About Jack’s Gauntlet

This picture is from 2008. It shows me introducing my daughters to iPhone. I can still remember the app. It is called Bubbles by Hogbay software. With some nostalgia I always install it onto every new iPhone I get.

This video is from 2010. It shows my first venture into iOS programming. Inspired by Bubbles, I had constructed  an application for my two daughters who were learning their shapes. I recorded my voice and then I used GarageBand to raise the pitch so it would sound silly. Then I used shapes to make an interactive experience that would be fun for kids to play with. Back in 2010, I made this video as part of a little online resume as I shopped myself around for various jobs.

Fast forward 5 years, and today I have continued to evolve the concept of this game. I composed the original app using Objective C. Today, I have continued these explorations with Unity. See? The shapes are still there, and the game still interacts with them. But I’ve taken things to the 3D realm.

As a kid, I really enjoyed playing Summer Games on my Commodore 64. My mother had a government job and worked in an office with some nice coworkers. One of them sold her a used Commodore 64. My mother didn’t know anything about computers, but she knew they were important, so she got me one. Back then we were really a poor family, so I always think about how wise her sacrifice was. A few years later she met my step dad. He drove an oil truck and delivered home heating oil to customers in Philadelphia. He always had the chance to meet many people. One of the people he met was an avid computer gamer and this person provided my dad with some games for me. Summer Games was one of my very favorites. I would spend hours on my Commodore 64 pole vaulting, racing, and diving. This concept of a family of challenges always stuck with me. Over the past few months I have used Unity to make a game where tilting an iPhone causes a ball to roll. Another game involved flipping a coin. I also made a game where a basketball could be thrown into a net, and another game where a character can be controlled for the purpose of collecting space boxes. With Summer Games in mind, it was a natural idea to collect the games under one roof and use a menu to access the different games. At some point, I might break some of the games out into their own apps so I can more fully develop their features, but for now they all exist happily together under the moniker of Jack’s Challenges. And this has been the history of how it came to be.