Anchorite

Welcome to Anchorite |

Anchorite is the personal works of solo game developer Mathew Purchase, based in Sydney, Australia. So far we've released three titles, Unstoppable, Interloper, and Exoloper. Many prototypes failed to bring us these games.

Another update to this blog.

March 12, 2026

I’ve updated the website again! The previous iteration sucked. The one before that was impossible to maintain. At least this one is somewhat popular. Since the last update, I’ve been mostly going through the motions, taking on contract jobs and more or less just existing. I’ve worked on a few prototypes here and there. Maybe.. just maybe this year I’ll get back into production.

A Brief Interlude

November 28, 2025

Exoloper launched in Febuary to… basically zero sales. Not zero, and thank you to anyone who paid for the DLC in the game, but nowhere near enough sales to have made it worth my time. I’ve covered this before, so I won’t go into too much detail. A month after that my youngest was born. So goodbye any level of creativity or sleep for what has now been eight months. Also goodbye home office. Goodbye reasonable thinking and pretty much any decent cognitive load. ...

Post Launch

March 11, 2025

Exoloper has been out for a month and a bit now and the overall reception has been great! It’s currently sitting at 4.0 stars out of five globally on the Appstore with ~100 ratings. The reviews are generally really nice and supportive, and the feedback I’ve been getting is great. Theres’ bugs, but they’re being caught and sorted at a dececnt rate. Theres balance issues but none of them break the game in a way thats unfair to players. Overall it’s in excellent shape. ...

Exoloper Launch

February 1, 2025

Exoloper will launch on the 10th of Feburary 2025. Preorder is available today. I’m so, so tired. It’s been two and a bit months since my last post, so here’s a quick rundown on what i’ve been doing. I spent a vast majority of the remainder of October, and half of December just fixing the game. Cleaning up bugs, clearing up balance issues, making sure it works and plays as nicely as possible. Overall this is the most polished game I’ve ever released, and likely, it’ll feel a little rough at launch haha. I’m extremely proud of where the game’s at, but I cannot stress how complex the game is for a single developer to have built, there’s just no way I can be across all the potential issues. ...

Exoloper Marketing

October 18, 2024

Exoloper is in open beta, and if you’re seeing this, that means I’m exhausted. It’s been a good couple months since I last posted here. August and September had me in cleanup mode, leaving little to write about and October has just been dedicated to getting the game’s marketing and public presence in shape and ready to go online, and its hard (at least for me) to write about my progress on building marketing material.. at least.. while I’m building it. I also lost the last two weeks of work to sickness and non-anchorite work stuff. ...

The Home Run

August 16, 2024

This past month has been devoted to pretty much just tidying up the game. I’m super happy with where its at right now, and just want to get it to the point where I’d be happy to hand it over to some fresh faces. The biggest addition was adding in a new tutorial system. This new system is more like what most people would expect from a mobile game, hiding all elements that aren’t required until they’re needed, highlighting the important parts, etc. ...

Polishing

July 28, 2024

This past two weeks has had me working on cleaning up the game, tracking down bugs, fixing issues and generally just polishing the heck out of it. Progressing nicely There’s something really satisfying about actually finishing up UI elements that’ve been in the game since nearly day one. I cleaned up the intro sequence, added some transitions and boom, it now feels like a more professionally made game. ...

Charge and Polish

July 24, 2024

The past few weeks have been a mix of school holidays (again) personal time off, and being heads down fixing bugs left right and centre in Exo. Interloper was more or less at this stage when I decided to launch it, all the pieces were in place, but it could’ve used a lot more love. None of the remaining bugs are totally game breaking, and none of the rough edges would turn away a dedicated fan of the genre, but they’ll add up for prospective new fans, so I’m determined to make sure this release is as polished and clean as possible, even if it takes me another couple months to launch the game. ...

Missions

June 28, 2024

This week’s been again a grab bag of little fixes and improvements to the game. I’ve hidden away the debug menu, added to and improved the campaign over ui, fixed a bunnnch of issues with iCloud and added a handful of iOS specific stuff, including performance profiles for devices based on RAM quantity, all bitsy, but stuff that needs to be done. However the big one is reworking the way the game’s missions handle. ...

Forest Campaign

June 7, 2024

This week I’ve wrapped up work on the content for Exoloper’s launch. That means all the art, sound effects, weapons, items utilities, pilotable Exos, ai, vehicles and so much more is now in-place. Will it be tweaked? Yeah, probably, is it final? I’d say so! Is the game done? Noooooooo. I implemented all the new enemy types for the Forest Campaign, and in doing so, added units that use Utilities (such as active camo or smoke launchers). This makes combats way more dynamic, and it feels great. You’ll hate being snuck up on by sword wielding Exos! I also added some new toys to play with, including Heavy Autocannons that just shred through light and medium armour. ...