Why Create a New City Builder in 2025?

Uptown - Classic City Builder for Mac - Oct 14, 2025

If you were around in the early ’90s, you might remember the magic of booting up SimCity on an old Macintosh. On that black and white screen my first little towns came alive — growing from a gathering of houses into bustling cities. By the time SimCity 2000 came along in full color, I was hooked.

I spent countless hours watching my creations evolve: laying out zones, waiting for houses, offices and factories to rise, placing special landmarks such as airports, parks and police stations — or watching with a mixture of fear and exitement when a tornado tore everything apart. My favorite part was always the early game. Starting small, sketching out the outlines of a town, and watching it slowly come to life. Those early games struck a perfect balance: not too complex, but still rich enough to make you feel like a city planner and mayor all at once.

Why City Builders Still Work Today

Fast forward to 2025, and city builders are still a very popular genre. So are cozy, creative games where you can craft and tinker at your own pace. The formula behind the original SimCity still resonates: simulation-driven play that lets you discover the rules of a little world and test what works (or doesn’t).

Those older games, as brilliant as they are, look and sound their age. Their charm is timeless, but pixelated graphics and crunchy sound effects don’t always connect with a younger audience (e.g. my kids). For a genre that’s all about immersion, a fresh coat of paint goes a long way.

Enter Uptown

And that’s where Uptown comes in. My goal is simple: take the DNA of early SimCity, give it somewhat modern graphics and sound, and gently expand the simulation without piling on overwhelming complexity. Uptown will introduce new landmarks, extra buildings, and tweaks that make the city feel more alive — but the core loop will stay faithful to what made those games so fun in the first place.

Think of it as a love letter to the classics, updated just enough to feel fresh.

Why Mac Only?

One unusual decision I’ve made is to build Uptown just for Mac. The reason is personal: I am a game developer using Unity by trade, but for my hobby projects I enjoy using Apple’s tools like Swift and SpriteKit. A change of pace, that keeps the project fun and my Swift skills alive. The tradeoff is that the audience is smaller — but Uptown will run well on modest hardware, and Mac users rarely get games designed specifically for them. Also something we haven’t seen since the ’90s: Mac-exclusives. Who remembers Marathon, Glider, Myst and tons of shareware by Ambrosia?

A Modest Scope with Big Heart

I’m keeping the scope of Uptown roughly in line with the original SimCity — simple, approachable, but still deep enough to get lost in. A dash of SimCity 2000 will sneak in as it brought many improvements, along with a few of my own ideas. Keeping that scope small has already proven to be quite the challenge. At the end of the day, Uptown is about recapturing the feeling of those early days: the joy of starting small, the excitement of watching a city come alive, and the satisfaction of being both designer, creator and destroyer of your own little world.

👉 Next time, I’ll dive into Uptown’s roots and talk about the game’s “DNA” — how the original SimCity source code, and modern tools shaped what I’m building today.

The Secret History of Mac Gaming - A Great Read!

General - Oct 1, 2025

Recently I was gifted the book ‘The Secret History of Mac Gaming’ by Richard Moss. It was an awesome read, bringing back memories from my childhood and teenage years when me and my brother played almost every game available on the Mac. We were a Mac-only household so we would scavenge the early internet and magazine disks for games and demos to play. Just like today, most games came out on the DOS/Windows PC, but you would be surprised how many Mac-exclusive games were published. It was a thriving market with solo developers creating awesome games mostly distributed as shareware. This book makes sure not to miss a single one!

About the book

The book is published by Bitmap Books and if you are familar with their releases, you’ll know what to expect; A beautifully bound hard-cover book with great typesetting and full color imagery on high-quality paper. You’ll read all about classics such as Armor Alley, F/A 18 Hornet, Solarian, Crystal Quest, Glider Pro, Marathon and many more. With great screenshots and stories from the developers that will take you right back to the 80s and 90s.

Written by award-winning journalist and game historian Richard Moss, The Secret History of Mac Gaming draws on a combination of archive material and around 80 interviews with key figures from the era to tell the story of those communities and the game developers who survived and thrived in an ecosystem that was serially ignored by the outside world. It’s a book about people who followed their hearts first and market trends second, showing how clever, quirky, and downright wonderful video games could be.

Wait, what?!

When I reached the chapter on John Calhoun’s Glider and Glider Pro for the Mac, I was shocked and surprised to find my own name in the book. Mind you, I did not have anything to do with the original. I merely helped bringing over a source port of the original game named Aerofoil by Eric Lasota to modern macOS. So I guess that will be my 2 seconds of fame. Unless my own Mac-exlusive game Uptown makes any waves of course ;)

Mini Football Celebrates 5th Anniversary with Release 4.0

General - Sep 25, 2025

As a senior developer on Mini Football, I am proud to announce the latest release, version 4.0, marking the 5th anniversary of the game. The game has been overhauled in many ways, setting it up for the next five years. From a technical perspective, version 4.0 is probably our biggest update yet, and it rolled out very smoothly.

Happy 5th Anniversary! To celebrate 5 incredible years, we’re launching a massive update with learnings and player feedback from these past years. Get ready for a whole new Mini Football experience!

What’s New:

• Player Cards Reimagined: Discover stunning new card designs and instantly recognize the power of each player with clearer rarities.
• Upgraded Progression System: We’ve completely overhauled the tier and stadium progression system to make every match more rewarding.
• Boosted Drop Rates: We’ve significantly boosted the drop rates for Legendary and Mythical players and made all rates visible in-game for full transparency!
• UI & Visual Polish: Experience a smoother game with widespread UI improvements and new gameplay visual effects that make every goal more exciting.

Thank you for an amazing 5 years! This is just the beginning of a new era. See you on the pitch!

Read more on the official support page here!