(Now Distinctive Games)
Remember the days of J2ME fliphones? I made games for them with Distinctive Developments, Sheffield. In a lot of ways it was a step back after working with early smartphones: J2ME phones could usually only have one button pressed at once, and had extremely low amounts of RAM. One game I ported, Zaxxon, actually had more RAM available in the arcade original (1981) than the lowest-spec phone I was porting to! Later on we started working on early iPhone and Android phones, which was a huge advance. Working on extremely low-spec devices was fun in itself: figuring out what could be cut to fit the RAM and processing speed available without compromising quality on the better devices was an interesting challenge.
I got the opportunity to make an original game, FlipZoo, a one-month project. It was designed to accommodate for the bad phone keyboards of the time by being a one-button game. One keypress toggled all the disappearing platforms or obstacles on, pressing again toggled them all off. The idea was to guide your little lemming-like animals to the exit by toggling the platforms at exactly the right time.
I also worked on the 3D J2ME version of Tomb Raider: Underworld, coding the climbing sections, a snow-racing minigame and a wire connecting minigame, and a cog-linking minigame, as well as writing some of the dialogue.
