About Us
I have been a PC gamer for years, and after I finally took the plunge and bought an Aquila during a Star Citizen sale in 2015, I started to think about how I would like to play a combined FPS and SIM game experience.
I could see that this combined play was going to be in games more and more as time goes on, and the best methods I saw at the time for managing the controllers left me wanting something different.
I didn’t want to have to look so far away from the screen to flick a toggle, or adjust a dial on some part of my HOTAS, and I didn’t want to have to play with controllers off to the sides of my chair, or at the far reaches of my keyboard and mouse play area.
I needed to keep the controllers anchored, and to use them front and centre, but wanted to swap back to mouse and keyboard quickly.
So it took a little while, but in 2018 I had finally thought about it enough. I had saved up a bit of money, and went to get my initial design mapped out.
It was terrible.
The design was completely unusable. Unsuitable to be prototyped despite every attempt over the next year and a bit to correct it.
Then COVID hit. The designer decided to go do something else, and I was just left with the idea and nothing else.
I finished a contract at my work, and it was a good year or so before I started there again. We had just had a baby, so between looking after our little girl and the occasional sleep, I took it all back to basics. I used a small free to use CAD program to create a simpler model, then engaged a new designer to see if that would work any better.
It was. And did. And we were able to get a 3d printed model that did a great proof of concept. It wasn’t cheap and it wasn’t perfect for production, but we were on the way.
Then the designer quit his job and went to teach at Uni.
So I connected with designer #3 – SINCLAIR PRODUCT DESIGN and got the whole thing redesigned and refined (although this time we didn’t have to go from scratch) and we got ourselves a functional minimum viable product prototype. And it was GREAT!
It was exactly what I wanted, and if you are here reading this, you will have seen the imagery of our existing prototype unit showing the form and function of the CAS, If you have made it this far, I hope you have seen the value in it as a play accessory too.
Thank you to my dearest friend Rebecca Ewer who did the Photography and Alice from fiverr alicepotato | Profile | Fiverr for the image touch ups. Thank you for the incredible animation shivakeswani | Profile | Fiverr, and Gunnar Olsen for the soundtrack to that video, and for our rendered images thank you to Sofie sofi3d | Profile | Fiverr.
I recommend each and every one of these people for their respective crafts - please reach out to them for all your relevant needs.