CRABITRON: Giant Space Crab Simulation — Crabstarter

Crabitron has been featured by Apple on New and Noteworthy! We'd like to thank everyone for their overwhelming positive responses so far.

Version 1.0.2 has also been released with some bug-fixes and support for Everyplay video sharing.

For anyone who has experienced the freeze while fighting Cyberclops we are working hard on getting an update to fix this ASAP.

Crabitron has launched! And so has this Crabstarter!

Please note that our first day's sales figures won't be available until April 21. The sales up there at the moment occurred in the past when we accidentally released Crabitron twice.

Crabitron is a giant space crab simulation for iPad. (Possibly the only giant space crab simulation.) John came up with the concept in 2011 by attempting to design a game that was only feasible on a tablet. After the initial prototype, Simeon created the art and John did the programming.

(Also: Josh Rogers handled additional art and media. Christopher Larkin composed the awesome in-game music. And Colin Capurso was our beautiful hand model for the trailer above.)

After two years of development we ended up with a game that we loved. We had no idea how to market it. So we decided we would do a Kickstarter — only, we had already built the game. This led to the idea of a "reverse Kickstarter," a kind of system where you could fund the game, see how well the game was doing, and get your reward immediately.

Yes.

But you also get to see how well (or poorly) Crabitron is doing financially, and exactly how well Crabitron is ranking on the App Store.

While our Crabstarter is intended to be a humorous take on Kickstarter, you get a quality game for your $5. And it's a game that we want to keep working on. To that end, we've added "stretch goals" (scroll down). Once the development costs are recovered, hitting these stretch goals will result in fun updates to Crabitron.

Yes. Crabitron has two in-app-purchases for this reason. There are two permanent upgrade items: a coin doubler ($3) and coin tripler ($5). We included these items in Crabitron because they are the sort of in-app-purchase that we usually buy in games.

Should we make our funding goal, here's where we'd like to take Crabitron in future updates:

One of the advantages of Crabstarter over a more traditional funding model (such as Kickstarter) is that 100% of the development risk has already been taken by us. We have fronted the time and development costs to get this project into a state that we are pleased to release.

There is always the risk that you could back our project and not like the result. For that, we suggest that you watch the trailer above. We've tried to present our game clearly and honestly. If you like what you see then we're sure you'll love Crabitron.

We're also faced with the challenge of not meeting our funding goal. If that happens, we still plan to make cool things. We just won't be able to work on everything we want to work on; we might have to scale down our dreams a bit.

Two Lives Left is a tiny game company located in Adelaide, Australia. Formed by Simeon Saëns, John Millard, and Dylan Sale. We met while doing our PhDs in Computer Science. We decided to leave academia, because it was much more fun to build games and creative tools. We have recently created Codea, a visual programming environment for iPad, and Cargo-Bot, a game about programming; Crabitron is our latest project.