Build a shed. Convert the garage. Expand the kitchen. Add a bedroom and a deck. Give it some new paint and put in hardwood throughout. Our website structure is still relatively tidy. Nav links are at the top left, and there are only six of them. You are never more than two clicks from any particular page, and the home page is always one click away. On the back-end, it’s a different story.

The back-end is a mess. We are obviously too busy making games to give it the TLC it deserves. Last week I added a facebook “like” button to one of the pages, and was alarmed by all of the bloated html code I had to scroll through. There were code snippets from various web services, many that I don’t even use anymore. A Google Ad? I thought I’d gotten rid of those in 2010. And what the heck is Stat-Tracker? A web service that I must have used in 2008.

Like I mentioned above, customers don’t really care about what’s under the hood. Does it work? Will it accept my money and give me Airport Madness 4? Good enough. The website works just fine. I’ve never had any complaints, aside from the occasional friendly email, to point out spelng erors or dead links. I still use PayPal exclusively for payments, because I think this makes the customer feel safe. There are cheaper services for sure, but PayPal brings the customer trust.

Earlier this year we gave the website a new banner image, that will likely change from time-to-time. We also categorized our games into three categories: Airport Madness, Radar Chaos, and Other. I’m not sure for how long we can use “Other” as a title, as we plan to expand beyond Air Traffic Control games in the next year.

We will likely be buying aviation games from other developers, and adding them to our site. These would exist in a sandbox of their own, separate from our stuff. We get a lot of requests for different styles of games, and feel this is one way of offering greater variety.

Website feedback is always welcome! creator@bigfatsimulations.com

In addition to building air traffic control games for PC and Mac, we have decided to develop for iOS devices, too.  This includes the iPad, iPhone and iPod touch.

It was nearly three weeks ago that we received the necessary D-U-N-S number from Dun & Bradstreet.  After several failed attempts at submitting this number to the Apple Development Center, I decided to send them an email this morning, regarding my enrollment status.  To my delight, I received a phone call from someone at Apple just 5 minutes later.  Apparently, I had unknowingly frozen my account due to over-submission.  I guess it pays to be a little patient.  They quickly rectified things over the phone for us.  We can now proudly call ourselves Apple Developers 🙂

Look for Radar Chaos on iPad very soon!

We have recently decided to port our Radar Chaos games to iPad.   One month ago, we visited the Apple website to sign up as an official Apple developer.  Step 1 is to enter your business D-U-N-S. number.  Huh?  Never heard of it.  The D-U-N-S Number has become the standard for keeping track of the world’s businesses. Many major corporations, including Apple, require their suppliers and contractors to have a D-U-N-S Number. It verifies the credibility of your business.

So we applied for this number last month, and just 30 short days later, we received a friendly email from Dun & Bradstreet, containing a brand new, shiny D-U-N-S number.  But upon submitting this number to Apple, we were told that the number was not valid.  Apparently it takes a couple of weeks for the number to get distributed across the various look-up databases (or something like that).

So, we are patiently waiting.  We will keep you posted with our progress on Radar Chaos for iOS right here.

We are about to release another update to Airport Madness 4, free to those who have purchased this product. We plan to fix a few bugs, improve framerate issues, and add two more challenges to the list.

A word about updates and versions. An update is any change that we make to a product. A product can have several updates, and these are always free to those who own the product. A version, however, is different. A new version is an entirely different product with it’s own price tag. If someone owns Airport Madness 4, they can download all of it’s updates for free. However, they would have to purchase new versions of the game, such as Airport Madness 5.

We really hate having to charge for our products. It makes us feel like an ugly, faceless corporation. It would be cool if we could make a living by offering our stuff to you for free. Many have suggested that we do just that. “Make your games free!” In case you haven’t noticed, there really is no such thing as free. There is always a catch in there somewhere. There must be nearly 50 billion mobile devices out there now, and game developers have learned that they can make more money by charging less. Charge 99 cents, and you sell ten times more games. Make the game free, and you earn even more money through advertising. Add in-game purchases, and you make a killing.

Yesterday, my daughter asked me if she could download an app to play. I can’t remember what it was called. Ninja Dragon Land, or something. It was free. So why not? Today, she asked me if I could help her unlock some of the game options so that she could feed her starving ninja dragons. For just 99 cents, I could buy her 200 gems, enough to feed 4 dragons for 3 days. Or, feed 2 dragons for six days. An even better value would be to buy 1200 gems for $5.00. Enough to feed her entire herd for a month. The game even offered the option to spend $20 for 10,000 gems.

We live in a time where people are willing to give money to their mobile devices. It’s weird. Many developers are cashing on the concept of in-app purchases. They make the game free. Then they charge their users to death. And they always include a super expensive option, as there are always people who will pay. These users are referred to as “whales” by the game development industry. The opposite of “whales” are “freeloaders”. When an app detects that a user isn’t buying anything, they show the user a bunch of ads. One way or another, you are going to give up something. People don’t see what’s happening. Nothing is free! Get it? Free games cost money.

There are free games that don’t force you to buy items, but show annoying advertisements. Our free versions are not free, either. In our free versions, we always show you what you could have if you bought the full version. Nobody can afford to develop a game (or anything) without some way of getting money out of it. That’s enough on that.

Speaking of Airport Madness 5…

I’m tired of counting versions. Airport Madness 4, Airport Madness 5, Airport Madness 37. The next version gets an original name. And we are working on our next contraption now. I can’t really say much about it yet, except that it has a really cool theme. It’s not going to be another “Here’s six airports, knock yourself out.”. This one has something special. You can expect to see it in January 2013.

Honestly, we have enough ideas and material to keep going with the Airport Madness series for years to come. However, we are going to try something new in 2013, after our next version of Airport Madness.

Lots to look forward to 🙂

The impossible is never easy, but we’ve managed to do it.  Radar Chaos Hawaii Edition is now available for instant download.

We were fashionably late, as usual.  I must learn to better estimate a project’s size before making promises.  Initially, RCHE seemed like a simple spin-off of the original Radar Chaos.  However, we were determined to pack more features into the control panel, add life-like procedures and a real-world location.  In the end, the entire project was basically rewritten from scratch.

Our first instinct was to add “Hawaiian” music, since the location of this radar simulation is the Hawaiian Islands. However, this gave the simulation a feel which we did not like.  We hated it, actually (especially after some 50+ hours of testing the beta version, which contained such music with ukuleles and flutes).  Ukuleles and air traffic control?  They don’t go together.  One is relaxed, happy and care-free.  The other is intense, and it puts you at the edge of your seat, stresses you out, and causes you to mutter, “How am I gonna handle THIS mess?” repeatedly.  So we went with that.  In fact, the music we chose for Radar Chaos Hawaii Edition is filed under the genre of “horror”.  You may think that sort of music wouldn’t fit inside a game,  but I actually like the fit.  It is suspenseful, dark and haunting, created by composers Roland Rudzitis and David Flavin.  Music only exists during the introductory screens of the game, not during game play.

Our coder worked hard until late last night (and early this morning) to get everything functioning exactly as it should.  We are now in ‘wait and see’ mode, poised at the computer with the email program open, waiting for any complaints or bug reports we can jump on.

We really hope that you enjoy Radar Chaos Hawaii Edition.  It truly is a fun game, for those who love aviation.  Airport Madness 4 is by far more popular, but it’s content aims at a much broader spectrum of users.  Radar simulation is a niche market.  It’s my favorite type of game, by far.  In fact the very first game we ever created was a radar simulation, originally intended to be a commercial training product.

It’s not easy to write instructions for air traffic control.  Our original promise was a radar game with “no instructions required”, but that quickly became an impossible promise.  We have created nearly a dozen tutorial videos for this game, as well as several pages of written instructions, which should be enough to get you going.

Enjoy!

Big Fat Simulations is a small company. We read all our e-mails, we love our customers, and if you are sad, we are sad. We’re literally a Mom & Pop company, and we believe in the personal touch. So here are our three promises to you …

1. No Obnoxious DRM! Pirates exist. Sad, but true. But we won’t let hatred of people who rip off our games drive us to annoy our paying customers. When you order from us, you immediately get a download link to your game, requiring no keys or passwords. That’s it. No online authentication. No need to keep a disk in the drive.

• If your computer dies and you need a new registration key? We’re sorry to hear that, and your replacement is free.
• Register on the Mac and switch to Windows? A new key is free.
• Your child wants to play the game on his or her own machine? That’s awesome, and an additional key is free.

2. Money-Back Guarantee! If you don’t like our game, we don’t want your money. We have a no-questions-asked One Year Money-back Guarantee. Game stops working? You wake up one morning and realize that it sucks? You decide that you hate us personally, and our adorable children too? Money back within one year. You might think, “Hmmm. I wonder if people ever buy the game, play it through, and demand a refund.” The answer is: No. This has never happened. You know why? Because our customers are awesome people.

3. Free Demos! That means that you get a chance to play and make sure that 1. It works, 2. You are having fun, and 3. The retro graphics don’t enrage you. If the demo works for you and is fun, you can buy the full game and be confident that it will still work and still be fun. And if it doesn’t? Have we mentioned our Money-Back Guarantee? We love that almost all of our customers played a demo first. It means we’re earning our pay honestly. Because, again, If you don’t like our game, we don’t want your money.

Wow, great work everyone! Holy smack. That’s a lot of airplanes moved in Airport Madness 4 within just seven months. That’s 200 times as much traffic as Chicago O’Hare moves for the same time period. I’d better hurry up and get the next edition of Airport Madness 4 out. You folks are going to LOVE this one!

Enjoy!  Radar Chaos: Hawaii Edition will be releasing soon, hopefully by the last day of July.  If it’s not available by July 31, just wait longer 🙂

Download the HD version here!

Radar Chaos Hawaii: Honolulu TRACON from Big Fat Simulations on Vimeo.

If it seems quiet around the website, our Facebook page, our blog and Twitter feed lately, it’s because we are focused on the completion of Radar Chaos Hawaii Edition.  Our original goal was June 1 (thankfully we kept that one a secret from you, because we missed it).  In May, I mentioned on Facebook that RCHE would be available July 1, but later deleted the comment.  We have since been keeping the date vague, but promising ‘some time in July’.   We are aiming for the last day in July.

Our sincere apologies for not being quick with the email responses these days.  Of course, we always respond to emails involving issues or complaints immediately.  However, it’s those daily emails that we get from users who have an idea for a game that we should make:  “Hey, you should totally make a game that involves trains.  People love trains!  Can you make that next?”.  I always try to respond to these idea people, since this is where all of our great ideas come from.  However, while we are in production mode, sprinting for the finish line, our email efforts are minimized to that of keeping existing customers happy.

Our dream is to take August off.  However, it will likely be dedicated to resolving bugs, assisting customers with their downloads, and adding critical game features that players feel are missing from Radar Chaos Hawaii Edition.   Not to mention, a new version of Airport Madness in time for Christmas (you will love this one!).  There is no rest for game developers.

Look for news of Radar Chaos Hawaii Edition’s release right here in about two weeks!

Radar Chaos Hawaii is coming along, folks!  We hope for a release in about two weeks.  Check out the new screenshots of Oahu and Hawaii here.  We will be adding a second video shortly, including screenshots of Kauai and Maui.