I had the chance to chat with Maddox Saul, the indie dev behind AVENGE MYSELF—a wild, fast-paced shooter that’s all about speed, style, and pulling off insane moves. We talked about what inspired the game, how it’s coming together, and what it’s like building something so ambitious as a solo developer.
Tell us a little about yourself and how you got started in game development.
Maddox: I’ve always wanted to develop games and have been trying to do so in some form or another since before I knew what multiplication was, but I’d say I really got started sometime around 2016 making custom maps for games like Counter-Strike and Intruder. These days I do a bit of everything and am a plenty competent programmer (I hope), but level design is still my main area of expertise.
What inspired your latest game, and what was the initial vision behind it?
Maddox: I had the original idea for Avenge Myself four or five years ago; I was playing a lot of Planetside 2 at the time, and one of the classes in that gets a type of jump jet that launches them forward. It’s a lot of fun, and I thought it’d be fun to mix with some Tribes-esque skiing, but it never got past a very, very basic prototype at the time. Way later in 2024, I had started making YouTube videos about games I found interesting, and heard that there was an Ouya game jam happening. If you aren’t familiar, the Ouya was an infamously ill-fated Android-based microconsole from 2013. As a kid I bought one and wanted to make games for it, but never did because I didn’t actually know how; now that I do, I thought it’d be funny to join the jam and make a video about it. I figured I wasn’t ever going to get around to the old game idea and it didn’t seem like it would be too much work, so I went with that. It ended up swerving away from the original idea a bit — now it’s much more of a Tribes/Sonic the Hedgehog blend that’s heavily oriented around speedrunning — but it went so much better than expected that I decided to turn it into a full game, and here we are. (So much for not being too much work, haha.)
What were some of the biggest challenges you faced during development?
Maddox: Motivation. It turns out making a whole game is a lot of work, even if it’s not a terribly large one. A project on that scale is easy to get burnt out or just plain intimidated by, especially when you’re developing it solo. Still struggling with that one.
Is there a particular moment or feature in your game that you’re especially proud of?
Maddox: I think the core movement has ended up being incredibly fun. It’s frankly a small miracle that I was able to get stuff like riding through loops working smoothly. That said, tutorializing it has been tricky with how technical, fast-paced, and somewhat unusual it can be; quite a few people have struggled with it in the demo, so there’s plenty more work to be done there.
How do you approach balancing creativity with the realities of budget, time, and resources?
Maddox: Setting a realistic, concrete scope early helps a lot. As much as it hurts to admit, your ultimate dream game isn’t very good if you never finish it, so knowing what aspects are the most important and focusing in on those is extremely important if you want to release the video game before the heat death of the universe.
What advice would you give to aspiring indie developers just starting out?
Maddox: If you’re *completely* new to game development, I’d recommend finding a good foothold to expand your knowledge from. For me, that was level design; making levels for games gets you working in the engine and brushing up against a lot of other fields, but getting started is much easier than if you were trying to build a game from scratch. The same can apply to most kinds of modding — you’re still learning how game development works, but you only really need to worry about one specific aspect of it, occasionally poking into other avenues to support what you’re working on. Over time that’ll give you a good level of baseline familiarity from which you can learn everything else without it feeling like you’ve been thrown into the dunk tank.
Other than that, I think it’s best to just get to work without thinking too hard about it. It’s very, very easy to overthink things with projects as big as these, and at a certain point it stops doing you any good. It’ll feel intimidating and slow going, but incremental progress is still progress, and it’s the only kind you’re gonna get with this stuff.
What’s next for you — any future projects or updates in the works?
Maddox: I have a lot of games I’d like to make, but we’ll cross those bridges when we get to them. Until then, I just want to get Avenge Myself finished.
Where can people follow your work or support your game?
Maddox: The best thing you can do is share the demo around! It’s available on Steam. I mainly post updates on Bluesky and sometimes on my YouTube channel. Most of my content isn’t related to Avenge Myself, but if you’re the sort of person to read a site like this, you’re probably interested enough in obscure gaming stuff to like my other videos.
