Around 3 years ago, I published Gravity Quest to the iOS store. I developed the game during the summer of 2014 after finishing my PhD and starting my new job in industry. Developing Gravity Quest was challenging and fun. I learned about the Phaser game framework, implemented custom collision detection, spent hours fiddling with the game's pixel art, crowd-sourced the creation of levels for the game, and wrote the just linked blog posts (and others) about the process.

Gravity Quest

I originally sold Gravity Quest for $0.99, but quickly found that I could not make any money this way and rather risked deterring potential users. So I dropped the price all-together after a few months, and Gravity Quest was overall downloaded a few thousand times. However, I eventually lost interest in further developing or promoting the game. When in 2016 it was time to once more renew my (paid) Apple developer account, I decided against it, and the game vanished from the iOS store.

I still kept a copy of the game on my phone, though. And when I recently, rather by accident, opened it, I found that the controls and sound had stopped working. This annoyance and the time since I last worked on the game motivated me to fix things.

So I dug up the source code and starting working again on Gravity Quest. Mostly, I updated Phaser (from version 2.0.7 to version 2.8.0), which fixed the control and sound issues. I also refactored the code to make (some) use of modern ES6 features, I set up a new webpack-based build process, and fixed some minor issues. I tried to ensure backwards-compatibility, even if it meant having to keep some awkward variable names.

In effect, Gravity Quest version 1.2.0 emerged. And as of yesterday, it is available in the iOS store.

I also made the full source code of the game available in this repository. The code is a bit of a mess - but I think source code of games easily is.

I am happy to receive feedback on the game or its code via Twitter.