ONES TO WATCH

Meet UK gaming’s ones to watch

Say hello to five up-and-coming game creators taking on the world.

Our team of App Store editors are all about celebrating new and interesting games; but here, we’re going behind the scenes to meet some of the independent creators behind some of them.

These folks are making games in tiny teams – or even entirely by themselves. And we think they’ve got big futures ahead of them.

Lulu Kadhim

Kadhim spotted an open position at Zombies, Run! developer Six To Start on Twitter back in 2016. Having played the running-meets-storytelling game before, she jumped at the opportunity to help make it.

She started out in a support role, but quickly moved into the production team to help write snippets of the world’s fiction here and there.

Kadhim is also an editor at Strange Horizons magazine and has written fiction and non-fiction for The Book Smugglers, Vice and Translunar Travelers Lounge.

Her full debut as a writer in the game came in a June 2019 story called Track the Ripper, in which you, the runner, are on the trail of Jack The Ripper.

She then moved into commissioning and editing new stories within Zombies, Run! too, as it continues to expand its catalogue of jog-along audio stories. Indeed, her work has led to a recent move into a new full-time writing role at Brace Yourself Games, maker of Crypt of the NecroDancer.

Dean Blacc

By day Dean’s an iOS app developer, but in his spare time – for almost five years – he’s been developing his love letter to ‘90s beat ’em ups: Adventures of Kidd.

It’s a charming, retro-style scrapper with a knowing sense of humour and an easy-to-slip-into play style. Dean did all of the coding and artwork entirely by himself, and hired work acquaintance Josh Mobley to create the soundtrack.

Not content with making entire videogames in his spare time, Blacc keeps himself busy outside of games with several other design and photography projects.

The game arrived on the App Store in April 2019, and ever since Dean has been busily working on a new character and new game modes, which will be added into the game in the coming months.

Megan Wheeler

The idea for Cat Tap, a cute hybrid of virtual pet and high-score game, came to Megan Wheeler when she was studying Computer Game Art at the University of Creative Arts in Farnham.

Inspired by her own mischievous kitty-cats, she learned to code, built a demo and pitched it to her University’s incubator program.

Next, she got extra programming support and fleshed the project out some more, releasing the game on the App Store as part of her course.

Wheeler and Gallagher continue to work on Cat Tap, which has evolved from a speculative student project into side hustle.

After she graduated, Wheeler landed a job at Bournemouth developer Memini, where she met coder David Gallagher. They became business partners, and relaunched Cat Tap in November 2019 with more polish and extra features to please its cat-loving players.

Wheeler and Gallagher are now working on more new features and content for their pet project, which will be added soon.

Zut Games

Experienced game developer Fritz Solares made colour-sorting puzzle game I Love Hue for his partner Fergus Evans as a Christmas present.

It was inspired by Evans’ tendency to sort all of the books in their flat by colour as a soothing, stress-busting slice of self-care.

Fergus Evans (left) and Fritz Solares (right) turned their love of sorting books by colour into a game – and now work together as Zut Games.

The original game was so popular that the duo decided to make a sequel, neatly titled I Love Hue Too.

With Solares handling programming and design and Evans on creative direction, the duo released their new game just in time for Valentine’s Day on February 13th 2020. Awww.

Loveshark

Tara Reddy has been working in the futuristic field of augmented reality (AR) since 2016. She and co-founder Sam Weekes both worked at AR app Blippar until they set up their own business, Loveshark, in August 2018.

The London studio’s debut game LaserDraw – think Pictionary in AR – was built and released in just five weeks that same summer. Then, Tara and her team started prototyping several other augmented reality ideas.

Tara Reddy and Sam Weekes founded AR pioneer Loveshark in the belief they could make and release games super-fast. And they were right.

They landed upon Dance.io, a game that tracks your movements using your device’s camera and scores you on how well you’re matching the moves on-screen.

Again, it was (somehow) built in a matter of weeks, and since its launch in July 2019, Loveshark has been adding new content and features to the game regularly.