Tonda Ros

Tonda Ros is a game designer and the creator of Blue Prince, the 2025 puzzle adventure that topped Metacritic's charts for the year and won two top D.I.C.E. Awards. He developed it over roughly eight years at his small studio Dogubomb, almost entirely as a one-person project.

Ros came to games from outside the industry; he has a filmmaking background, and Dogubomb describes itself as an indie game and film studio. For years he hosted annual puzzle weekends for friends in rented vacation homes, turning whole houses into puzzles inspired by the board game Jewels in the Attic. Indie Game: The Movie convinced him a small team could ship a complete game, and playing Gone Home and The Witness pushed him to try prototyping in Unity.

He began a prototype around 2016, expecting to spend six months on it, then quit his commercial development job to keep going. He funded the project from savings and from ad revenue on a Magic: The Gathering website he ran, and has described working 80-hour weeks for eight years. He brought in art director Davide Pellino, jazz duo Trigg and Gusset, and even commissioned Christopher Manson, author of the 1985 puzzle book Maze, his biggest influence.

Blue Prince, published by Raw Fury, launched on April 10, 2025 on PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox, with Mac following in September 2025 and Switch 2 in March 2026. Players draft rooms of a shifting mansion, Mt. Holly, each day to reach the mysterious Room 46. Eurogamer, The Guardian and Polygon each named it their Game of the Year, and by December 2025 it had passed two million players.

At the February 2026 D.I.C.E. Awards it won Outstanding Achievement in Game Design and for an Independent Game. Ros has said he will never make a direct sequel, is polishing a final big update, and expects his next game to be less ambitious. His story is a modern template for the long, self-funded solo project.