Welcome to the Broken Platypus Games website!
Broken Platypus Games is a company formed by Matt Guest with the express purpose of building the types of games he would love to play, but that don’t yet seem to exist (or don’t exist in the exact form he’d prefer.)
This website serves as a vehicle for writing about and distributing said games. At this stage, it’s more of a development Journal as we work towards creating our first game to be released for the iPhone.
If you’re interested in iPhone development or game development in general then be sure to add us to your news reader, follow @brokenPGames on twitter, or just pop in from time to time and see what we’re up to.
A little about Matt, if you’re interested:
I’m a web and application developer by day. Throughout my career I’ve worked on just about every type of website you can imagine, boring stuff like accounting software, and most recently as a Flex application developer for a pretty sweet digital publishing company. Other than a few small flash game contracts I haven’t really set a foot, or any other extremity, into the games space.
My interest in games is strong, however, and goes way back to my Atari 2600. Ever since I played my first round of Combat! I’ve wanted to learn how it was made. I tought myself to program with the specific intent of building games. I’d stay awake for days on end building little side scrollers and LORD “Other Places” modules (Seth Robinson is one of my heros) I was dedicated, trust me. Trying to get my 15 year old brain to understand what “mov al, 13h” actually meant without the luxury of today’s Internet was no simple feat. (big thank you to Andre LaMothe for helping with that one)
Anyway, while I was still in high school I got an opportunity to work with a local manufacturing company mentoring under their in-house developer and the rest is history. I still toyed with building games on nights and weekends from time to time, but writing business software and moving into web and Flash development paid the bills.
So here we are, many years later, with more than a few unreleased demos and half finished game projects under my belt and finally I am truly inspired. The state of the industry has returned to those good old days, when a programmer with an idea and a little elbow grease could whip up something interesting and sell it to other people. The days of shareware have returned and what’s bizarre about it is that this revolution is mainly occurring in, of all places, consoles and mobile devices – the two spaces that have traditionally been closed to all but the most serious, and publisher backed, development shops. In this world where casual games are soaring high and a small development team can make a name for itself on actual game consoles, well, all I can say is Huzzah!
This journey for me will begin on the iPhone, simply because I own one and really enjoy it as a gaming device. This doesn’t mean, however, that I’m not excited to see pathways being cleared to allow more and more developers to express themselves on the Wii, Xbox and PS3, as well as other mobile platforms like Android, Palm Pre, PSP and Nintendo DS. The future is wide open for the independent game developer, it’s up to us to innovate and fill those niche markets where people are hungering for something that big publishing can’t provide.
I plan to satiate with gusto.