‘Swimsanity’ and Building a Community: An Interview With Decoy Games’ Khalil Abdullah

With the release of their game coming up, we had a nice long chat with Kahlil Abdullah, co-founder of Decoy Games about all things Swimsanity, helping other marginalized game developers, and what’s next.

BlackNerdProblems: So, you have a release date. Khalil Abdullah: Yeah, yeah. Hype! BNP: How does that feel? Khalil: Feels pretty good. I always tell people a lot of this stuff happens behind the scenes months before it occurred. So people have been asking “Have you been celebrating recently?” and I’m like we’ve been celebrating like months ago because we already knew when it was going to be. But we’re hype to get it out there in public and stuff. It’s cool, it’s cool to see the page on the console pages and stuff like that. So, we’re excited.  BNP: So, for all the folks that don’t know about Swimsanity, tell us what the game is all about. Khalil: Swimsanity is a 4-player, underwater shooter with competitive and cooperative game modes where you can play with or against your friends. Basically, you control this underwater, aquatic hero called a Mooba. And he’s equipped with all these special power moves called ‘Unleashes.’ You can become a humongous shark, you can heal your teammates, you can deploy an underwater, what we call, an aqua tank.  There are 13 of these, across 8 different game modes. So, if you’re kind of a competitive guy, you can play against your friends in a typical deathmatch or elimination mode. We also flip the game…