So, at the end of the year, there’s always a bit of self-reflection, and for us, this year’s been a really crazy one. The year started out with the seeds for Self Aware Games, and between January and March, we had no name, and it was a pair of us working part time out of our living rooms

Taxiball's First Playable

As you can see, in the early days, without an artist, the game looked… um… “functional.” I took a stab at some placeholder art, but it wasn’t a whole lot better. (though I still kind of like the style for the water)

Taxiball with Designer Art

Fortunately, not long after this, Crystal joined us, and Taxiball immediately started looking a whole lot better! The pixel-art, eboy-inspired style that she brought to the game was incredibly appealing. Between the hyper-digital style and the all-vocal beatbox soundtrack, the game just felt like nothing else out there. Taxiball wears its influences on its sleeve – the old Labyrinth toys, Crazy Taxi, retro pixel art, but when it’s all smashed together with the beatbox stuff, it’s *still* unlike anything else out there.

Taxiball with Artist Art!

Taxiball was a really satisfying experience. We got our first game out the door to rave reviews, and it was something we were really excited about. The soundtrack was really unique, and while it wasn’t a runaway sales hit that made us all bazillionaires, a lot of people really enjoyed it. Edge Magazine named it #6 in their Top 50 iPhone games, which was really great.

Crystal + Funnel Cake = oog!

Once Taxiball wrapped up, we got to work on the first of two updates, adding levels and polishing up little bits and pieces of the game.

Okay, first we went to Great America, where we all got funnel cakes. For anyone who’s thinking of doing the same, LOOK AT THAT THING! Share your damn funnel cakes. I think we bought four, total, and ate maybe 1.5 of ‘em among the four of us? Seriously. Unless you’re Man vs. Food guy, one funnel cake for 3 people.

We’ve still got things we’d like to do in Taxiball – we had some really bizarre ideas for things that we’d like to do in the game. I hope we’ll get a chance to go back and give it a little more love. (And if you want more Taxiball content, the answer is simple! Get more people to grab the game, and we’ll add more stuff!)

As Taxiball was winding down, the question was, “What next?” One of the most important decisions of the year was to start development on the Palm Pre, and one of the best things that happened early on is that Dan joined the team as our main Pre developer.

We thought long and hard about what we’d do on the Pre, what the audience might want, and how it might differ from the iPhone’s audience. I don’t know whether it’s ended up being the case, but at the time, we thought the Pre would appeal to users of the Treo & Centro, which were slightly more business-oriented than full-blown consumer-oriented. The other thing that we’d learned with Taxiball is that games that require a lot of twitch-based dexterity are a bit self-limiting, audience-wise.

Self Aware Games' first office space!

So, a turn-based game that appealed to a slightly older audience of people on the go, for a platform that was starting from scratch! Card games and word games seemed like the way to go, right from the start – but what? Hold ‘Em? As much as we liked the game, it’s a known quantity – and we wanted to make something really special.

A simple misunderstanding later, and Word Ace was born – not just a word game or a card game, but both together, cross-platform between the Pre, iPhone & (later) Facebook! (In the picture below, avid Word Ace players may note something’s different about that screen than in the final game. That one change took many iterations over many weeks before we settled on the final thing. It’s a small detail, but one that tripped up a lot of early players!)

Word Ace

With Taxiball, we’d laid the groundwork for letting friends keep up with their friends in game through our Friend List-based leaderboards. With Word Ace, we’d take it a step further, and allow people to play together. Sure, there were other online card games, but we wanted to make sure that it felt *social* – like you were playing with people, and not just a bunch of randoms.

In addition to the text chat, we introduced a little “click & flick” emote system, where you can quickly swap out your profile picture for a happy or sad face. It was pretty amazing how fast Word Ace was prototyped, and as a result, how early we’d been able to play it online. For months, we’d play against each other (and our friends, our beta testers), often late, late at night. I’d be lying in bed at 2am, playing Word Ace against bots, when Colin, Crystal or Dan would suddenly appear at the table.

We talked about bugs via the in-game chat. We played face-to-face in the office. Heck, once we submitted the game to Palm, we even talked about bugs with their people via the in-game chat!

CTS defends our desks!

At the San Diego Comic-Con, Colin got a chance to talk to Tycho, from Penny Arcade, about Word Ace. When the game launched on the iPhone, he posted a note on their site. As longtime fans of PA, we were over the moon.

Word Ace launched on the Pre. It was an ambitious game on a new platform, and the fact that it launched as smoothly as it did was a testament to both the hardworking folks at Palm, and the hours and hours of hard work our team put in making sure that we’d be prepared for the launch. Thousands of people started playing, and the feedback about the game was incredible. We’d made it free, so that as many people could try it as possible. Once the game was completely solid, we’d turn on chip sales & donations, so people who wanted to support the game could spend whatever they wanted on the game to help support further development.

Chip sales went up a few weeks after launch, and donations are slated to be part of the next update. It’s been really fascinating watching the competition on the App Store/App Catalog, and seeing how things have shaken out – how they’ve been different from each other, how pricing evolves as people realize that the $0.99 price point isn’t sustainable, and it’s been a learning experience.

Dan Rarely Drives to Work

Speaking of learning experiences, there’s nothing that teaches you about what you did right or wrong like releasing a game. And one of the greatest things about working on mobile platforms is how fast development is. I came from a console game development background, where most projects are a minimum of 1.5 years, and some projects take 3x that long.

I’d never want to go back to that. You spend so long trying to make sure that your game is fun, but you only get that learning experience once every 2-3 years. Now, we learn a massive amount about how to do things better once every 3-4 months! Heck, with each update we learn something new, which brings that time down to once every few weeks.

With Taxiball, we learned about pricing, about making a game that’s dexterity-based, about how important generating awareness is on the App Store, and how to work with a new team. With Word Ace, we’ve learned a lot, again, about pricing, about keeping people playing the game, the importance of good & proactive moderation, and the perils of building an always-on, always-online game.

The One Constant? Bakesale Betty.

And some of the time, we still work out of the living room, and not the office.

Not long after the launch of Word Ace, the next step became really clear. Hold ‘Em. There wasn’t a Hold ‘Em game on the Pre, and Word Ace’s interface was so good that by taking that and applying it to Hold ‘Em, we were confident we’d have an exceptional version of online Texas Hold ‘Em. People wanted it. We got e-mails asking for it the moment Word Ace went live. Who were we to argue?

Card Ace!

We also really wanted to do a version of Word Ace (and Card Ace) for Facebook. Rylan joined the team and built the Facebook (and fubar) versions of Word Ace & Card Ace in a ridiculously short time, bringing our total “official” team size to five.

So in the course of the last year, we’ve released: Taxiball (iPhone), Taxiball Free (iPhone), Word Ace (webOS (Pre & Pixi)/iPhone/Facebook) and Card Ace (webOS (Pre & Pixi)/iPhone/Facebook). That’s a lot for a small team in a year, and we couldn’t have done it without help from some very critical people.

Every single one of those games is something I’m proud to have been a part of, and to both the players and the people who’ve made Self Aware Games possible, thank you.

It's Not a Mugshot.

I’d never have thought that this is how 2009 would have turned out.

So… what’s next? I can’t tell you. What I will say is that I thought I was as excited about a concept as I could be with Word Ace, and I’m even more excited about this. And if you thought Word Ace was different than Taxiball, this new thing is as different from both of those as you can imagine.

The Eyepatch Is Just for Kicks

Onward to the future!