Four solodevs weigh up the risks and rewards of creating games as a team of one

2024-04-01

GamesFour solodevs weigh up the risks and rewards of creating games as a team of oneWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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(Image credit: Madison Karrh)

Birth

With the unprecedented wave of layoffs the game industry faced in 2023, more developers than ever before are wondering whether they can make it on their own. Surely, the thinking goes, striking out alone must beat toiling away for an employer that might not even want you sticking around once your current project has shipped. But does the reality stand up?

To find out, we talk to four solo developers to discover their experiences. Tomas Sala quit the company he founded to make The Falconeer; Lucy Blundell abandoned a career at Chillingo to create the acclaimed visual novels One Night Stand and Videoverse; Madison Karrh only found enough stability to leave her job making medical simulators with her third game, Birth; while Joe Richardson, creator of The Procession To Calvary, has only ever known solo development. How lonely is it to make games without a team in support? What kinds of compromises – artistic and financial – are required? And is all the risk worth it to be master of your own destiny?

Tomas Sala

(Image credit: Wired Productions)

Bulwark: The Falconeer Chronicles

Subscribe(Image credit: Future PLC)This feature originally appeared in Edge Magazine. For more fantastic in-depth interviews, features, reviews, and more delivered straight to your door or device,subscribe to Edge.

(Image credit: Future PLC)This feature originally appeared in Edge Magazine. For more fantastic in-depth interviews, features, reviews, and more delivered straight to your door or device,subscribe to Edge.

(Image credit: Future PLC)

The latest cover of Edge, which features Star Wars: Outlaws

This feature originally appeared in Edge Magazine. For more fantastic in-depth interviews, features, reviews, and more delivered straight to your door or device,subscribe to Edge.

Tomas Sala clearly has no regrets about leaving behind the corporate cage he helped to build. “I hate fucking Scrum and Trello, all this fucking Jira,” he spits. “It drives me up the wall.”

(Image credit: Tomas Sala)

The Falconeer

My only response when things get stressful is to work harderTomas Sala

My only response when things get stressful is to work harder

Sala’s latest game, Bulwark: Falconeer Chronicles, is a city builder that he says reflects his chaotic nature, where buildings sprout and grow like flowers rather than being laid out in a grid. At the same time, it’s a more relaxing experience than his previous games, which were about “wanting to be free, or conflict, or whatever was bothering me at the time”. It’s an example of the unfiltered relationship between author and art that can make games from solo developers so fascinating to play – and with Sala now feeling more settled, Bulwark is about “feeling safe and creative”. Getting to this point of safety, though, has been a rocky road. Sala talks about what he calls “the fear”: the fear of failure, the fear of not being able to support his family.

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Lucy Blundell

(Image credit: Kinmoku)

Videoverse

For Lucy Blundell, going solo meant leaving her first industry job, at Macclesfield-based mobile game publisher Chillingo. She’d joined as a graphic designer almost straight out of university, and found herself responsible for all graphical design, on promotional and in-game artwork alike. “Back then they were putting out one or two mobile games a week,” she says. “It was really crazy. I remember that first year, I couldn’t really go on holiday, because when I did, stuff just stopped.”

When EA acquired Chillingo in 2010, it brought in another artist to ease the workload – but with the mobile game market shifting in the wake of Candy Crush, Blundell faced a new problem. “At that point, EA switched focus: they wanted us to try and find another big, free-to-play kind of game,” she says. “I just didn’t like mobile games at this point. I was feeling a bit icky about them.” At the same time, there were few options for advancement at Chillingo, except moving into marketing for a bigger pay cheque. “I didn’t really want to do that,” she says. “Money’s not a huge driver for me, but being creative and learning is.” She thought about applying for a job at a big game studio, but worried that her art skills weren’t at the required level. “My 3D art was OK, but it wasn’t great. My 2D art was all right, but not good enough.” It was a predicament that left her feeling stuck. So she quit.

(Image credit: Kinmoku)

Videoverse

Just try and work on something you can get done in six months, because it’s probably still gonna take two years.Lucy Blundell

Just try and work on something you can get done in six months, because it’s probably still gonna take two years.

“It’s crazy to think that I still get almost enough money from that now to keep doing what I’m doing.” At least, as long as she lives thriftily. “I think the craziest thing I ever did was [after] One Night Stand had a really good week, when it got nominated for IGF,” she says. “I was like, ‘I’m buying an iPad, and buying the best one, the really big one, and I’m getting an Apple Pencil’, and I just waltzed into the store and got it. Even then, it was for work.” Blundell’s next project followed a similar trajectory to Love IRL. After three years of work, she realized she was never going to finish it, so it was abandoned in favour of 2023’s Videoverse. She reckoned that would be a quick turnaround, taking no more than a year. It ended up taking three.

Given her experiences, it’s no surprise to hear Blundell’s one piece of advice for anyone who is thinking of going down the solo development route themselves: always keep the project small. “Just try and work on something you can get done in six months,” she says, “because it’s probably still gonna take two years.”

Madison Karrh

(Image credit: Wings Interactive)

Birth by Madison Karrh

Indie-pendence day(Image credit: Aggro Crab)If you loved Birth, there are a host ofupcoming indie gamesfor you to check out.

Indie-pendence day

(Image credit: Aggro Crab)If you loved Birth, there are a host ofupcoming indie gamesfor you to check out.

(Image credit: Aggro Crab)

Another Crab’s Treasure

If you loved Birth, there are a host ofupcoming indie gamesfor you to check out.

Not every solo developer comes from inside the game industry. Before making 2023’s Birth, Madison Karrh worked at construction equipment manufacturer Caterpillar and made games for training doctors – and before that was following a different path entirely.

“For most of my life, I just wanted to teach kindergarten,” she says. It was during her education degree, during a class on teaching math, that Karrh had her awakening. “I just loved it so much, and thought I wanted to be a mathematician,” she says. “And then I learned how to code, and loved code even more. So that’s when I switched my major to computer science.”

Chicago-based Level Ex is a supplier of what Karrh calls “very gross medical simulations” for doctors. On one hand, it meant she got to use Unity in her day job and work with some smart people; on the other, she wasn’t too thrilled about creating gamified versions of knee surgery, and the research that was required.

(Image credit: Wings Interactive)

Birth by Madison Karrh

If you’re not working on something, nothing is getting done on your projectMadison Karrh

If you’re not working on something, nothing is getting done on your project

Karrh admits she was “very ignorant about the games industry in general,” so was delighted to discover that there were bodies that would actually pay developers to finish making video games. ‘I thought all your money comes when you release the game." A successful application meant enough cash to sustain her for a year, and leave her job at Level Ex. “Oh my gosh, it was so scary,” she says, but reasoned that if Birth was a flop and money ran out, she could always just get another job. Still, it took a while for her to adapt to going solo. “If you’re not working on something, nothing is getting done on your project,” she says. “You can’t take a day off and come back and think, ‘I wonder what happened while I was gone?’ Because nothing happened while you were gone.” And although Karrh loved handling the programming and art for Birth, being a solo developer meant doing absolutely everything for herself, including the marketing – which she found much less enjoyable. She adds that music is her “weakest link”, and that she relied on public domain classical songs for Birth, although she would like to work with a composer in the future.

There’s also, again, the fear. Karrh says that sales of Birth were initially disappointing, with fewer than expected Steam wishlist conversions. “For the first two months after Birth’s [release], I was like, ‘OK, I’ll have to get a job in a month or so’.” It was only after several TikTokkers made videos about the game that things picked up. She says it’s now selling “more than I need it to”, adding that another benefit of being a solo developer is that the bar for success is much lower, since there’s only one mouth to feed. “I feel the fear a little less now,” she says. “And I think it’s because I’ve come to terms with the fact that if I need to go back and get a job, I will be fine. I also know that you can make something while you’re working full-time. Of course, this is coming from someone who is not a parent and has a very easy-going life.”

Joe Richardson

(Image credit: Joe Richardson)

The Procession to Calvary

That’s not the case for Joe Richardson, solo developer of The Procession To Calvary, who has two children to support. But he started making games in his mid-20s, while at art school; after graduating, his aim was to “not have to do a real job”. He’d started working part-time in a screen-printing studio while studying, although his role was mostly cleaning gear and fetching bacon rolls rather than printing. Finishing The Preposterous Awesomeness Of Everything, the game he’d begun at uni, took another year, alongside part-time work at the screen-printing studio and “surviving off the dregs of a student loan and living as frugally as can be done in London”. He reasoned that if the game did well, he’d be able to continue as a developer. “And if it didn’t, I’d have to get a real job,” he says. “And then I released it, and it did very, very, very badly. It sold 15 copies on day one.”

Prior to this, he’d had good reason to think the game might do well: PewDiePie, one of the world’s most popular YouTubers, had shown interest in the project, and Richardson had included his likeness in the game alongside those of Kickstarter backers. “Not knowing the industry at all, I thought, ‘Well, I’ve made it’,” Richardson says. “I’m going to release the game, he’s going to tweet about it because he’s in it, and I’m famous. And right up until release, he was messaging back and forth, and so I thought, here we go: hit ‘Release’, wait for the money to rain down on me. And then silence from PewDiePie, silence from the world.”

Richardson says he never got to the bottom of why PewDiePie stopped replying, and why he never mentioned the game’s release. This should have been the point where, as per the agreement with his girlfriend, Richardson left solo development behind. He sent out a few speculative applications to small game studios, but his heart wasn’t in it. “Secretly I was fully focused on just making another game,” he says. That was Four Last Things, a point-and-click adventure built from repurposed Renaissance art in only a year – something he finds hard to believe now, having worked on his latest game, Death Of The Reprobate, for some three and a half years.

(Image credit: Joe Richardson)

The Preposterous Awesomeness of Everything

I should make what I want, because I’m capable of making something great.Joe Richardson

I should make what I want, because I’m capable of making something great.

But times were desperate. For the final few months of development on Four Last Things, money was so tight that he had to ask his girlfriend to cover his rent. So what kept him going? He partly attributes his resistance to getting a ‘real job’ to his social awkwardness and anxiety. “But also an inflated sense of my own self-worth,” he says. “I felt like I should be making my own thing, not making someone else’s thing.” Like Sala, he enjoys being able to do as he wants. “But there’s also got to be an assumption that what you want is somehow important: ‘I should make what I want, because I’m capable of making something great’. I think that ultimately what makes an artist an artist is that they’re an arrogant prick.” Yet Richardson is also incredibly self-deprecating about his work. So how does this square with his supposedly inflated sense of self-worth?

“Maybe it’s that I don’t think I’m making great art, [but] I think I’m capable of making great art,” he suggests. “So I think I’m also making shit. Having ridiculous expectations of what I’m capable of makes me view not only everyone else’s work but also my own work as substandard.” Though Four Last Things wasn’t a big success, it sold enough for Richardson to justify keeping going. He was still picking up shifts at the screen-printing studio, but occasionally started saying no to work. “Then one day I realized I hadn’t worked for six months, and I was like, ‘Oh, wait a minute, I’m a professional video game developer now’.” The game has continued to sell steadily. “I think, particularly with adventure games, the long tail is really important, because my games are 20 years out of date to start with, so it doesn’t matter if you’re a few years late to the party.”

This feature originally appeared inEdge magazine. For more fantastic features, you cansubscribe to Edge right hereorpick up a single issue today.

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Tomas Sala

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Lucy Blundell

Madison Karrh

Joe Richardson

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