Garuda Force was always a moonlighting project while I worked a day job as a young software developer in my 20s. I became a programmer because of my love of video games, but up until that point I had been unable to get into the games industry.

For Garuda Force games I handled everything other than the raster art, music and sound effects. My sister Aminder Dhaliwal, a student at the time, was involved as artist for Keep In Play and Block Six, Spencer Nunamaker was contracted for sound effects and music for both games. Jesse Davis and Dakatri Draché worked on art for the unreleased Project Duel and Project Honey respectively.

Video games are important to me. When I was a kid, I was bullied throughout my time at school. In a video game, even when the main character is being attacked by several enemies at once, the programmer or designer of the game must provide the tools the player needs to survive, at the minimum the player must be able to stand a chance, otherwise the game would not have balance and it would not be fun. Real life has the potential to be highly rewarding, enriching and enjoyable, I love being alive. Unfortunately, it's not as much fun for the powerless, and it's also not as much fun for people who don't have the means to go on real adventures and experiences beyond their neighborhood. Video games offer a sense of achievement, delight and adventure. I enjoyed nothing more than playing video games when I was a child.

Keep In Play and Block Six did not see a huge audience, mostly because I was a naive developer who did not understand sales and marketing. The people that did play the games enjoyed them, they told me directly and in user reviews.

I eventually did find a chance to get into triple A games developement via tooling and automation. I went on to work on an Xbox 360 first party game and two Xbox One first party apps at Microsoft, including a major launch application. I then went on to work at Sony Interactive Entertainment on two Playstation 4 / Playstation VR games. After having worn many hats creating my own games, working in larger teams was constricting in many ways, but I learned a lot and enjoyed it.

One problem I had when working in the games industry in a large studio was the lack of creative input due to the specific duty of each role. I also realized that in general I enjoyed Japanese video games more than any other and a lot of that had to do with how characters and story are developed, I felt that the style of games being developed in the studios I worked at did not reflect my personality and my interests. Another problem in the video games industry and in general in the job market in the early 21st century, that I had not considered before I reached my 30s, was relatively low pay. For a long time I was fine to put up with this because I enjoyed working in games so much, but after starting a family it became harder to justify to my wife and myself.

I decided to learn more about how the economy works, how business works, and why some people are financially wealthy and others are not. I started finding out what socalism, capitalism and the free-market are really about. I decided that while I wanted to work on independent video games, working on a business unrelated to games would be less risky and a more accessible path to wealth. Still risky, but not a lottery, or so I hoped. My first few attempts at this failed fast, including CardPi, Mercator, BetaShip, and one I wish to revisit in the future, Memkind. I then came across an idea related to the work I had done at Microsoft and Sony. I had had to implement a system to do a particular task across three teams across the two companies and it was not really the core part of my job. I decided to create a high quality service that would do this for teams at a reasonable cost, the objective was to create a far better system while freeing up developers to focus on other work. That business is now Tesults and it is profitable. Tesults continues to be improved constantly, releases take place daily. I value liberty and freedom and starting a business feels like something I should naturally do. I believe capitalism and the free market is the better way, but I have learned how entrenched interests, big businesses and government can make it difficult for smaller players. When the business is large enough to allow me to do so, I intend to bring back Garuda Force. Tesults provides enormous value to many teams, but I want my lifes work to be a video game that delights people, has a message and brings something entirely new to players.

Our lives are affected greatly by what happens to us in our first years, and video games have been with me from near the beginning. Long live games, Garuda Force will return!