My first video game crush was in the early 1980s. Installed in our little convenience store in Buckfield, Maine was a wooden cabinet, blistering with vivid light and artwork of outer space. It was Asteroids, and even though I could not play it well, the bright lines were hypnotizing and had me enthralled. Ever since, I’ve wanted to build my own game, using pixels to build a different world. I battled my way into a very cursory understanding of BASIC, enough to build simple word games or quizzes, but could not parse out the mysteries of sprites enough to build anything more than that.

Just recently I’ve decided to revisit this desire to build games and try my hand on modern, objective languages with sprite libraries easily imported into them and assets you can just drop in. It’s been a blast! I’m far more happy than I thought I would be to announce that I’ve released my first game for iOS using Swift, WINTER HOP.

I wanted to build an extremely simple game, as simple as I could, but something that would transport the player into another world, the same way that ASTEROIDS did when I was a child. I’m not sure that I one hundred percent achieved this goal, but I’m elated at the result!

Winter Hop is available on the App Store! Please give it a try, rate and review it, and see how far you can get my red-scarfed friend!