That’s right, we’re bringing House of the Lost to the iPhone and iPod Touch as ‘House of the Lost Mini’!

Now, Mini doesn’t mean that you’re going to get less of the awesome action, or fewer randomly generated levels, or a smaller number of weapon crafting possibilities; it just means that we had to squish the files down to size and rework the controls to better fit the smaller screen size of a phone. Check out the screen below to see what I mean.

Directional Shooting

We’ve also heard the cries of our iPad players who want to see House of the Lost include directional shooting! This means that instead of lining up your character with the left-hand stick and then hitting the fire button to attack you can now attack in any direction (up, down, left, or right) depending on where you tap the attack button.

This is something that we’ve only added in the last week or so and I have a feeling that we’re going to need to continue tweaking it in the weeks ahead, so for now it is not the default control option, but you can turn it on from the settings screen. If you’re one of the players who have been asking for this please let us know what you think about it and how we should continue to improve it. We’ve still got a few graphics to swap out ( including the d-pad image in these pictures ) before we submit to Apple but you can expect House of the Lost Mini to be available in the next few weeks. Let me know what you think in the comments, and if you have any questions about the game shoot those over as well.

That’s right, the wait is finally over, you can go and grab House of the Lost Mini for your iPhone 4S ( or newer ) right now. Just follow this link: House of the Lost Mini for iPhone

Also, check out this sweet stop-motion promo trailer that we put together to celebrate the launch

As I stated in our last post, you’ll still get all the awesome roguelike action gameplay of House of the Lost that made the iPad version so great AND you get the brand new d-pad shooting control scheme! So go grab it from the app store and let me know what you think in the comments!

We've been hinting at it for awhile but now I'm happy to officially announce that we will be launching House of the Lost for OUYA this month! Let's be clear though, this isn't just some port to a new platform, this is absolutely the best edition of the game. Not only is this the most up-to-date version of the game from iOS and Android but this version includes a few new features that you can only get on OUYA, physical controllers and a new couch co-op mode!

Quick Recap

House of the Lost is an action/adventure game that challenges the player to survive a constantly changing haunted house while trying to save his sister. It plays similar to the dungeons in the original Legend of Zelda, or the more recent PC game Binding of Issac. You move from room to room fighting monsters, solving puzzles, and uncovering secrets on your way to a showdown with that level's boss. Along the way you will grow stronger, craft new weapons, and learn the secrets of the House, but if you fail you'll have to start back at the beginning. Also, each time you start over the house randomizes itself, changing the layout of its levels, placement of its monsters, and location of items and power-ups. All of this combines to give House of the Lost a real old-school challenge, and we are really excited to bring it to OUYA.

You can check out more screenshots and video of the game in action on our game page right here.

Physical Controllers

One of the biggest enhancements for the OUYA version of House of the Lost is support for the OUYA controller. You can now play House of the Lost with an actual controller in your hands, and it is a thing of beauty. Since the initial launch you have been asking us to refine the controls and we've made big improvements to how the game plays based on your feedback. However, none of those tweaks could make up for the fact that this game just needs to be played with an actual controller, and as soon as you get your hands on it I think you'll agree.
Our control setup for the game uses the left analog stick or d-pad to control your movement and the four face buttons ( O, U, Y, A ) give you directional fire independent of your movement. This allows you to move in one direction and then use the face buttons to fire in any other direction as you move. We've also mapped both analog triggers to item activation so you can use whichever one feels most natural to you.

House of the Lost has never controlled better than it does in this version, you've got to get your hands on it.

Couch Co-op

While the addition of physical controls has a huge impact on how you play the game our other massive addition could possibly be an even bigger deal, Couch Co-op! From the moment we got our hands on our Kickstarter OUYA console we've felt that it's best when you're playing together with a friend. OUYA is THE co-op console and we knew that we had to adapt House of the Lost to support co-op if we were going to do an OUYA release. We're very happy to say that adding a co-op mode was the best decision we could have possibly made.

In co-op mode you and a friend get to team up to defeat the House and rescue all the children trapped inside. Because the game is room based both players get to share the full game screen, there is no need to split the screen and limit your view on the action. Also, just because there are two of you now doesn't mean that things will be easy. Not only have we upped the difficulty on the enemies in co-op but we also have friendly fire turned on so you're going to need to be on your toes if you want to survive.

One area of the game that co-op really affected was our concept of permadeath. In House of the Lost you only get one chance to defeat the house and escape, if you die along the way you become a 'Lost Soul' and have to restart your journey from the beginning. When we started working to add a second player to the mix we realized that there was an interesting way to allow you to work around this issue and we decided to create a way for one player to bring the other back into the game. When one of the players dies in co-op mode they will transform into a 'Lost Soul' and disappear into the house while the other player continues on with the quest.

If you've played House of the Lost before you may know that you can find these 'Lost Souls' in different rooms of the house and if you save them they unlock secret shops where you can buy new weapons and items. In co-op mode, not only will you get access to the shop if you save a 'Lost Soul' but you'll also be able to bring your friend back into the game by saving them from the monsters. This makes seeking out the 'Lost Souls' even more important and really adds a new level of tension as you're trying to find a way to get your buddy back into the game.

A Huge Update

In addition to what we've talked about today there are also a huge number of smaller changes and tweaks that have found their way into the OUYA version of House of the Lost. This has really been a labor of love for me over the last several months as I've been making these updates in my spare time while the rest of our team has moved on to other projects. All the hard work has payed off though, as I really feel like this version of the game brings back that feeling of a lazy summer afternoon playing SNES with my brothers. There is a certain kind of fun that you can only get when you're sitting in the same room and playing together on the same screen.

I hope when House of the Lost launches later this month you'll give it a try and get a little of that old-school gaming nostalgia as well.

Today I'm happy to announce that, even before release, we've already updated House of the Lost for OUYA! Over the last couple weeks we've been refining and adding new features to the upcoming OUYA release and I want to quickly highlight a few of them today.

New Game Plus

New Game Plus is an unlockable mode that allows you to continue playing a game after beating the final level, and now, House of the Lost has it! We've added a New Game Plus (NG+) mode to House of the Lost that allows you to keep your weapons, items, coins, and score from one play though and carry it over into another. This lets you continue to rack up high scores and gives you a better chance of crafting and permanently unlocking new weapon combinations. You'll need to watch out though, every enemy in the game gets more difficult in NG+ and their difficulty will continue to scale up even if you play through the game multiple times without dying. Although, I wouldn't bet on anyone being able to do that.

New Levels

In addition to the NG+ game mode, we've also added new map layouts for the House that will continue to keep you guessing as you play through the game. Each of these new map layouts will have new puzzles, new enemy placements, and new secrets to discover so you'll have even more game to enjoy.

When is it coming out?

We're finishing up the release right now and expect House of the Lost to launch on OUYA next week! As soon as we're confident on the launch date we'll let you know for sure but go ahead and call your friends to set up a game night for next week. You're going to need the help.

The day is finally here, House of the Lost is now available on OUYA!. After you watch our awesome launch trailer click on this link to hit our OUYA game page, where you can download the game directly to your OUYA no matter where you are right now!

Bringing House of the Lost to OUYA has been an incredibly long journey for us, and we are so excited to finally get to see it on the store. When we chipped in to the OUYA Kickstarter we were really hopeful that we were contributing to something that could change the way games are made, and made available to players. While I think that OUYA has had a few stumbles along the way they really have created a console that is welcoming and friendly to developers and players alike. Bringing together the open development standards seen on mobile and the living room/big screen/couch gaming aspect of the home console is a huge undertaking, but also something that is sorely needed in the industry right now. We're extremely proud to be a part of it! Now go play House of the Lost!

P.S. If you didn't already download the game to your OUYA you can do it now just by clicking this button!

Download House of the Lost Now!

Welcome to a very special post about a milestone that F5 Games has just passed, our 20th Anniversary as a company! It is hard to believe that we have been in business for two decades, but I suppose time files when you're having this much fun. To celebrate, I thought it would be nice to take a look back at the last 20 years of F5. We'll take a look at how and why we got started, the ups and downs we've experienced, and of course the games we've made along the way.

So, grab your favorite beverage and settle in as we take a journey through the first 20 years of F5 Games.

Humble Beginnings

F5 Games was founded on March 10th 2005, mainly as a way to get into E3. Don't get me wrong, it had been my dream to start a game company for years, and that was the plan once college was over, but when we realized that if we started the company in our last year of college we could take a trip out to LA and get in to E3, we decided to move up the time table.

After making the trek to E3 we were more excited than ever to start working on a real game that we could release into the market. Our first attempts were focused on the PC using the Torque Game Engine (or TGE) from a company called Garagegames. While we learned a lot about development during this time we quickly realized that we were not going to have the resources to develop the game we had in mind without a publisher or investor to help us bridge the gap.

Unfortunately for us, there wasn't much interest in funding a few recent college grads to build a game company in Oklahoma. Since our publisher search didn't bear much fruit, we had to take another look at our situation and make some decisions. How could we still fulfill our dream of making games if we didn't have the resources to complete our vision? We ended up making two changes to our approach, the first was to slim down the scope of our game projects and focus on 2D development, the second was to go 'get real jobs' to pay the bills and work on our game projects as a side gig.

F5 continued in that mode, with us learning a lot and working on new game prototypes but not really getting closer to launching anything, for the next couple years. And honestly, the story may have ended there if something hadn't come along that completed changed the game; the iPhone.

The App Store Changes Everything

I can still remember watching Steve Jobs announce the iPhone in early 2007. It was such an incredible change from what had come before that I knew it would be a success, but I had no idea how much it would end up changing the world. After getting the original iPhone later that year we started to brainstorm what kind of games we could put on a computer that you always had in your pocket. We got into the Jailbreak scene and began installing apps and games that we found online and were amazed at what could be done without any official support from Apple. By the time Apple released the App Store we knew this was the future for F5, we were going to be a mobile first game studio.

We started working with the iPhone SDK and prototyping simple and fun game concepts, and that led us to our first official release, Independence Night!

Independence Night - Released 11-30-2010

It may not looks like much now, but it will always have a special place in my heart. This was the first time we were able to 'get over the hump' and take a game all the way to release on the App Store! And even for a straight-forward game like Independence Night, that is no easy task. Our little game about a boy defending his home from aliens by shooting fireworks at them had made it to the App Store and was even featured by Apple in the 'New & Noteworthy' and 'What's Hot' sections of the store! It was a small thing, but we proved to ourselves that we could do it.

Our next release was an attempt to build something 'for the market', which in 2011 meant a widely approachable puzzle game. Our contribution to the genre was a block dropping puzzle game called IncrediBlox.

IncrediBlox - Released 06-01-2011

IncrediBlox was a much more complete game than Independence Night and it did much better on the store. Part of the reason for its success was the papercraft visual style and tricky puzzles. The fun characters, challenging puzzles, and up-beat music made IncrediBlox a great way to spend a few minutes of your day. I'm very proud of how it turned out.

After IncrediBlox we set our sights on something bigger. We had been scoping out a game that we considered to be the perfect match for the iPhone. It was a turn-based RPG that you played with your friends. It was D&D in your pocket and you could take your turn whenever you liked. We called it, Pocket Heroes.

Pocket Heroes - Released 07-12-2012

We decided to put together a prototype of our 'Words with Friends RPG' and take it to E3 2011 to see if we could get anyone interested in our idea. We fired up a project in our editor named E3Quest and we got to work. Over a couple weeks we were able to put together a single area that allowed two players to quest together, use their skills to fight some enemies, and get some loot at the end. It was small, crude, and the absolute minimum product that showed off our idea, but it was real, and it was awesome to see it working in real time.

Showing the game at E3 ended up being great for us. Not only did we get some press coverage from mobile game sites like TouchArcade, and 148 Apps, but we also started to hear from publishers who were interested in working with us to bring our RPG to market. It was great to have people excited about our game, but it also cranked up the pressure on us to really deliver with this release. Honestly, we didn't think it would take all that long to build, we had built the prototype in just a few weeks, so surely we could finish the game in about 6 months right?

As usually happens in game development, especially when making an RPG, things ended up taking far longer than we expected.

We were still working on the game as we entered into Summer 2012 and we decided to travel to E3 again and show the beta version of the game to the press. We received great feedback and went back to the office to keep cranking until Pocket Heroes was done. This time period is probably the only time I have really 'crunched' for a game deadline, and I don't recommend it to anyone. At the time, it felt like we had to do everything we could to complete the game, even if it meant drinking energy drinks at 2:00 AM to get one more hour of coding in before waking up and heading into work the next morning. It was a grueling time, but it really felt like it would all be worth it once we made it to launch.

On July 12 2012, we finally did launch Pocket Heroes and it was a very exciting time. Unfortunately, because we had been pushing so hard, we hadn't left enough time to fully test all of the circumstances that our players would be playing in and the bug reports started coming in. We spent the next several months continuing to update and improve the game but there were some aspects of the design that we just couldn't 'fix'. Our design was based on a group of friends deciding to get the game and play through the quests together, and when you played that way, it was great. After launch we learned that a large number of players wanted to meet a party and team up in the app, which wasn't something we had prepared for. Even after adding that functionality, what we found was that without the draw of playing with their real-life friends, many parties just stopped moving forward in the campaign. If the other people in your party stopped playing you ended up dragging 'zombie' characters from one quest to the next, and that was not a great way to play.

In the end, Pocket Heroes was a flawed game that you could have a lot of fun with if you played it in a certain way. It is something I have always wished we could have solved better, but to this day there really hasn't been anything else like it.

After the grind of working on Pocket Heroes we decided to work on something much smaller in scope that we could complete quickly and find the fun in right away. That project turned in to House of the Lost.

House of the Lost - Released 10-30-2012

House of the Lost was a great change of pace for us and a game that we all really enjoyed working on. It came together quickly and we were able to launch on iPad after just a few months of work. Over the next couple years we brought the game to several additional platforms, including iPhone, Kindle Fire, and even the OUYA indie console. Working with OUYA was a great experience and it made House of the Lost our first game to appear on a console!

The OUYA version of House of the Lost really ended up being the director's cut of the game. It had all the enhancements we had added since the initial launch, controller input which suited the gameplay much better than touchscreen controls, and it even had 2-player couch co-op! If you are lucky enough to still have an OUYA with House of the Lost installed, fire it up and you are sure to have a good time.

After House of the Lost, our next big release was an attempt to make a multi-player shooter that worked on mobile devices. There had been attempts to make FPS games on mobile by then but they just didn't fit the devices of the time. Our solution was to make a top-down multiplayer shooter that limited your visibility like an FPS. This game was 'The Hunted'

The Hunted - Released 11-20-2014

The Hunted has always been one of my favorite games to build. I can still remember the daily testing sessions that tended to run past quitting time because we just wanted to get in one more match. We built an exciting game with varied characters, lots of game modes, and 8 player cross platform multiplayer. It was a blast to play, and to this day, I brainstorm ways to bring it back for another round.

Also, how can you beat a land-shark character with a machine gun?

Time For Something New

After releasing The Hunted in 2014 I decided it was time to slow down and try to come up with some new ideas before launching anything else. The next several years were full of prototypes, studying the market, and learning new tools, but we didn't release another game until we kicked off our card game phase with Blackjack Masters.

Blackjack Masters - Released 12-20-2019

Blackjack Masters was something I built myself to try and better learn what worked in mobile gaming and what didn't. It allowed me to work on building new kinds of game loops, adding competitive social elements, and improving on our UI design. It's also a lot of fun to play, until you meet a bad run of cards that is. Blackjack Masters has been one of our most popular games and started a run of successful cards games on the App Store and on our latest platform, the Infinity Game Table by Arcade 1Up.

Bringing Players Together with the IGT

I first heard about the Infinity Game Table when I saw their Kickstarter video pitching a coffee table sized touchscreen device that focused on people playing together. I was instantly hooked, and I knew that I wanted to make games for it. We backed the Kickstarter, and not long after we received our table I contacted Arcade 1Up to see if F5 Games could build games for the IGT platform. We ended up being the first 3rd party developer to release a game on the IGT and we have had a great partnership with them ever since.

Blackjack Masters Party - Released 11-22-2021

Blackjack Masters Party took what was great about the mobile version of Blackjack Masters and blew it up to a full size casino experience for up to 4 players! It really captures the excitement of sitting around a table in the casino, but without all the regrets when your hand doesn't work out. Blackjack Masters Party was not only our first game for the IGT but along with the iPad version it has also been the most successful game in our history!

Block Breakerz - Released 06-13-2023

Our next release, Block Breakerz, hit both the iPad and IGT in the summer of 2023. Not only did the game find a great audience on the Infinity Game Table but we also received a feature from Apple on launch day! The fun action gameplay makes it easy to pick and play with your friends, family, or kids. Just try not to get too made when they start beating you.

All-In Texas Hold'em - Released 10-31-2023

Later in 2023 we released All-In Texas Hold'em for the Infinity Game Table and iPad. This game had a couple firsts for us, it was our first 6 player game for the IGT and we also decided to write our own Poker AIs that players could compete against. This ended up taking a lot of research and work to pull off, but the quality of games you can have with computer opponents makes it all worth it. Texas Hold'em has been one of our fastest growing games and looks like it will surpass Blackjack Masters in the next year as our most successful game.

Euchre Masters - Released 05-21-2024

Just last year, in 2024, we released Euchre Masters to the Infinity Game Table and iPad. Euchre is a great classic card game that is very popular in the mid-west and we wanted to make it easy for new players to learn and enjoy. We also really refined our presentation and UI for Euchre Masters and it shines through in the finished product. This is one of the most attractive games we have ever made.

BlackHearts - Released 01-14-2025

And that brings us back to 2025! Earlier this year, we released BlackHearts for the Infinity Game Table and it has been doing well over its first couple months. BlackHearts was our attempt to create a brand new card game, one that takes inspiration from the classics like Hearts and Pitch, but delivers something new and fun to play. This was also our biggest card game release yet as it includes 3 games in 1, so it took a little more time to polish but we are very proud of how it turned out.

What Does the Future Hold for F5 Games?

Now that we have finished our look at the last 20 years of F5, what comes next? How do we take the next step and reach new players all across the world with our games? What propels us to continue on and still be around in another 20 years?

Looking back over our history has helped me to realize just how far we have come in our ability and knowledge of how to make a great game. There was so much to learn about game development and the business aspects of releasing a game that it feels like we have been building on our success, and learning from our mistakes, all to get us where we are today.

With that in mind, we have decided it is time to take a chance and swing for the fences once again. We are going back to one of our favorite genres and building not one, but two new role playing games! We are developing a tactical RPG that is focused on large screen devices as well as a new twist on the dungeon crawler that will be targeting mobile, and we are hoping to release both of these games in the next year! You can see a very early screenshot below of the tactical RPG and we plan to share more information about both of these games here on the website and on X over the coming months.

Thank You and Happy Anniversary F5 Games!

Thank you for reading this, very long, look back at the history of F5 Games; I hope it was interesting for you. I believe it is important to look at where we have been so that we can get to where we want to go. And I hope you'll come along for the ride. Here's to the next 20 years!