Interview: Dimitar Stoyanov, Developer of Bush 1022

Atmospheric Open World Minimalist Bush Flying

Atop a wind battered mountain with snow flurries flying everywhere I set throttle to maximum and sent the aircraft down the runway. It would be hours before the sun would rise, but my now ladened bush plane side slipped and soared skyward into the inky sky. Using the flight instrument "Six Pack" and a basic GPS/GLONASS I narrowly avoided getting spatial disorientation flying in the pure darkness dotted by pockets of snow whipping by. Flood lights in the wings of the aircraft were the final tool needed to dodge trees and hills while I descended to the delivery destination. This is a common experience in Bush 1022.

Bush 1022 release trailer.

Bush flight games and bush flying related add-ons seem to be on a bit of a rise lately. Though none of them have the same artistic direction and flight experience that Bush 1022 does. Between the varying weather and minimal player direction in an open world setting, even from the first few minutes of playing it I felt something like a low-grade wanderlust; I wanted to know what was behind every hill, what was on the other side of every lake and what the name of each location on the map could be hiding from me. 

An article about this game will be coming to Skyward Flight Media in the future for sure. As I continue to play, my feelings about the game compelled me to reach out to the developer of Bush 1022 for an interview.

Finding an airport with its lights on is a wonderful feeling during night flights.

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Thanks for accepting my rather sudden interview request. I was swept up by my feelings about Bush 1022 and had questions I just had to ask! Please introduce yourself.

Hi, my name is Dimitar Stoyanov. I was born 1998 in Sofia, Bulgaria. My dad is a big Isaac Asimov fan, so even when we had little food to eat, there were always computers in the house, and I was strongly encouraged to use them. I spent most of my childhood playing PC games, some of my favorites being: NFS from HP2 to MW;  BF 1942, 2 and BC2; Colin McRae Rally 2 to 5; Call of Duty 1 to 6; And my favorite of all time: GTA SA.

I feel very lucky to have grow up during, what feels like, the golden age of modern games.

I've read that you are a software engineer. How did you become interested in indie game development? 

Though I love software engineering, it mainly served to pay my bills. I was interested in game development since I was a kid. The first code I ever wrote was in the form of scripts for Arma 2 missions when I was 14, trying to make a Call of Duty-like campaign there :D

What pushed me into taking indie game development more seriously was the pandering to shareholders and lack of care for customers from larger studios. Having all the technical knowledge to open my own studio and seeing the pain of my fellow gamers, it feels like my duty to provide something better for the community.

I believe indie games are the future. Big investors are very far away from actual gamers and they mostly hire leadership with no vision to make fundamentally good games.

How has your experience with game development been so far?

I made my first small game in Unity back in 2019. Since then I've made many little, unpublished projects that got nowhere. In 2025 I felt like just making stuff has no true value, so it became my goal to publish whatever I make. I shifted to Godot and made "N-body Problem" to learn the fundamentals. My first game jam entry was "Bush 522" a bit after. I then made "Bush 1022" to learn the Steam deployment pipeline and see how I can set up a business around it.

I wanted my first Steam game to be something I love, so even if it would have very few fans, I'd always be around to support them. It breaks my heart when I see an abandoned game.

While doing some basic research about you, I came across your dev blog. I have seen a mix of posts about personal interests and snippets of code. What are you planning to do with your blog in the future? 

I'm currently shifting my blog towards things I have fun discussing with my friends. My latest post on AI is a topic we often argue about. Since I also get a lot of books as gifts, the next posts are likely to be literature essays. I also want to document the techniques behind my FOSS way of making music, showing alternatives to Apple and Microsoft's ecosystems, but I still have problems with live looping.

At some point I'll probably shift to a platform that allows people to write comments on my posts. I originally chose Hugo because I love writing very technical content in markdown.

Completing a hard delivery and gaining multiple achievements at once.

I first saw Bush 1022 on Itch.io and Steam a short time ago. Though I also see Bush 522 as the prototype to Bush 1022. What did you learn from your time developing Bush 522? 

I learned about the importance vision. In my past failed projects, I would always start by planning the specific contents of the game first. Anything I could think of, I'd add to a long list of features, with the idea that I can remove it later if not needed. I'd always get completely swamped after development starts.

In the game jam for Bush 522, I had 14 days to start and finish the project, so I had to change my approach to be on time. Instead of throwing random ideas at the wall, hoping for something to stick, I spent the first 2 days of the game jam away from my computer. I would get comfortable, close my eyes and just imagine how the final game looks like, how it plays, how it feels. I'd make drawings of the visuals and write down some of the perceived experiences. I realized that this is the game's core vision.

I deeply understood the final game before making the first asset or writing the first line of code. The development process felt like a natural straight line, I knew exactly what I had to do at all times, what to focus on, what to ignore. I was finished with the game 3 days before the deadline. Basically, excluding the concept phase, Bush 522 was made in about a single week, and it was better than projects I had spent months on, simply because I focused on deeply understanding its core rather than the shell of attributes that make it up.

This is a great point of view. Indie developers are usually solo devs or small teams of people. Time and resource management is especially important for them. Would you suggest that other aspiring developers join a Game Jam or challenge themselves to a short development period to see if their core idea is a viable concept for a game?

Absolutely! I believe that for any potential long-term project, it's best to get as much feedback, as early as possible. Had I done this for my previous dragged-out projects, I'd probably be able to see my lack of vision early and either adapt or cancel them before spending too much time on something that's fundamentally flawed.

As a solo developer with aspirations to expand and start my own studio, every minute of work counts a lot and I am super precise with how I spend the very little time I have. The feedback of a game jam can quickly give an answer if the time spent is wise.

The atmosphere of Bush 1022 is quite interesting for a simcade. Even during the day time it feels subdued and mysterious. Why did you choose to go for this theme rather than something more "traditional" for games similar to this? 

I wanted to build an aesthetic that would really capture the feeling of solitude in the remote wilderness. I did a bunch of drawings to get a feel of the colors and atmosphere for that. I didn't research any other games, so I wasn't influenced by the common patterns in the genre when it comes to the overall theme.

Despite its very small file size of roughly 100MB, the feel of the game is massive. At the start of each new playthrough a new world is procedurally generated. What is the maximum world size?

It could theoretically go on for millions of kilometers, the terrain loads in chunks, so there would be no resource overhead.

I've made the world borders at 30km in each direction from the start, because the physics and graphics in vanilla Godot are calculated with 32-bit floats, and that's about the limit before small glitches can be noticed. Float is a data type that becomes more inaccurate as the difference of magnitude between the values it does arithmetic with increases. Basically, the small change of the aircraft's position between each frame becomes more imprecise as the aircraft's global coordinate values grow. You can observe this in many other games if you go way outside the playable area.

There are, of course, ways to fix this, but it would take a lot of development time, and I feel like it won't bring any value to just have a larger game world for the sake of having a larger game world.

From the player's point of view, I think that a procedurally generated map is beneficial for replay ability. As it is a different experience each time the player starts a new playthrough. From the developer's point of view, is maintaining procedural generation in the long-term a challenge at all?

The purely technical part is not a challenge for me. However, when it comes to how the game feels, a huge challenge for future content is to design the generation patterns in a way that doesn't feel repetitive. Replayability becomes truly valuable only when each playthrough feels unique in a way. I feel like I'm not there yet, but it's what I'm aiming for.

I have not completed a full playthrough of my first seed yet, but on average how many checkpoints and airports are there in each seed?

There are 100 checkpoints, 5 of which are airports. Landing on 40 unique checkpoints is enough when completing a regular playthrough, only the "Master" goal section requires landing on every single one.

The last tab of the travel list shows specifics about how many of the checkpoints are hidden or are water platforms, should be about 50 each.

A section of the world map for the current playthrough.

Why did you prefer an open world game instead of a more linear style game? 

I love the freedom of open world games and my technical background gives me an advantage when it comes to world-building algorithms. I feel like good linear games are made of all the things I'm bad at making, and until I grow my studio, aren't the best use of my very limited resources.

I appreciate that the delivery system gives players some structure for their gameplay, but is not too complicated. What are your thoughts on it? Do you have any plans to make changes to deliveries? 

10A. I don't like the lack of control in the current system. You could end up in an area where you only have very long and difficult deliveries to do. I'm currently thinking of overhauling it in a way where the player can have much more specific options on the types of deliveries to do. I want to still keep it simple, though.

Delivery menu as seen at any checkpoint.

The combination of the terrain players must land in, the simplified flight model and the weather sometimes makes me wonder if a more advanced flight model would be beneficial. What are your thoughts on this? 

Not sure if more advanced, but I think it could make the game more fun for the flight model to be affected more by temperature and precipitation. Ground effect is also something that has been requested. So yeah, I'm thinking of expanding the flight model, but only for increasing the game's depth and fun, not for chasing realism.

How has feedback from the community around Bush 1022 been? 

The feedback so far has been mostly positive. There are some very thorough player stories, and there are a lot of requests for new features. I feel like people are seeing this game a bit like a foundation for something bigger. I love that, and it's a big motivation for me to grow it further.

You have mentioned a general roadmap for this game in 2026, but also that this year you have a new project that will be your main focus. What do you think is the ideal final version of Bush 1022? 

I don't see an ideal final version. For me it's an iterative process of always adding something new and improving the player experience. I want to tailor the game to what the community wants.

Broadly, I feel like the right direction is to grow the game's depth, give more soul to the remote world you're flying in, and give the players more things to do. Once all of that is covered, I'm sure the community will come up with more requests.

This may be a little bit early to ask, but is there anything we can learn about your new project right now? 

I planned to make prototypes for a kit-car builder rally game and an architecture simulator, but Bush 1022 has been performing well recently and is back to being my main focus at the moment. When the timing feels right, I'll join a cool game jam and release a small version of what I've planned, like I did with Bush 522 -> Bush 1022. I want to get user feedback on my ideas as early as possible into the development process.

Thank you for your time and effort with Bush 1022. Playing it has been a good experience so far. I look forward to seeing it develop some more. I appreciate you taking time to talk to me about a few things. 

These were some awesome questions, I gained some extra insight myself while answering! I'm glad that you're enjoying my game, I wasn't prepared for many people to play it, let alone being interviewed about it. I really appreciate the support, I love the positive community that's starting to build up. Thank you!

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Connect with Bush 1022 by Dimitar Stoyanov

• Itch.io

• Steam

• Website

Flying over a magical forest?

Flying by spotlight.

Preparing for water platform landing.

Landed on a water platform.

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About the Writer

Aaron "Ribbon-Blue" Mendoza

Co-founder of Skyward Flight Media. After founding Electrosphere.info, the first English Ace Combat database, he has been involved in creating flight game-related websites, communities, and events since 2005. He explores past and present flight games and simulators with his extensive collection of game consoles and computers. Read Staff Profile.