Astraware was my first really fun job out of university. It was a scrappy startup run out of a little office in Keele University business park. Everyone there loved games and loved to make them, in the true indie spirit. They specialized in PalmOS games – a very early smartphone/personal organizer platform with a stylus-based interface. We also worked on early Windows phone games (PocketPC) and as I was leaving, moved to iPhone development.
Everything in Astraware was hand-coded in C++ – no engines, and the bosses had strict rules against using anything remotely costly in terms of ram or CPU. STL was discouraged, Boost strictly forbidden, and virtual inheritance frowned upon. Saving every bit via bit-shifting to pack small values in integers was company policy This led to some of the best-performing and popular games on that early platform. They mostly ported the casual games popular at the time: PopCap games a specialty. I learned an incredible amount about how to make games playable for a huge audience and how to optimize for weak hardware. I also learned a lot about deadlines: Astraware games usually took about 2-4 months to port, so the pace was fast.
Complete list of games developed for Astraware: Bejeweled 2, Chuzzle, Insaniquarium, Insaniquarium Deluxe, Tradewinds, Pixelus, Cubis, Fruit Frolic, StarPop, TipTop, Pixelus, Crazy Daisy, Astraware Sudoku
Original Games
The games I felt I made the biggest contribution to were two original games, Crazy Daisy and Sudoku.
Crazy Daisy was my own design, a matching game where you tap on daisies to rotate them to match petals with adjacent flowers. Designing cute, colorful casual games has been a passion for me ever since.
Sudoku was a big hit for Astraware at the time: I pitched it to my boss Howard at the start of the Sudoku puzzle craze in 2005, and we made it as fast as we could: I made the interface and Howard made the random Sudoku generation algorithm. There were no other released Sudoku games at the time, so we had to design the interface from scratch, with respect to the PalmOS screen that didn’t have enough pixels to display all the numbers. The game was out in about a month and caught the crest of the wave of the Sudoku craze and it made a LOT of money. Just watching the money rolling in was wild. Astraware had a web interface set up so we could see how sales were going for each game – very motivating, although I didn’t get a cut!