Armoured Engines: A New Project Begins

I am very happy to announce that my small indie team, Bounder Games, are working on a new project. I have come to think of it as a "steam punk western epic", on mobile devices, called Armoured Engines. In the game, you take on the role of a train engine owner who travels between towns in the wild west, protecting the train and making important deliveries. Bandits, evil robots, hostile monsters, and more will attempt to cripple your steam-powered locomotive. Luckily you have at your disposal an arsenal of weaponry with which to fight back. The game will make use of intuitive touch control methods, different for each type of weapon. Some will be mostly autonomous while others will be more manually controlled. A big part of the game will be customising your engine, choosing what and how much cargo to take and where to travel. You can also hire helpers, which provide more functionality for your train (repairing damaged cars, boosting weapon performance, etc). Finally, there will be an overarching story linking all this together, of a grandiose style suitable for something dubbed a "steam punk western epic".

Meet The Team

Sarah Herzog

"Mama Bounder"

Speciality: Leadership, Programming

Other Talents: Art

Background: Sarah has been, at various points in her life, a writer, singer, artist, drama teacher, martial artist, chemical engineer, nanotechnology researcher, engineering education researcher, science teacher, tech support grunt, quality assurance monkey, and finally, most recently, a game programmer. So many hats leads to only one thing: indie game development.

Roy Stevens

"Bounder Bug"

Speciality: Writing

Other Talents: Art, Design

Background: Roy is a student at prestigious game development university Abertay. He has loved games for as long as he can remember, and has always wanted to have a hand in making them. Like the rest of the team, he has a wide range of talents and excels when allowed to have a hand in everything.

Kyle Drysdale

"Song Bounder"

Speciality: Audio

Other Talents: Art, Design, Writing

Background: Kyle is a recent graduate from a creative audio production degree at Abertay University. He shares a deep love of games with his team-mates, and specialises in making awesome music and SFX for games. However, he also is a talented graphic designer, artist, writer, and game designer.

The Plan

The Bounder Games team has big plans. Someday, we want to make amazing, long-term games that will take a year or two to develop and will have a crazy amount of depth and longevity to them. However, to get started, we focused on choosing a game idea that could be developed in only a few months - our target release date is September 1st. To that end, the team met and each of us pitched three ideas, all with the goal of promoting our style while meeting this time constraint. Armoured Engines was the unanimous choice.

Concept mock up of part of the world map

Now, we work. For the last week, and continuing into the next week, we have been in pre-production. This means, for us, creating concept pieces and mocks of how the various stages of the game make look, planning what features will be in the game, and working on story and characters. After that, we dive head first into production. It will be difficult, as I have a day job and Roy has university. We also have a couple planned trips out of the country later in the year that will disrupt our work flow. But despite all this, I am confident that we will be able to deliver a high quality game by September.

I will be posting regular development updates here and on the team's many pages. If you've got any social media accounts, it would be a big help to us to give us a follow/like, or, if you are feeling generous, a share. Our accounts are:

• Twitter: @BounderGames
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/BounderGames
• Google+: http://gplus.to/BounderGamesPlus
• Tumblr: http://boundergames.tumblr.com/
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUpnlSlDJRy4D6J3To4KgPg

Drop by and say "Hi!", and look forward to our future updates!