GAMES AND APPS
Yeah, We Make Games Too
We originally founded Inflatable Studios to be a game design company.
Here are some of the projects we've released or are working on.
One Page Solo Engine
Type: Pen-and-Paper Roleplaying
Link: One Page Solo Engine, and the App
One Page Solo Engine is a minimal, all-in-one toolkit to play your favorite tabletop RPGs without a GM. The document contains rules for how to use various random tables called Oracles to generate content and answer questions like a GM normally would. The document is completely free and has become popular in the solo roleplaying community.
We also implemented an app for OPSE that runs on the web and mobile and generates the results for you without having to roll the dice. The app also lets you chronicle your game to share with others later.
Jisho Joshu
Type: Learning App
Link: Jisho Joshu
This app helps Japanese language learners identify words and easily look up the definition. Jisho Joshu means "Dictionary Assistant" in Japanese, and the app highlights words and lets you hover over them to see see more info. It works okay, but there are better tools out there for analyzing Japanese. Turns out natural language parsing is hard.
The app integrates with an online service called WaniKani that teaches kanji and vocabulary for the Japanese language. Jisho Joshu links with your account and highlights the words you put in based on whether you have already learned them or not.
Also there's an animated assistant who is just adorable!
Mad Grab
Type: Mobile Gacha
Link: Unreleased
Mad Grab is a mobile game where you operate one of those claw machines like you see at an arcade. The difference is that instead of trying to catch a single prize, you're trying to catch as many as you can before time runs out. To help you with this, you can get all sorts of crazy power-ups, like turning the claw into a cannon or summoning a UFO with a tractor beam to abduct the prizes.
The game is 95% finished and unreleased. We need to release it, but honestly we don't understand marketing well enough yet. The mobile market is so saturated and if we don't do the release right, it's likely to just be ignored forever. It is a lot of fun, though.