A FATHER-SON duo is looking to build on their work after recently releasing their first collaborative project in the form of a mobile game.

Chris Turner, 52, and his son Alexander Summerfield, 21, of Ramsey started worked on their game, Crystal Caves, for more than a year before releasing it this month.

The game is currently on the Google Play Store and Chris is working on registering it with Apple to gain more exposure.

He said: “The game has advertising in it as well so I make a small amount of money from that, but it costs £95 annually to register an app with Apple.

“I am devoted to this business and I’ve taken some reusable code from Crystal Caves that I plan on using for other games.

“Alexander and I are definitely thinking about the next stage and we there is no doubt we will do something.”

For an app to be eligible for the Apple app store, it must fit certain criteria.

As of April 2022, all iOS apps submitted on the app store must be built with at least Xcode 13 and the software development kit for iOS 15.

Xcode is Apple’s integrated development environment, used to develop software on their products.

The app most also be optimised for the latest iOS, tested on devices and then submitted for review.

Mobile gaming is a very lucrative industry as per Statista, in 2022 smartphone games accounted for 45 per cent of video gaming revenue globally.

Revenue in the mobile games sector is projected to reach £2.24 billion in 2022 and there are more than 9,000 games from British publishers on Google Play.

In terms of Chris’s journey, he has pursued games development since the age of 13.

Chris said: “At that age I was constantly bugging my parents for a computer for Christmas.

“At that point I’d already got the bug and it was a natural progression going through school and college learning about computers.

“My first programming job was working for Boulton and Paul in Norwich and I’ve gone on from there.”

His first game, Crystal Caves is an action-puzzle game that presents a 2D landscape in which the player has to navigate by removing soil obstacles.

Players have to be careful as there are boulders falling from above that can hurt the game’s character and ruin progress.

There are 100 levels in the game, each with a different objective such as collecting 20 blue crystals.

Chris said: “I enjoyed most aspects of it because I’m a software developer at heart and I do it in my free time.

“Games are fun to write in general but creating the rules and testing them out was the best part.

“Ironically, it was the most challenging part as well because you might think you’ve got everything working properly and spot something wrong, meaning you have to test it all over again, it can be quite challenging.”

If you would like to try your hand at the game visit bit.ly/3wZgb6V.