Our story working as indie dev while having full time jobs news

Myself, Thang, is the elder of the two and is a programmer. I do all the codings for our games. I used to work for Rare Ltd on Banjo Kazooie Nuts & Bolt and Kinect Sport series, then moving on to Voofoo Studios as my current daytime job where I have released many multi platform games like Pure Pool, Pure Hold’em, Mantis Burn Racing.

Dzung is my younger brother and quite luckily he was not interested in programming like me but he liked 3D art instead. So this would make us a perfect brothers team of one programmer and one artist passionate about making their own game. Dzung started out working for Rare as well but then move to movie industry, working for London’s Double Negative and created special effects for 007: Skyfall, John Carter, Snow White and the Huntsman and countless other games as clients of his own 3D Studios – Thunder Cloud.

In 2012, after many little hobby games created purely as the result of our joy for “making our own games”, we decided to go for it and make “real” games to sell and may be earning some money. We decided that we are not going to follow the trend at the time that is creating quick, cheap mobile games. We wanted to create very high quality games, on pair with professional titles. However, with just a team of 2 with other full time job commitments this would be unrealistic so we decided that we would focus almost all our effort in the core game-play only and make it as perfect as possible.

So we set out to work on our first game, Tank Brawl. Fueled by enthusiasm we worked on the game whenever we find free time, whether it is evening after full time job finished, deep into the night or whole day during UK bank holidays. After nearly a year, the game is finished to our satisfaction quality and released to Ipad. However the game doesn’t sell well for reasons that we don’t even fully know. This put us off the “creating our own game” thing for about 2 years.

Then around 2015, we both moved back to our home base in Hanoi, while still working full time, we decided that we would go for it again and redid Tank Brawl with many added features and polishes and release it on Steam. Tank Brawl was released again in Steam in May 2016 to well received criticism and many people liked it. Although it’s not a massive hit or earning us any money comparable to our full time job but at least it doesn’t totally kill off our enthusiasm. During this time, I had an idea of a gameplay mechanic that is based on my favourite childhood toy called Big Trak, a programming rover. So me and my brother started working on our second game Jump, Step, Step, an innovative relaxing puzzle game. The game was quickly greenlit on Steam and went on to release in March 2017. Around the same time, we secured our slot for it in Xbox One marketplace, and since then we have finished our work on this version. So our first ever own Xbox One title is scheduled to release on Xbox One on 11th August 2017. Only god knows what happen next.