Hexas Hold'em
An actual for real game I released on Google Play
Finally, a fully published game
Late development build running on an emulator.
One I left EA in 2015, I immediately knew I wanted to try building an Android game again after having to drop
the Amoebunnies mobile game I had started in 2011. After brainstorming a few
ideas, I settled on a puzzle game that had a poker theme. The game consists of a grid of 19 hexagons each
with a card displayed on it and the player's task is to swipe 5 connected cards to make the highest value poker
had that they can. Bonus points are applied if the player finds the highest hand possible and the bonus
multiplies for every best hand found in a row.
To add a little extra flavor to the game, every 30 seconds one of the tiles is turned face down and cannot be used. There are 4 power-ups that can be activated to help the player control what the best hand is. There's swap so they can trade the location of two cards, flip which flips a card that had been turned face down, shuffle which re-deals the cards shown, and wild which lets the player replace any card with a joker. Once a power is used, it is deactived, however upon reaching a score threshhold a random used power will be refreshed.
Although I successfully launched the game to the Google Play store as a free download, any time someone would search for my title, Google assumed you mistyped Texas Hold'em and would display ten or so results matching that before displaying my game. In the end I got very few downloads outside of family and friends. I value the experience though, even including making my first purchases on Fiverr for artwork. The game has since been removed from the Play Store as I did not keep up with required updates. The game still works on my personal devices and should on yours if you'd like to give it a try. Please note leaderboard functionality is broken due to being out of date.
