Raid on Bungeling Bay was, of course, a free-roaming top-down game where you fly a helicopter over a vast archipelago, dogfighting enemy planes and bombing factories. Every island was individually laid out, with a coastline, buildings, road network, even a couple of airfields where the enemy planes spawned and refueled. The designer built a layout tool to streamline setting up those islands, and at some point he realized he was having more fun building attractive layouts than actually playing the game. He thought maybe others might feel the same, so when RoBB was complete, his next game was essentially a gamified version of that layout tool, with more interactions and an economy and so forth.
