A Look Back
At this point in my career, I had left the game industry and had been teaching for around five years. I taught a variety of different courses ranging from 3D art to coding game in a variety of engines. Indie games were starting to come into their prime with many different opportunities, including a vibrant Flash game scene. This made me want to get back into making games, not just because it was fun, but also so that I could better understand how that marketplace functioned so I could bring that knowledge back into the classroom.
As chance would have it, I was hanging out at a Full Indie event, a local indie dev meetup, when I bumped into my friend Brandon, who I had worked with back in my Radical days. He was also looking to make some indie games for the same reason. Neither of us wanted to put our full investment into creating a full-scale game, but rather we wanted to build something with minimal art and a simple, fun game design. Something that we could build quickly and attempt to sell it.
In early March 2011, we set a challenge to quickly prototype a concept each and then show each other and choose one. I created a game in GameMaker that I called FlipFlop, which is what became Flipnaut. Our goal was to try and get the game built in 3 months, which was not realistic considering we both were working normal jobs and doing this on the side. It ended up taking about 6 months to get the game more or less complete and polished to a level we were satisfied with. We then put it up on the marketplace and ended up selling the front splash page for a few hundred dollars. We learned a massive amount during that time and we planned on making a larger version of this game, but as happens in life, we both went onto to different things. Maybe one day we will resurrect it, who knows!