Bomb Squad Academy is a game I released in 2017, inspired by my love of electronics.
"Save the world one wire at a time with Bomb Squad Academy, a puzzle game where you have to defuse bombs under a time constraint."
This game was a brand new adventure for me. The underlying tech for it was extremely simple. Compared to planets and pathfinding systems, simulating small digital logic circuits is pretty trivial. In fact, my friend and I prototyped the mechanics in less than a week. But in so many ways, making this game, and more importantly, being intent on finishing it, forced me to become a better all-around developer.
Because I couldn’t hide behind technical challenges, because there wasn’t some incredibly difficult programming task that I had to complete before working on the rest of the game, I had to constantly step out of my comfort zone.
I did everything from level design to sound design to even concepting and then editing a trailer for this game! Something that even on Fireborne, I always imagined tasking someone else with. But out of this effort to make everything in the game, I came to realize something important.
An indie game can generally only shine by its design and identity, not any technical or artistic achievement, something that is so often underestimated, especially by ex-AAA developers like me. No indie game will have better Dragons than Skyrim, or better animations than Uncharted.
But while any single part of Bomb Squad Academy is unremarkable on its own, the sum is completely unique, and unique to me. It is special, something that was confirmed by reviewers as it received glowing recommendations from both PC Gamer and Rock Paper Shotgun.