★ Clickable: Click to Swim!

Dakota and I are always kicking around silly ideas for videogames. I hadn't worked on a game since the mid-Nineties when everything I did was written in Turbo Pascal for DOS. But when Dakota and I thought up the concept for Click to Swim, I knew I had to make it real.

It took me about three days of work to hack out the first version, mostly spent drawing 50 versions of a little naked guy treading water. It was a lot of fun, and I felt like I was learning a lot about how Flash 9.0 works. The game went through a few revisions as Dakota and I played it and sent it around to our friends. We even tested out a multiplayer mode. I probably swam for about 20 hours while on conference calls.

The final version, to the right, represents about 6 furious hours of refactoring and redrawing (and a restore-from-backup) that I did a few weeks ago. To commemorate the glorious launch of this new section of our website, I think its time for this to become the very first "XOXCO Clickable!" I am now attaching the official seal of "It works, ship it!"

All of the work we did, including all the previous versions (and a few wallpapers) are available on Swim's permanent page: CLICK TO SWIM

- Ben Brown, Mar 11, 2009