UFO Shoot’em Up is one of Jacob Honda’s earliest titles, launched in 2016 for Android and iOS, and it’s a first-person shooter game where the concept of moving your spaceship is as absent as my motivation to get out of bed on a Monday morning!
The game is incredibly simple—so simple that your ship moves on its own! Players just need to tap the screen to zap incoming UFOs and other obstacles, which was all the rage back in 2016.
At the time, we had grand plans: dividing players into evil planetary empires and heroic liberation armies, battling for territory like it was an intergalactic game of capture the flag. Players could upgrade their ships and planets with points earned in gameplay.
But alas, our player base didn’t grow as much as we hoped, and we never got around to those epic updates. However, the power-up feature we added somehow became a hit with a few players from Finland (or was it Norway? Who can keep track?).
For a while, we were locked in a daily battle for leaderboard supremacy with our Finnish friends, but eventually, it turned into a game of ‘who can wait longer before logging in’—and then, poof! Everyone disappeared like socks in a dryer!