Bomb Squad Academy is my current game project, inspired by my love of electronics. It is currently greenlit and will be on sale in the first quarter of 2017.
"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 is a brand new adventure for me. The underlying tech for it is extremely simple. Compared to planets and pathfinding systems, simulating small digital logic circuits is pretty trivial. In fact, my friend Olivier 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, is forcing me to become a better all-around developer.
Because I can't hide behind technical challenges, because there isn't some incredibly difficult programming task that I must complete before I can work on the rest of the game, I have had to constantly step out of my comfort zone.
So far I have done everything from level design to sound design to even concepting and then editing a trailer! Something that even on Fireborne, I always imagined tasking someone else with. But out of this effort to make everything in the game, I've come to realize something as well.
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. Regardless of its future success, there is no game like it out there, and that's what makes it special!