Monday 23 June 2014

Tap Happy Sabotage is launched!


Good news everybody! Tap Happy Sabotage is now available from the Windows Store for Windows 8 devices. Please do download from here and join in the fun!

Tap Happy Sabotage is completely free, without ads or in-app purchases, so there's no excuses not to play it!

I took the game to Radius Festival in London on Friday, where it went down really well. You can see it being given a full work-out by Vlambeer's Rami Ismail and One Life Left's Ann Scantlebury at http://www.twitch.tv/radiusfestival/b/540285765?t=123m40s (I'm on at 2:03:40)

And of course, there's a new trailer up here, with some of the footage from this year's GameCamp and Indie Games Collective.


Thursday 19 June 2014

Tap Happy Sabotage on an 88-inch touchscreen

I was fortunate enough to be invited to the Microsoft headquarters in Reading, UK, to demo Tap Happy Sabotage to their staff. They had the game pre-installed on their 88-inch Perceptive Pixel Display.

Needless to say, it was an incredible experience. The display is very responsive, and the nature of the game meant we were reaching all over the screen to grab our cards.



I shot some video so you can get a feel for how it plays out!



Many thanks to the team at Microsoft for inviting me over, and for hosting a very successful demo session!

Saturday 7 June 2014

Speaking at Develop Conference 8th July 2014

Hi everyone! I'll be speaking again at this year's Develop Conference in Brighton, as part of the Evolve track. So if you're there, please do come along - my talk is at 12:15 on Tuesday 8th July and is all about building games for big touchscreens. Games, that is, like my very own Tap Happy Sabotage (which is, by the way, coming to Windows 8 on June 19th). Details of the talk are below:


Thinking Bigger: Developing for Large-Scale Touchscreens

Touch has been the defining interface of recent years, and the latest influx of large-scale PC touch screens is the start of a brave new world for games and physical play. Designer Alistair Aitcheson is known for his heavily physical tablet games and the creator of "Tap Happy Sabotage", a game built for up to 52 players on a single 27-inch touch screen.

In this talk he demonstrates why this sea change is not to be overlooked, and how developers can make the most of this exciting technological shift. He explores the play possibilities that set big screens apart from tablets or phones, and draws on personal experience to show the design strategies that make a touch game great at scale.

He also investigates how games for these interfaces fit into our current app marketplaces, what existing tablet games need to do to adapt to this new interface, and the potential for this technology to drive innovative installation-based game projects.


Develop Conference has always been a favourite of mine, and I'm really excited to be back speaking about a subject which I am incredibly passionate about!