Enjoy!

I’m keeping extremely busy with the upcoming release of Airport Madness 3D.  As you can see in the above image, the airport details are beginning to take shape.  What you cannot see are the spinning propellers and animated fuel trucks, baggage carts, tugs, and moving passenger jetways.  The closer I get to finishing this project, the more excited I get about it.  I hope to show you a teaser video very soon.

Working with Unity3D, our development software, is an absolute dream.  I’m constantly amazed by how easy it is to implement my ideas.  Adding radar screens was a very simple task.  Just yesterday I got an email from somebody asking if it would be possible to add “instant replay”.  After a brief search of the Unity website, I determined that this is a relatively straightforward feature to add.

One thing I’m not sure about at this point are the aircraft I’ve chosen.  These are purchased 3D models (I’m not a 3D modeler), and they were the first thing I found that a) looked good and b) were low poly which means they will play nicely on a slower mobile device.  I’ve created some of my own liveries (can’t use real airlines, unfortunately).  I purchased these vessels nearly a year ago, but I’ve since found better stuff out there.  So at this point, I’m looking for feedback on how the aircraft look.

As for a release date?  I’m always late in delivering, so I’m trying to be somewhat vague.  I suspect this game will be complete by the end of February 2016, so check the product page regularly!

Here’s a little-known fact:   The very first version of Airport Madness was prototyped as a 3D game.  It was 2008, back before there were smartphone apps, back when Flash games were still very much alive.  I was new to programming and had no idea how I was going to build the thing.  Flash presented some very serious performance challenges for the 3D game developer.  I eventually gave up and decided to make the thing a simple 2D game.

  
In hindsight, 2D was the right move. It would’ve failed miserably as a 3D game in 2008.  But now with faster mobile devices out there, and development platforms such as Unity3D, the world is ready for a 3D version of Airport Madness.  

I finally began development of a 3D version of Airport Madness about a year ago, but until this week, I had doubts about whether the 3D version could ever be as fun as its 2D predecessor.  I was worried about how small the airplanes would look when viewed in a 3D space.  Who’s going to spot a Cessna on final approach from two miles away, while playing on an iPhone 5?  And what about performance?  Anyone can build a game by purchasing a bunch of pre-built game objects such as airplanes, runways and hangars.  However, there can be very serious performance consequences by doing so.  When a 3D artist creates an object such as a hangar, they give it as much detail as they can.  They want the thing to look perfect, because game developers may use it in their first-person shooter games, where the building will be viewed up close.   Such incredible detail puts a heavy workload on mobile devices, and can cause the app to crash frequently.

  
Development of Airport Madness 3D is going tremendously well. I’ve created airplanes, runways, water, grass, hangars, towers, fuel depots, gates, airport signage and vehicles that not only look good, but offer stability on mobile devices.  I’ve found beautiful music and sound effects.  I’ve chosen some fun airports. And I’ve kept the control instructions the same as that which you see in Airport Madness: World Edition.

Most important: I’ve obeyed the rules of Airport Madness.  I’ve avoided the urge to go “realistic”, and kept the focus squarely on the word “fun”.  Planes move quickly.  Conflicts are frequent.  Crashes are exaggerated.  Airport choices are based purely on how fun I’ve determined their layout to be.  It would be a mistake to say, “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool to add Van Nuys Airport?“, because I believe Airport Madness is more fun with crossing runways.   Having said that, I think the game needs at least one beginner airport, and that’s why I’ve chosen Kingston, Jamaica with its’ single runway operation.

I’ve avoided certain things like flight information displays.  I had considered adding computer screens that would display information about each aircraft, such as destination, altitude, route, number of passengers and so on,  but I just don’t think it adds any fun value.  Airport Madness is fun because it is an incredibly fast-paced game.  Crashes are abundant.  Not terribly realistic, but seldom boring.

I’ve avoided investing time into design of a tower control room.  I’ve seen other apps attempt this, and and while I must admit they look pretty, the novelty wears off and you’ll find yourself looking for an option to hide this distracting detail very quickly.  A small screen presents so much limitation, when trying to create an air traffic control environment.  There’s no room for unnecessary detail.  What you want is the largest viewing space possible, so you can spot those planes and avoid collisions.  To be honest, however, I find myself intentionally allowing collisions in AM3D 🙂 

I’ve said this before:  If things seem rather quiet around here, it’s because I’m working.  This week I intend to get some screenshots and a video teaser out to you for our upcoming Airport Madness 3D.

Ouch.

I’m very excited about this new game development software called Unity 3D.  It’s far more powerful than I need it to be, but definitely an ideal development environment for Airport Madness.  As much as I want to make things look as good as possible, I’m mindful of the mobile users out there, who don’t want this game to crash on their outdated Samsung Galaxy Tab 3.  So when I added realistic moving water to Airport Madness 3D, and the software asked me what type of reflection and effects I’d like, I decided to skip those and stick with something very basic.

The explosion above was a very complex endeavor.  I’m using  very lightweight mobile-friendly aircraft models, which must break into realistic pieces during a collision.  The pieces need to be highly animated, and that’s where the Unity game engine shines.   Unity calculates precisely how each piece should tumble down the runway, occasionally bounce off of one another, then come to rest.  The fire and smoke was my idea.  After all, this is Airport Madness!  It needs to be crash-errific, but hopefully not offensive to anyone.

I’m really not sure when this will be ready.  It’s looking like February 2016 now… fashionably late as always.  I promise to deliver.  I always do.

Airport Madness: World Edition is doing well on all platforms, so we must make its’ bimonthly updates a priority.  Even after the Release of AM3D, we intend to keep the AMWE updates coming.  The next update, by the way, is December 1, 2015 and we will be adding Amsterdam, Schiphol.

Dear excellent customers,

Airport Madness: World Edition is now live in the Steam store! While we continue to sell all of our games through our existing website, we will gradually port them to the Steam game platform. Steam is incontestably the best-known channel for buying, updating and sharing PC, Mac and Linux games. With a user base of 75 million, Steam is the largest collection of registered PC gamers in the world.

More Reliable Game Delivery
Automatic Updates
Community
Achievements, Game Stats, Trading Cards

Over the past seven years, we’ve battled many issues with our game delivery system, such as Adobe Air problems, download security issues, and damaged files. On Steam, games just work. We’d like nothing more than to bring you ALL of our games on Steam today. However, the Steam Community must first accept our games through their Greenlight voting system. Help us by voting!

A huge thank you to those who gave Airport Madness: World Edition their vote on Steam! Our game has been ‘greenlit’ and will be available for sale on Steam this Thursday.  To celebrate it’s release, we’re throwing a one-week 15% off sale.

It’s been a challenging two-month effort to get our bestselling game accepted by Steam. They have over 75 million users, and many, many thousands of game developers, all pitching games to them.  Steam has grown.  It’s become far too much work to review each and every game idea, so two years ago they developed a site called “Greenlight”, in which the users get to vote potential games up or down.

Greenlight has approximately 2000 games in the cue at any given time, and they seem to be accepting about 100 of these games per month.  Every time somebody gives a game their vote, that game moves up in rank.  For some, the process of getting greenlit takes only a couple of days.   But for many, a game will sit on Greenlight forever.   For us, the process took about 40 days.

If anyone here owns Airport Madness: World Edition already, and wishes to own it on Steam instead, go ahead and buy it.  I’ll give you a refund on the purchase you’ve made through our site.  Contact me at support@bigfatsimulations.com.

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