A good many of you know me for my work on the hit iPhone games geoDefense and geoDefense Swarm (geoDefense is also on Windows Phone 7, by the way).  I did these two titles while wearing my other hat, that of CEO of Critical Thought Games LLC.  So it might be somewhat confusing to see a game by this other company, Simutronics, attributed to me.   For those of you who are not familiar with my play.net roots, some explanation is in order. 

So, for my geoDefense fans, here's the scoop…

I am the President & CEO of Simutronics Corp.  A company I co-founded over 25 years ago. We've been doing online and other games for all this time.  A couple years ago I started playing around with my new iPhone as a hobby and ended up creating geoDefense, which became one of those big iPhone game successes you hear about.  As such, I wrapped up that effort in an LLC named Critical Thought Games.  But for all its success, Critical Thought Games is essentially a one-man band (with occasional contributions from others), hobby company of mine.  

Simutronics Corp, on the other hand employs around 30 people.  And when we all decided our next title would be an iPhone game I was excited by the prospect of not having to do most everything myself.  This meant we could go much bigger with our ambitions.  Tiny Heroes, I knew, could be a much deeper game play experience, with higher production values than anything I could pull off alone in my spare time (even with Skippy's help!).

At the same time, I wanted to make sure that what we did held true to the geoDefense franchise in at least one respect:  strong game play, with razor sharp level balance.  Although we were doing a very different game than anything I've done before, it had to be something geoDefense fans would find challenging and worthy of their defense-game time.

I think we've accomplished that and more.  Specifically, the game is also much more approachable for the casual player.  We've broadened the difficulty range to be relatively casual at the easiest but blisteringly hard at the far extremes.  I've mentored my staff of designers in the style of defense that I like, and what makes geoDefense so special, but also let it grow in its own direction.  And I've leveraged my incredible staff of programmers, artists and others to bring a lot more to the table than I could ever imagine doing alone.

I won't spend much time in this post to sell you on the game.  That'll all happen soon enough.  But if you like geoDefense, you are going to really love the depth, attention to detail, and the surprises we've wrapped up into this great game Tiny Heroes.

As for when... we are in our final weeks.  Fixing bugs, reducing memory consumption, and doing daily rounds of testing and tweaking to refine it to perfection.  

Get ready to have your life consumed... again!