![]() “I was learning the iOS platform as I was developing the game, which made the development process quite a bit slower,” Rajan says. The iOS version of the game took around five months to develop. “It was a constant balancing act, I spent way too much time mulling over the pacing of A Dark Room.” “I had to make sure that the game progressed quickly, but not so fast that it left the player confused,” Rajan continues. By contrast, a mobile game is all about instant gratification - particularly when there’s a payment involved. On a desktop, an idle game is perfect since it can be left for long periods of time without the need for activity. One of the main problems for Rajan was that idle web games typically don’t translate well to mobile. “I’d like to say that porting A Dark Room to iOS was a similar task.” “It’s very difficult to translate a piece of poetry from one language to another,” Rajan says. If he had simply seen it as a way to make a quick buck, it might have been more straightforward. “I wish it was as easy as just taking the web version and translating it to a language that iPhone understands,” he says. Amir Rajan found out about A Dark Room online. ![]() “For the next five months, developing the iOS version of A Dark Room was my drug,” Rajan says. Intrigued, Townsend gave him the stamp of approval. He emailed Townsend immediately to ask if he could port the game over to iOS, perhaps adding a bit of his own creative spin. ![]() “Two months in, I came across the web version of A Dark Room,” Rajan says. His living costs were low and he had sold most of his belongings to support himself. While he sat at home in Dallas, Texas, he was busy planning a way to strike out on his own. Rajan had been working in the software industry for the past eight years but was currently taking a sabbatical to reevaluate his career. One of the places the game made a decent-sized splash was on Hacker News.Ī software engineer named Amir Rajan read about it there. Once Townsend put together an initial version, he posted it on social media and sat back to watch the analytics. Its sparse appearance drove toward an equally sparse apocalyptic setting.” “I put together the UI for the opening screen before I had much of an idea about anything. Like a lot of creative projects that come together quickly, the speed gave the whole endeavor a stream-of-consciousness feel. “When I’m excited about an idea, I never have the discipline to sit down and hammer out a design first,” he says. Townsend spent just one day thinking about possible directions for the project, and then jumped straight into coding it - hacking the game together with javascript with a view to playing it in the web browser. Inspired, his initial idea was to make A Dark Room “an idle game with a narrative.” “I was totally in love with apparent simplicity and unexpected depth,” Townsend says. “I suppose you could say that I am an enthusiastic amateur.”įor Townsend, the genesis of A Dark Room came when he played Candy Box, a role-playing 2013 browser game featuring ASCII art, created by a 19-year-old student in France. “I wrote my first game in QBasic on the family 386, and I’ve been hooked ever since,” creator Michael Townsend says. Towsend’s web version of A Dark Room in, err, action.
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