Newer devices

Starburst Turret

How to build electronic devices

Robot

About Me

My Games
General information on my games is below. If you have a question about the purchasing process, check out my Frequency Asked Questions page.

Death From Above

     Death From Above is my first 3D game. You're the gunner of an AC-130, and you have to judge your shots to hit Communist thugs on the battlefield below. The game was over 2 years in development, and uses custom physics and graphics engines. It includes a 3D water simulation, deformable terrain, and destructible buildings. 


Death From Above had contributions from these people:
Luke Allen - physics, gameplay, art
Greg Jaworski - graphics engine
Austin Hull - art
Anna Li - art
The end-of-campaign photos are from these sources:  Europe Campaign II Other Campaigns

Angular Velocity 

     Angular Velocity was a much larger effort than my earlier games. You control a ball, and your object is to break the window at the end of each level. You use a grappling hook to swing through the world, tilting the phone to control gravity. The game runs on a custom physics engine that I wrote.
     I've recently released a level editor as an update to the full version; the level editor tutorial is here. An Angular Velocity user, Billes, wrote an excellent browser-based version of the level editor, here.




Space background and selected other graphics are by Austin Hull.


BattleTanks

     BattleTanks is a top-down tank combat game, similar to the Nintendo Wii Play tank game. You tilt the phone to drive the tank, and touch to aim. When you destroy enemies, you pick up weapons and upgrades. The upgrades available in the game are:
TOW missiles - can be guided in flight by touching the screen. (Tube-launched, Optically-tracked, Wire-guided (TOW) missiles are a real anti-tank weapon. The basic operation is that a soldier or helicopter gunner aims the sight at a tank, and electronics in the missile launcher optically track the missile by watching a flashing light on its tail fin, and issue it commands to guide it to the aim point. Thus the missile is cheaper and lighter because it doesn't need a guidance system, and all the complex parts in the launcher get reused for the next shot.)
Railguns - an instant shot, penetrates multiple tanks. (Real railguns are not practical yet for combat purposes, because the rails get destroyed after a few shots. If the material science problems get solved though, they'll be awesome. The basic idea is that they shoot at 20 km/s and produce an explosion just from sheer kinetic energy, like getting hit by a meteor. They would also be cheaper than missiles.) See my coilgun page for a simple homemade electromagnetic gun (although unfortunately, coilguns cannot reach anywhere near the muzzle velocity of railguns, and are pretty useless as actual weapons, they are easy to build.)
Mortars - can be aimed by touching and holding on the screen. (Real mortars are more for anti-personnel use; this is kind of an unrealistic weapon in the game.)
Improved speed - Self-explanatory. (Real tanks don't go around picking up faster engines in the field, but I have read that their mechanics often remove the speed limiters on the engines. So let's say that this upgrade represents that.)
Composite armor - This upgrade will absorb one hit, but is lost in the process. (Modern Western tanks use layers of ceramics and other materials to absorb damage, and it's far more effective than just steel.)






Tanks and selected other graphics are by Austin Hull.


Atomic Bomber

     In Atomic Bomber, you control a NATO ground-attack plane during a hypothetical 1970 Soviet invasion of Europe. You can drop both conventional and nuclear bombs. According to Tom Clancy (who is my main source of Cold War knowledge), the NATO battle plan was to use tactical nukes during a Soviet invasion because the Soviet ground forces massively outnumbered NATO. In the game, you face Soviet anti-aircraft artillery (the ZSU-57), SAMs (the SA-2), and fighters (the MiG-21). To keep the game interesting, you have to just avoid the fighters; they're invincible. In reality, (also according to Tom Clancy), NATO expected to have air superiority during a Soviet invasion, so the Soviet fighter threat in the game is probably unrealistic.
   Based on the high scores that the game submits to my web server, as of February 2013, 82 million games of Atomic Bomber have been played since its September 2010 release, and roughly 495 years have been spent in gameplay.

Atomic Bomber screenshot

I've recently added an extra game mode to the full version, where you can fly an A-10 Warthog armed with a GAU-8 30mm depleted-uranium cannon, plus Hydra 70 unguided air-to-ground rockets. Below is a screenshot of the new game mode. The A-10's cannon can be used to shoot down the MiG (which was highly requested by players.) The MiG also gets shot down if a stray SAM hits it, in both game modes. The A-10 mode uses a separate online high score list from the regular mode.

My newest programming project has been learning OpenGL and porting Atomic Bomber to iOS. The gameplay is the same as the Android version, and the online high scores lists are shared. (Right now I don't plan to port my other games, but we'll see how it goes.)

A-10 mode screenshot


Snowjob

     Snowjob is the first Android application I made (and you can tell; it's fairly low quality). It was inspired by the February 2010 blizzard that closed the Federal government for a week. The game is a simple arcade game where you have to drop snow on politicians to keep them from making it to the US Capitol building. Every time a politician gets there, he will issue a soundbite and  increase the national debt. The game is over when national debt reaches 100% of GDP. (A "snowjob" is when politicians engage in misdirection or obfuscation, so I thought the name was appropriate.)

Intro screen

Gameplay screen

If you're viewing this page on an Android device, you can download the games from the Android Market via this link. (The link only works on Android devices)



Source for the Snowjob graph of actual US debt is here.
Source for the Snowjob intro background image is here.