XOR was the resolution of a creative itch I'd been wanting to scratch for over 20 years.

I was working for a videogame company as Art and Design Manager when we were awarded a Nintendo development license. The original Nintendo Gameboy had just been released, and we needed some game designs for it (as well as the NES).

One of the game designs I came up, Scarabeus,  with was eventually released as "Pyramids of Ra" by Matchbox with me as designer and artist. However, my original idea was to design a game that would give me the opportunity to also program in machine code. I'd was familiar with Z80 which the Sharp LR35902 had a lot of similarities with (unlike the NES which used a Ricoh 2A03 which was very similar to the 6502).

After using Unity3d as an artist/technical artist for several years on the Tiger Woods Online game, it occured to me that I could go one step further and use this excellent game engine I was familair with to create a mobile puzzle game on my own based on my original concept for the project.

Harking back to my first indie days int he game industry, I set out a goal of not just completing and publishing a game but doing it without any outside help. And so, the game I finally released only contained content that I created (with the exception of the underlying Unity3D runtimes of course). That is, every bit of art, every line of C# code, every level design and every note of music was all created by me.

I also made sure the game was data-driven, in part though sheer necessity. While it would have been simple to just create every level as a unique Unity3d scene, this would have generated a large number of assets to have to manage.

After designing 64 beginner levels, I decided to release the game to the public with the intention of adding another suite of 64 levels to introduce the player to the remaining game mechanics I'd implemented as a free update. I never actually got round to this as I landed a full time job that required my full attention.

I'm now dusting off the cobwebs from the code and planning on releasing XOR 2 as a new title.