I Spent 175,000 Hours Working On Indie Games
Thoughts after surviving 20 years in the games industry...
Introduction
I recently hit the 20-year mark of my career in game development, publishing and consulting. That's about 175,000 hours if you include sleeping and you need a clickbait headline for attention because you aren't famous enough to carry an article like this on personal brand alone.
I'm writing this introduction the day before GDC 2025 in a coffee shop watching vacant Waymos slide eerily into the intersection opposite. The universe has clicked into an unrecognisable configuration since I started out in 2005 and I don't pretend to understand much of what's going on, but I hope you can take something useful from my experience that will spur something in your own gamedev journey.
It’s sometimes difficult to summarise the twists and turns of the trajectory that’s taken me here but indulge me for a moment while I give it a go.
I've been fortunate enough to play various parts on multiple cult hit indie games during the course of my career and I have successfully sold a small games publishing business. As a developer, I worked on Mode 7's in-house games like Frozen Synapse and Frozen Cortex as well as my solo project Wardialler. When we moved into publishing, I looked after Tokyo 42 and The Colonists, then signed the hit deckbuilder Fights in Tight Spaces in 2019. Through IndieFund, I invested in Armello, Hyper Light Drifter and Hackmud. Music-wise, I've produced soundtracks for several of the previous games mentioned, as well as Knights in Tight Spaces, Lunar Division's The Banished Vault and Amberspire, Audiosurf and various other indie projects. Finally, I've consulted and advised for UK Games Talent and Finance, Reforged Studios and The National Videogame Museum as well as being an IGF and BAFTA judge.
When we started, indie dev was a much smaller, scrappier community of folks who were either busy rolling their own game engines or getting to grips with the esoteric technology on offer just in the hope of making something functional. Fast forward to today and the tech is more accessible than ever - right now, people are busy making basic but functional online multiplayer games simply by describing their desired feature-set to an AI.
Whether you think games are facing a bright new horizon or teetering on the edge of a depressing chasm, I truly believe that the fundamental dynamics of development remain the same at all scales: Catch and Hold are still the best explanation I have as to why certain games achieve long-term success; dev projects need a singular guiding vision, adaptation, communication, validation and unrelenting determination to get to the finish line.
A couple of important notes before I get started. None of this would have happened without my co-founder Ian Hardingham and all of Mode 7's phenomenal employees, friends, family, freelancers, advisors, collaborators, and co-conspirators through the years. I'm not attempting a comprehensive history or blow-by-blow account here by any means, so apologies if I don't call out everyone by name and apportion due credit.
I'd also like to acknowledge that we started out in games with many personal advantages that the majority of people in the world do not share. I believe game development is an approachable dream for many, especially these days, but in saying that I'm not trying to suggest that it is remotely meritocratic or egalitarian. This is why I believe that public funding via programmes like UK Games Fund is so important: thriving and diverse creative industries are a demonstrable net benefit to society.
Start
Let's start from the beginning.
I co-founded a development studio called Mode 7 in 2005. In reality, my co-founder status is slightly retconned, as Ian Hardingham - the company's original founder and a friend from my school days - had kicked off our first project in its early form a few years previously and generously paid me to work as a freelancer for a while before we really got going.
Everyone's heard the ancient conventional wisdom that you shouldn't go into business with friends - in my experience, this is abject nonsense. If you have the right kind of relationship and the right level of respect, this can translate perfectly to a working environment. Ian's faith in me and generous willingness to share credit for our achievements has been a constant throughout our story and we've combined many other friendships and working relationships along the way.
We were a scrappy team initially, with various folks making variable contributions to our first game Determinance (don't look for it!) which came out in 2007. This was a quirky multiplayer sword-fighting title where the movement of your mouse corresponded directly to the thrusts of the character's sword. It won GameTunnel's Game of the Year: Innovation Award (really!), was covered in PC Gamer's "Oddball" column (reading this excitedly on a train on the way to Gamecity in Nottingham is an incredibly vivid memory), and sold about 12 copies on our website. I did audio and music initially and then ended up trying my hand at all sorts of things, from single player design to marketing and bizdev - it was a chaotic but invaluable experience.
Determinance happened because Ian figured out the Torque Game Engine as part of his final year university project and subsequently decided to take the huge leap to building his own game. He had a big, unreasonable idea and mustered everyone and everything around him in order to make it a reality.
To mine novelty from the future you need a pickaxe dipped in courage. I use the most preposterous metaphor I can summon in order to illustrate just how ludicrous it was to try and make a fully-featured 3D multiplayer game in the early 2000's with no experience. But without a luxuriant dose of hubris and a small team of folks who share your delusion, it's very hard to get anywhere. Working on this gave me a strong affinity for small teams as an engine of creativity - if you are unconstrained by systems and bureaucracy, you can start making progress and taking the necessary upfront risks. Even smart megacorporations understand and try to preserve this dynamic - Amazon's Two Pizza Teams are a perfect example and the "skunkworks" model still persists in many places, despite resistance.
I'm not always a fan of the generic "make small games and release them" advice that is handed out to newer devs. I believe you can figure out everything you need to on a wildly outlandish project as well: it's a matter of long-term goals, motivations and personality configurations. If you can afford to fail without taking yourself out of the game then you should consider going big - it can ultimately create more learning and opportunity. Just please keep your business and your personal life separate - racking up credit card debt or remortgaging your house at an early stage creates a risk profile that is hugely counterproductive for the vast majority of people.
Make absurd things that are too big with whatever you have lying around.
Finishing Move
It strikes me now that it would have been so easy to just not finish Determinance - it was a troubled and over-complicated project which dragged on for a long time and never quite found its groove. But Ian's commitment to complete it was inspiring to those of us who stayed the course and we eventually managed to get there.
If you start a game project, do so with a strong commitment to finish it. This doesn't mean that games can't ever be canned (I recommend Seth Godin's The Dip for a great discussion of this) and it doesn't mean you should beat yourself up if you fail to reach the finish line - just that you should do everything in your power to ship something in public that other people can play.
Completing projects successfully is a challenging skill to master - the best way I've found is an awkward balancing act between checklist-driven pedantry, judicious cutting, careful advocacy around quality and polish and an eventual sense of resigned acceptance.
You cannot know the outcome of an ambitious project in advance but if you build momentum and cross the finish line, you might end up somewhere unexpected.
In the case of Determinance, that finished product was intriguing but deeply flawed. I struggled to make anything of it from a bizdev perspective: our retail publisher scammed us out of the tiny advance he promised us and was last seen driving around Sheffield trying to flog the game out of the boot of his car at markets; my efforts to get the game on Steam (you had to be invited at that point in time!) stalled at around the point I left pleading messages on various Valve employees' answering machines.
Pragmatism / Idealism
However, the tech that Ian developed was so unique that it led us to some contract work with the excellent folks at Novint Technologies - we ended up working on projects for their Falcon controller (which you can see demonstrated in this superb LGR video). We also picked up further work from a friend who worked in the TV industry, leading to our graphics tech being used on British shows like The Chase, Eggheads, Going for Gold and The Krypton Factor.
I've since seen many other teams take their games tech and experience outside of the games industry itself with great success: if you are on the hunt for opportunities and you have an open mind then work is out there.
That doesn't mean that you should get pulled away from your game development dreams entirely but simply that you may have untapped resources that can help you get revenues until such time as you are able to fully focus on your goals.
Our contract work kept the lights on but was very time-consuming and intensive - I remember talking about growing this part of the business which led to some friction around diluting our focus. This is a quandary that a lot of companies experience - you find development or game-adjacent work which pays the bills but this detracts from your overall ambitions. I believe it's a necessary tension and one which you need to learn to navigate.
You really have two choices in this scenario:
Concentrate on growing your work-for-hire business such that it can effectively be spun off, then pivot to original IP development
Carefully minimise the time spent on work-for-hire so that the majority of your focus is on your game
I believe that the ultimate goal of game development should be to make a truly great game. This takes a lot of time, attention and often money, so if you really want to do this then your other work should happen in service of that objective. We benefited hugely from a reliable source of revenue, but we needed the course correction to bring us back into line with the reason we got into development in the first place.
The Frozen Synapse Era
Ian's original concept for our next game Frozen Synapse was a bite-sized Nintendo DS tactical game that could be played while watching TV - he was really ahead of the curve on "second screen" user behaviour! He wanted to pick up where classic tactics games left off but distil their gameplay down to the essentials.
I won't give a blow-by-blow account of its development here - plenty has been written about it by others and if you really want to you can enjoy the stylings of 2012 Me in this postmortem I wrote at the time, or this business postmortem I worked on for Gamesbrief. Instead, I'll focus on some specific topics that emerged from looking back at this period.
Art and Commerce
Frozen Synapse ended up working so well for us because it represented a strong union between self-expression and something that had a shot in the marketplace. Having worked both on more personal non-commercial projects and also on more purely mercenary endeavours subsequently, I'd say that finding this sweet spot is what really motivates me - it is elusive but the process of chasing it can be highly rewarding.
I don't think you can always engineer this but at least always having a commercial thesis for your project is a good start. With FS, we knew that people had gone crazy about the re-release of Terror from the Deep on Steam, and also that Laser Squad Nemesis still had a strong die-hard community. A timely and generous intervention from an experienced publisher (thanks Stu Chiplin if you happen to read this!) convinced us to switch from DS to PC development and focus on the core audience of strategy fans there.
Trying to steer away from anything you categorise internally as "just for the money" over time is also wise. I will say though that there are often ways to frame commercial opportunities with a creative lens and receive significant personal rewards for engaging with them, so never write something off simply because it fails to meet a load of opaque personal criteria you've decided to establish.
The FS soundtrack was a very important part of the project for me personally - I wanted the player to feel like they were listening to an album more than just a selection of music which was vaguely trying to accompany a game. I used techniques that I'd learned both from working on dance music and also more experimental electronica - I had grown up in the Oxford music scene where weirder hybrid styles were welcomed and championed, so this was an effort to sound authentic while also being appropriate for the game itself.
Ian also has talked in the past about how he was trying to capture the feeling of both playing Laser Squad Nemesis with our good friend Tom, and also the certainty and precision of Counter Strike: it can be helpful to chase a very specific set of emotions when thinking about design. I worry about game projects which don't have at least some of this intrinsic motivation: "sensible" commercial games are hugely risky - players pick up on that spark of life. Great games have something unreasonable about them, some shard of novelty.
At the same time, many designers believe that their work has to be wholly original to be valid - this couldn't be further from the truth: every game has its heritage and influences. A fantastic genre entrant with a bit of spice to it does have a commercial ceiling, but that ceiling is likely high enough for you to still hit significant levels of success. There is a big caveat though - you must have an intense and nuanced understanding of the desires and incentives that motivate players who favour that genre, as well as a sense of what they are looking for next.
My grandparents on my father's side were both artists. Bill was a commercial artist for a variety of clients, working with incredible skill on everything from photorealistic airbrushing techniques to more stylised output, many decades before the advent of digital tools like Photoshop. His wife Joan, on the other hand, developed a highly unique style as an experimental abstract artist - you can see some of her work here. I love all of their work, whether it was commissioned for an advert or it emerged from a personal desire to explore a material or texture - I think the relationship between art, its audience and its market is a complex alchemy that deserves more consideration than a vague moral pronouncement or a condescending wave of the hand. You can do commercial work with an artist's eye; you can do creative work with bald cynicism - the attitude makes the difference.
In any case, my friend David solved this whole thing with a wrestling match four years ago.
Sales and Distribution
As I mentioned previously, getting on Steam was an aspiration for almost every dev when we started out, so much so that quite a few developers seemed to believe it was a magic bullet irrespective of the state of their game.
Outside of Valve's ecosystem, developers had to take full responsibility for generating sales: all you had at your disposal was a landing page with a purchase link on it, there was no "discoverability". This led to a lot of experimentation on Frozen Synapse with PR, content marketing (basically just blogs at this stage) and paid UA (largely banner ads).
Obviously things are different today but there are some useful principles here: if a new distribution model or platform is emerging then it is wise to be proactive and figure out if it suits your game. Equally, being reliant on distribution alone is often perilous - building a community from your game's announcement onwards and looking into how to turn your work into content that might be useful to others are good starting points. If you can get an edge in your own sales and marketing process, you’ll be ahead of the crowd.
Getting Good
Frozen Synapse did eventually get the "Golden Ticket" from Valve, who sent us an email after Kieron Gillen's glowing preview on RockPaperShotgun and Alec Meer's writeup on Eurogamer. It was a perfect moment for us - two journalists whose work we grew up reading triggering a response from a company we dreamed of working with.
None of this would have happened if we hadn't focussed on the quality of the game above all else. It took a long time to get there (nearly three years of part-time work alongside the contract jobs just to get to the beta). It was also a risk in other ways to go all-in - I have a distinct memory of feeling intensely stressed out at one point by the thought that "all we had going on was Frozen Synapse".
Ultimately though, taking that time was critical. For most developers, the journey to competence is a long road.
Prototypical
Prototyping is the process of resolving big questions about your game and it was one of the things we did well during Frozen Synapse's development. I think almost every project I've ever worked on could have benefited from a little more focussed prototyping - iterating on mechanics, UX paradigms and progression without the distraction of art and content exposes the true validity of your game design. With FS, I strongly remember the moments of playing in the office where someone would pull off a cool move in multiplayer and you'd hear shouts and laughter - that feeling guides what I look for in a prototype to this day.
Our more complicated later games struggled a bit with focus at times - ideally, you need to front-load core features, structure and progression. This isn't always possible in reality and zero game projects can be described by a straight line from inception to release, but making repeated earnest efforts to go through the requisite prototyping stages before embarking on content will pay dividends.
Strong Core
A game needs a robust central ruleset which makes intuitive sense to players. This seems like an obvious statement but you would be surprised at the number of devs who seem to miss the point here!
Once you think you have achieved this through prototyping, you should test it in a mid-game scenario. This could be half-way through the single player campaign, or part-way through a run, or the point in a multiplayer match where everyone has managed to get hold of some upgrades: whatever. Fake, bluff and simulate whatever you need to get there but do not test your core mechanics solely on "Level 1" or another early-game state.
As a fairly minimalist game design, Frozen Synapse relied heavily on its core - it had nowhere to hide. This meant that the units, balance and UI were refined and tweaked iteratively until everything worked in concert.
Games as Vibes
You need to come up with aesthetics and secondary features which truly allow this core design to sing. The best games aren't developed via a checklist - they take a vibe and run with it as hard as they possibly can.
Art does a lot of heavy lifting here: I really believe that game art needs to either be highly stylised or else cutting edge in some way. Bland, undifferentiated or "nearly-there" art will not shout about your game mechanics effectively. Our long-time friend and collaborator Rich Whitelock has written about his work (and that of other artists like Rasmus Deguchi and Johan Lorentzon) on our games here, so check that out if you are looking for some direct insights.
There is a reason that the Command and Conquer remaster included a version of the game's classic installer. If you understand why that is, then you'll get what I mean here.
Expanding Circles
Our community who stuck with us through Determinance were absolutely vital to the success of Frozen Synapse, particularly those players who jumped on the early multiplayer builds and helped us to figure things out.
When testing a game, think of the process as expanding circles. Start with yourself, then another person you trust completely, then the rest of your team, then advisors, then friends, then community members, then sympathetic strangers, then complete strangers and so on!
The most successful games I have worked on all needed significant course correction from testers outside the dev team. Follow the process and hold yourself accountable.
Nearest Neighbour
Your game will constantly be compared to other games it somewhat resembles. Be ready for this and use it to your advantage, paying attention to player expectations. Front Mission, Laser Squad, Robosport…we heard "hey this reminds me of…" several million times during this period. One of the things we're most proud of now is the number of times FS is used as a Nearest Neighbour itself: we tend to get a cheeky mention any time a new simultaneous turn-based game appears on the horizon!
Celebrate and Calibrate
2011 - 2012 was a whirlwind for us as the game was finally released and gained traction: life-changing money, creative validation, winning multiple awards, travelling to events, meeting "famous" games industry figures and seeing our work praised across the board.
I'm extremely glad that (unusually for me) I didn't just immediately move on to thinking about the future. My memories from that time and what our team achieved together are extremely important to me - slowing down and giving them space to form was the right decision. I like the idea of the 24 Hour Rule as expressed here (although the specific time period could vary!) and it's something I try to keep in mind when something goes well or badly - don't suppress the feelings, experience them fully and only then allow yourself to move on.
If you are lucky enough to experience a game "blowing up" then it's hugely important to recognise that success can have some adverse effects. Firstly, your most vulnerable time as a business can come immediately after a big win - you need to make sure that you have access to a level-headed perspective that can help you figure out the next strategic move to make. Finance especially is critical - you may suddenly transition overnight to a mode where you immediately need a CFO or another finance brain in your business.
Also, the attention can have some weird psychological effects - I remember having a particularly difficult time during The Humble Frozen Synapse Bundle in case something went wrong with having that number of players exposed to the game at once.
It's easy for game devs to make work their identity - in a profession where you are asked to throw every element of your rational and emotional brain at problems, as well as an excessive amount of your time, this becomes almost inevitable. If you are this way inclined, it's worth taking time to make sure you're not neglecting your health or your relationships. The emotional challenge of success is not to be underrated, and it's something that a lot of game devs experience often to the detriment of their business in the long-term.
Lifetime Value
It is important to remember that games have an ongoing impact well after their launch.
This is why it is crazy to me that developers are so keen to abandon them when they find something that works! Some games critics in the 2010's and beyond did a huge disservice to both devs and players by continually labelling DLC as exploitative and evil - the reality is that well crafted, well priced DLC represents a service that players truly want.
If you have something that is working, find creatively valid ways to extend that thing in discussion with your audience - they will lead you in the right direction. You don't need to add huge features, just more of the content they want.
Frozen Synapse's ports and DLC worked very well for us - if anything we should have been more structured about them and done more. We had a superb critical, audience and financial response to the Red DLC pack, for example. These days, the advice around DLC is much more sophisticated - I'd urge any dev with a successful game to take note.
And no, to any commercial types reading, that doesn't mean that it is an infinite money fountain! At some point, you will hit diminishing returns and need a new game - just because many creative devs believe they've hit that point way too early does not mean that the good times will continue to roll forever.
Into the Endzone
Our next project was Frozen Cortex, an evolution of the FS formula which was themed as a brutal futuristic sport. As football fans and futuresports aesthetic enjoyers, this was a dream venture for us and - while ultimately a bit too niche for the budget we threw at it - it was critically well received and ended up being hugely rewarding.
If you want to learn more about its challenges, particularly around communicating its themes to an audience, then my GDC Failure Workshop talk is still online here.
Cortex's core design represented a refinement of FS's "predict your opponent's plan" conceit - while Ian first pitched it to me as "robots playing American football in a warehouse", it's a highly territorial game of positioning and motion.
We grew our team at this point, hoping to level up into more ambitious productions and particularly to advance our animation and art capabilities. I may have accidentally coined the term "triple-I" in an interview (I promise I was not serious). This is always a precarious time for any game studio and it's a step that needs to be taken in the right context.
Everyone on the team looks back on this game with fondness - we really did accomplish a lot with it and it still gets mentioned to us today. But its mediocre sales performance meant that we needed to rely more on reserves to get through our next project, and it was disappointing in terms of what it indicated about the wider indie games market at the time. I've subsequently been delighted to see games like Tape to Tape, which incorporate sports elements into a novel and fun indie game design, do very well. As ever, there are no hard and fast rules about the sort of content you can do if you truly figure out the audience. Games are games - whether they are played using human team members or a deck of cards - secondary prejudices and cultural associations shouldn't cause gamers to be closed-minded.
Early Access
Both FS and Cortex went through a paid beta / Early Access process, and I've subsequently worked on several other games that followed a similar trajectory. I won't attempt to be exhaustive here but I'll take the opportunity to give a few quick thoughts.
Public betas are all about calling your shots and communicating your progress. Your audience needs to know where you are going and how you plan to get there.
The initial release needs to be hugely impressive and very playable - it cannot have blockers or any impediment to solid gameplay sessions. It has to look and feel cool - the only thing missing needs to be content.
Then players need to be involved - they need to see a regular cadence of dev updates, they need to feel rewarded for contributing bug reports and feedback. You will always get "dead game / lazy dev" nonsense, so you need to take practical steps every day to prove this criticism wrong.
The game is now a live product - if issues emerge they need to be fixed quickly; improvements often will need to focus on content that players are asking for right now. Ideally, it should be a two-way process with players participating in the creation of the game they want to play.
"Early Access is your launch" is misleading - while the first release needs to be very impactful and live up to the promise of your game, this is far from your only chance. Also, successful Early Access games will experience a similar sales bump at 1.0 if you line everything up correctly.
Find the Level
Despite being a game which was well received and hit its creative aims, Cortex was just simply too expensive to make. With the sales information and market visibility that developers have now, there's little excuse for your project to fall into the same trap: if you go for something more niche then do your best to set an accurate upper bound for sales and scope accordingly in terms of things like art, animation and other expensive elements. The design might make sense, but the concept and presentation may limit your audience - there is nothing intrinsically wrong with this if you plan for it.
Second Synapse
After Cortex, we moved on to Frozen Synapse 2 which set the original's tactical encounters in the midst of a procedurally generated simulated city.
We knew we wanted to create a more expansive structure around Synapse's core gameplay - in 2016 the dynamics around the PC audience were becoming more clear, with players consistently choosing games that had a large amount of secondary strategic depth. Games like Prison Architect, Big Pharma and Dwarf Fortress were already proving that indie games could scratch these itches.
Pure tactical games that came subsequently, like 2018's ultrahit Into the Breach or even the recent Tactical Breach Wizards, brought a very high degree of design novelty to the genre and had hyper detailed aesthetics. This would have been very hard to achieve with an FS sequel given its minimalist design and visuals, so we needed to do something more with the contextual trappings.
FS2 was a difficult development process in many ways but there were several aspects that worked incredibly well - Ian's astonishing technical work on the procgen city and fitting levels into its many buildings for example, as well as much of the faction AI behaviour and dynamics. Looking back at its trailer now, the game had immense promise - I think we really delivered on maintaining the original game's atmosphere and adding a new strategic layer.
We struggled with the details though - balance and progression, insidious bugs which none of our QA efforts could ever find, systemic constraints which affected the pacing of levels and the requirements of supporting a much wider array of unit behaviours and stats while preserving the core gameplay. We overloaded the frame of the original FS with a little too much weight, and ultimately it couldn't hold up. Early Access could have helped but ultimately we were just too overwhelmed by to go through that process.
The critical response to the game was good but the bugs and other issues meant that the Steam audience turned against us pretty quickly - we didn't have the remaining resources to push forward and fix those things in a reasonable timeframe. Not fun!
Taken together, a few themes emerge for me when looking back at Cortex and FS2…
Goldilocks Engineering
Ian made this video about Frozen Cortex's AI, which I think illuminates his broader approach to tech.
I wasn't directly involved with this side of Mode 7's in-house games at the time but looking back I recognise a lot of the advantages we drew from a pragmatic approach to project architecture and feature development.
Games need to balance on the high wire between under- and over-engineering. Too little structure early on and they become an unwieldy mess of dependencies where any changes or iteration unravel the entire bowl of spaghetti. Too much structure and nothing gets implemented - you end up in an anxious stasis.
Similarly, building a slew of elaborate features prior to locking down a game design is often a disaster. The only real exception to this is simulation-style games where behaviour necessarily needs to emerge from complex systems - however, the process should be kept on a reasonably tight leash, tethered to the actual game that is being built.
World Building
Both Cortex and FS2 represented a huge opportunity to expand my narrative design and world-building experience.
One of the joys of game development is this ability to create a story that a player can actually inhabit, interact with and potentially change. It's such a joy that it's easy to get carried away, or let lore and world-building boil over until the whole dev process is ruined.
I like to take a dual-pronged approach to prevent this - working on broad general setting elements as soon as the very basic shape of the game is discovered in prototyping, then moving on to the details much later, after the single player structure and progression are established.
On FS2, we brainstormed a load of level concepts and worked on the ideal sequence of the story levels prior to my writing the bulk of the narrative.
Great game writing should function as dialogue with the game design - riffing on it, pivoting off it and playing a supporting role. On Frozen Cortex, the dialogue and bark scripting had visibility of Ian's AI system, allowing us to write special-case barks for a variety of specific situations. If the AI was weighing up two options, making a risky bet or had found a high-confidence move, then a character had something to say about it. This required a lot of quite gruelling writing sessions consisting of a lot of fine-grained variations but the end result was pretty effective.
Intuition and Systems
Player intuition is a critical variable - it doesn't matter how good your systems and mechanics are if something keeps chafing against what players want to do. Play is ultimately a form of expression, and if you are constantly undermining your players own instincts then your game will struggle.
At the same time, you cannot include everything that players might possibly want to do! A lot of feedback will arrive in the form "it would be cool if I could…" and if you listen to all of it uncritically you will end up with Homer's Car.
This is why a "defined feeling" is perhaps more important than traditional game design pillars. If you can clearly state "I want the player to feel like they are…" then you can hone in on that and filter feedback accordingly.
FS2 particularly felt obtuse and arcane to many players - we didn't have the same robust tutorialisation of a big production like a Crusader Kings game, but we also didn't have enough lead-in to give players a chance to adapt to some of its idiosyncrasies. Audiences can be quite forgiving if your game has depth and the initial experience isn't too overwhelming but this is a tough judgement call.
Management Games
Managing others and running projects is another balancing act. I've evolved a lot in my understanding of this over time and it was a definite weakness for me during this period.
I started from the premise that it is best to define broad goals and then let others figure out their own incremental processes to achieve them. This is - more often than not - a huge mistake.
Broad objectives need to be paired with much smaller, well defined short-term goals. OKR's are a useful framework for thinking about this - they combine an aspirational longer-term goal with measurable key results.
In my experience, most people also want at least some consultation on their process from the person managing them - they want to know they are "doing it the right way" and can drift into uncertainty without this. Everyone is different, with different experiences and incentives but - almost universally - people need clarity in order to function.
RACI is another useful framework for an organisation, even in a small team - ambiguity around responsibility and accountability particularly can lead to a raft of problems. You shouldn't be dogmatic about structural tools like these lest they turn into tedious business waffle that bores and alienates normal people - they are starting points for a human conversation.
The best projects have a combination of a very strong relentless top-level vision combined with a pragmatic, detailed, flexible and patient approach to structuring all of the incremental tasks along the way. In a small company, you likely need to be involved at both levels, and they both require a lot of focus and stamina.
Conventional wisdom and fear of micromanagement holds back a huge number of people from being effective at running projects. The reality is that every person needs a different granularity of oversight and management across their various tasks - there is a lot of flex between absent leadership and hovering over someone's shoulder.
The Publishing Era
I've cheated a little here with the sequence of events for narrative purposes - Mode 7's publishing efforts crossed over with the development of FS2, beginning with Tokyo 42 (2017) and The Colonists (2018), then culminating in the release of Fights in Tight Spaces (2021).
After a significant period developing our own games, we realised that we'd built up enough understanding of the whole process to collaborate with other devs on publishing their projects. This gave us the opportunity to fund and work with some brilliant folks - I'm hugely proud of everything we've put out to date and the superb developers we've been able to support.
Here are some views from both sides of the dev / publisher divide!
Faces of Risk
Sensible publishers (possibly an oxymoron but still…) try to control risk across several dimensions…
Capital Risk
Publishers who offer funding are looking to return a multiple of their initial investment in a game's development budget - that might feel close to a tautology, but I have had many confusing conversations with devs over the years which were missing that premise. Yes, many smaller publishers are "in it for the right reasons" and want to facilitate the creation of cool games as a core value, but the underlying financial motivation cannot be avoided.
This is why it is strange to me to hear devs repeatedly talking about "getting publisher money" as an end in itself. This is effectively saying "I want a zero sum relationship with a publisher" - it is inherently short-termist. Without earning out and generating revenues from your game, you will jump straight back into needing to "get publisher money", creating an endless loop of misery. If you can plan earnestly to generate a return for both yourself and the publisher, then you are on a much better track.
Audience Risk
Does the game have the potential to reach an audience large enough to justify its costs?
With Tokyo 42, I believed its incredible art style would be powerful enough to attract a significant amount of attention - this was borne out by the response to its initial trailer and the buzz it generated. Ultimately, as an action game without RPG elements or much character development (as well as a few fundamental quirks) it never achieved long-term audience traction in the way we or the lovely chaps at SMAC Games quite wanted - it still managed to be a decent success though.
When it came to The Colonists, I wanted to make a play to get into the city builder space which was incredibly fertile ground in 2019. It was ultra clear from looking at Steam that the audience for this style of game was there, so I didn't hesitate when it arrived as a pitch. It continues to do well as new players discover it - building and automation games of various flavours seem to be a perennial category for PC players.
Making very niche games and then going out looking for a non-specialist publisher might well be a fool's errand. Similarly "1% of China" style pitches, where the dev highlights a huge category and then attempts to justify their design by claiming they only need a small market share are worthless - understanding who will actually be buying your game is critical. Define a real audience and you are good to go.
Development Risk
Perhaps the most macro risk in game publishing is dev risk: will the developer finish their game on time and on budget?
Without a track record, it can be hard for publishers to pull the trigger. For first-time devs, much more due diligence is needed around their coding experience, development plans and proposed design. Shipping well-received games, even if they are small, does help with this so consider this a counterpoint to my above comments on ambitious projects!
Competent publishers should be active about controlling dev risk, becoming another clear and productive voice on your project and helping you guide it to the finish line. In reality, this is rarely the case, as a lot of feedback arrives late and in a non-actionable form, meaning that publisher production interventions simply serve to create tedious interpersonal triage work for the developer.
Content Risk
Games which require a lot of hand-crafted content (such as metroidvanias or third person platformers) represent another type of risk. The dev studio may be great at design and coding, but they need to demonstrate a pipeline that can finish all of the game's content to a reasonable standard in a rational timeframe. This is often harder than it looks.
Portfolio Risk
As a fundamentally hit-driven business, games publishing really only works if you adopt a "portfolio approach" - this doesn't mean "just sign a load of mediocre games", it means that (in an ideal world) you:
Do not expect similar performance across all of your titles
Occasionally push the boat out to sign something ambitious that might "return the fund"
Try to manage costs such that you do not end up artificially chasing a certain amount of throughput or catalogue size
Look after your catalogue such that residual revenues provide an ongoing baseline to support both your operations and your catalogue investments
Do not overtrade under any circumstances
Even publishers that claim to have found a way of mitigating these issues are often defined by 1 - 3 tentpole titles.
This means, from the developer perspective, that if your game doesn't fit into the right risk configuration for a given publisher's portfolio at a given time, you might get a straight-up rejection. Yes, there are super smart publishers out there who can be more specific, cherry picking titles rarely and building up an incredible winning streak but this can still fall apart if too much hubris creeps in.
Notes on Publishing
Here are a few more thoughts…
What is a Good Indie Game Budget?
Whatever will give you and your publisher a probable > 20x ROI!
This is a question that comes up constantly with devs looking for finance - the reason that nobody can give you a straight answer is that this is a poorly framed question.
If you are trying to land a publishing deal then you need to weigh the following factors:
Your team size and composition
Your short- and long-term studio plans
The level of development risk represented by your studio
The genre of your game
The reasonably addressable market of your game
The specific publisher you are targeting and their deal box
The current "meta" of publishing trends and biases
In my experience, the best approach is to pick a lane and then present your early pitch to publishers with a clear direction in mind. If your game is good, this will elicit some kind of response from which you can decide whether to spec down and hit a lower budget or reconfigure entirely.
Just a quick note on pitching, if you use an outlier hit game as a comp, be prepared to show in detail how you will be able to improve upon that game across a number of dimensions: visuals, depth, content, whatever it may be. "My game is a worse version of Minecraft and so some of that audience will play it" is not a valid argument and demonstrates that you are not being respectful of the publisher's time. Want to get out of this trap completely? Find relevant comps, then you can target your budget accordingly.
Why do publishers sign games?
Like all decisions, the final choice to sign a game rests on emotion..
A word I find myself thinking about a lot with games is "overwhelming" - if a video clip, concept or screenshot doesn't stir a powerful immediate reaction then something is wrong. If a game doesn't evoke a sense of awe then it will struggle. This is why horror is such a popular style - it takes a direct route to an emotional response. Vampire Surivors' insane number of objects on screen or Balatro's spinning number counters are there for a reason - they are simply overwhelming.
It is easy to make excuses as a developer, especially if you don't have much in the way of resources at your disposal, but really this is on you. It is possible to make games that wow people without expensive visuals or high-level software engineering skills - creating something that hits hard should be your sole objective!
It’s important to remember that this is a moving target. This is why many experience developers who return to games after a long break can struggle - they’re not tuned in to current audience expectations.
Here was my thesis for signing each of our games…
Tokyo 42
Instantly stunning visuals coupled with the curiosity of a hand-crafted indie open-world action game. The team were new to game development but were ultra motivated, had a very strong creative cohesion and were clearly up for collaboration.
The Colonists
An experienced developer who had worked on games before branching out on his own, with a clear understanding of a very popular genre and concept visuals that indicated an emotive and distinctive style. As a systemic game, there would be a lot of long-term depth for players, but a defined focus (the game wouldn't stray too far from The Settlers or Anno) would keep dev risk in check.
Fights in Tight Spaces
A perfect illustration of my beliefs about "familiarity and novelty" - I would have been a hypocrite to not sign it! Deckbuilders were (and are still) something of the hot genre du jour with well established dynamics and immense systemic depth, but adding the emotive (there we go again) punch of a brawler on top provided a much-needed spark. I knew I could add significant value from my experience with tactical games, and finally I knew and trusted the dev team.
If you are trying to get a game signed, it will be this story that a publisher can tell themselves about it which will make the difference, not how polished your pitch deck is or the fine-tuning of your market research. You need to find overwhelming combos of concepts, mechanics and visuals and present a clear development story.
Who Will "Do The Marketing"?
This is another poorly framed question.
Marketing begins and ends with the product - as the developer, you are selecting the start position and defining the possibility space.
The closer something becomes to a commodity the stronger its branding needs to be, so if you are making a more generic game then you need to generate secondary appeal for it via its presentation and brand values - again, this is primarily your job as you are pitching the project.
Game marketing is still largely about discoverability - yet again, largely your job as the developer. Figure it out from the get-go and use the ample resources available out there to put yourself in the zone of plausibility.
When it comes down to mechanics like social media posting, community management, PR, paid UA and platform holder relations then your publisher should be able to give you a specific plan for how those will be executed as they relate to your game, and who is responsible for each element. Paid UA for premium indie games on Steam is a nightmarish bloodbath as I write this, for example, and unbelievably hard to get right - if you want your publisher to go that route then, again, you will need to plan directly with them and clarify your exact expectations.
Feedback Loops
Defining testable assumptions, actually testing them with an audience and working constructively to find a solution should be a team effort between publisher and developer. There is often way too much subjectivity across the entire process and - if everyone is clear on their objectives and reasoning - a lot of doubt and confusion can be ameliorated.
On Fights in Tight Spaces, the team's openness around responding to feedback helped tweak the overall experience into line with the expectations of players who were used to very deep deckbuilders like Slay the Spire. These players wanted a variety of viable strategies and a sense that the game was fundamentally fair - they didn't want to get screwed over by RNG. We went through quite a number of testing cycles to get the balance right and it was thoroughly worth it. I discussed this further in this article about the game's Early Access process.
Calm Before the Storm
Final testing and shaping up for launch requires a cool head and lots of patience. Testing needs to ramp up and every build needs to be thrown to the wolves (aka the community) to be pulled apart - players are brutally unforgiving about the slightest launch bug and so slowing down at this point to get things right is ideal. Again, this needs to be a collaboration - ample time needs to be built into the schedule both to find and react to issues.
Communication and Expectations
These are the two elements that are critical to any publishing relationship, and the source of virtually all division. The publisher should be extremely clear about timings, expectation, feedback cadence and so on throughout the entire project - I know I could have been a lot better about this at times. The developer should actively ask questions and clean up any ambiguities. Game projects and project management are highly complex and a lot can change through the course of a development cycle - if you can keep talking and aim for a long-term relationship when a lot of this can be managed.
Mode 7 Coda
Ian left Mode 7 in 2019 and we said goodbye to our permanent employees as we discussed here - this marked the end of our collaborative dev and publishing projects.
While this was a difficult time, it was absolutely the right decision and the results we've all been lucky enough to have independently in the intervening years has borne that out. I spun off a publishing company to license the Mode 7 name and work on new games like Xenonauts 2 and Fights in Tight Spaces - this business was ultimately acquired by Reforged Studios in 2024, where I am now an advisor. Ian has found significant success in his new career as CTO at Oxford Brain Diagnostics.
I think of professional indie game development as an all-consuming contact sport: it's creative, commercial, technical, intuitive, human and abstract. The hard-won skills you develop can take you in interesting directions, both inside and outside games, if you so choose.
Final Thoughts
We were extremely lucky to exist in a culture of pioneering indies who were forging a path through the uncertainty ahead as well as experienced games industry folks who took the time to point us in the right direction with advice and connections. Going through everyone would be impossible - as soon as I start listing it all out I'm conscious that I'm going to forget people, do someone a disservice or mention something that might be best kept offline - but Introversion Software and Positech Games were both huge inspirations to us, and I’m very proud to call them friends today.
Games is a place where - most of the time - everyone wants to see each other succeed. I haven't come across another industry where that is the case.
Interfacing with this is a balancing act - you need a strong focus on craft and a desire to do things as well as you can, but also to pick your head up and look around from time to time.
This simply has to be what works for you so my suggestion is to just go out of your comfort zone occasionally - if you are more of a social animal then think about carving out some fully focussed time away from the crowd; if you end to get tunnel vision on your own goals and projects then get out there and make some friends.
Keep supporting other people who work in games - make sure that culture never dies out.
Beg, Borrow, Steal
When you learn to produce dance music, you quickly figure out that 99% of structure is stolen. Countless successful artists will lay a famous track out in their production software, mark out where the different sections occur, then use the exact same structure for their own work.
Games are no different - you can innovate as much as you like but you do not need every mundane structural element to be novel.
UX paradigms are another great (and often essential) den of thievery. Players will expect things to behave in certain ways - every change to expectations comes with an overhead of confusion and the burden of tutorialisation. Choose your battles wisely.
Validation is Currency
Get player validation wherever you can - give away as many free keys, prologue versions, demos or whatever else necessary to get that player feedback.
Once you have validation, you can leverage that into a more relevant strategy for your game - I have probably overused the story of Hackmud, the hardcore text-based hacking game we funded via IndieFund that was an instant yes for me based on the number of hours players were putting into its beta. Validation is the ultimate leveller - it exposes truly good games.
A Creative Solution
Games can be whatever you want. In a time when developers are increasingly cleaving to genres (not a bad thing in itself) you can make a mark by doing something truly out there. Have fun with it.
Creativity also is hugely relevant to the audience and their needs - if you make a game that truly facilitates player creativity then you might have something explosive on your hands.
The best games are often systems of expression both for the developers and the players.
Big Impact, Big Systems
The hypothetical "perfect" game from a commercial standpoint would scream at the player within the first half-second and then blossom out into an infinite system that could stay with them for the rest of their lives. How is your game doing on each of those two axes?
Strategy Games
My career highlights were all opportunistic and not really part of a long-term plan. Multi-classing music, writing and commercial functions, changing role from dev to publisher to consultant and then back to dev again is not something I'd advise anyone to do!
The throughline is that I've always looked for how I can make the most valuable contribution to the creative opportunities that were in front of me. I would probably be wealthier now if we'd gone all-in on publishing and raised finance in 2017; I would probably be a much more successful musician now if I'd stuck to a consistent release schedule for the last 15 years and so on.
However, this weird blend of stuff is what defines me personally and honestly I'm certain I would be less happy now if I hadn't charted this course. The most externally successful endeavours are not always the ones I cherish the most and causality is always weird to think about - I don't regret a single project I've mentioned here.
To anyone out there who is like me, my one big tip is to worry less! When you know something is right for you then go for it; when you know something is wrong then turn it down. Keep doing things, keep trying things, enjoy your time.
Free as in Beer
If you've had a commercial success and are struggling to live up to it, or you're going through a transition and aren't sure what you're doing next, you could always try making a small game and just giving it away. I did this with Wardialler which ended up featuring in the Leftfield Collection at Rezzed and got a very nice review in Edge - it was a game I'd always wanted to make and thoroughly worth the time I put in.
People First
The only real regrets I have in my career are all to do with people, not projects or their outcomes - they entirely consist of times I should have been more patient and more certain. It's something I want to keep working on.
Growth Mindset
A lot of devs (us included originally) say they want to "stay small and just make games".
One thing I would always urge them to look at is the vulnerability and stagnation which can come with staying small.
Growth also can mean a variety of different things - in a well-structured company it can actually offer greater opportunities for specialisation, so if you are resisting growth due to a reticence around managing people, you may in fact be tying yourself to a management role by staying small.
You get to define the rules and reality of your company, so follow the opportunities to their natural conclusion and don't write off growth (in terms of headcount, output or revenues) simply on the basis of your preconceptions.
Exit Strategy
Selling a business is not a straightforward trade: it's an alchemy of time, direction and money. Do you want to keep operating on your current trajectory for the long term or suddenly teleport yourself sideways into a different state?
I will write more about this in future but if you are ever presented with this decision then one of the most undervalued factors to consider is your situation post-acquisition. Very few people actually want to retire to the beach forever (not a risk for me!) nor do they want to be stuck powerlessly flapping around inside the skeleton of an organisation they used to control (I am not in this situation either thankfully!)
While selling your tech startup is basically considered a rite of passage, game devs are not often of this disposition. Thinking of your studio as a company which could one day change ownership can actually be a very healthy exercise - at the bare minimum it enforces a type of organisational discipline which can benefit you in the short term. It also can clarify specific questions around how you want to be spending your time day-to-day, and how much control you truly want.
Definite Optimism
Games are - despite appearances - in a great place currently, with new players entering the market, new genres popping up all the time and new tech breaking down barriers to entry. However, recent years have been disastrous for many employees as many large companies over-expanded, took bets which failed to pan out and adopted risky capital structures.
This kind of atmosphere can lead to a kind of default pessimism: "My game will never get noticed because everyone is a thoughtless philistine who is brainwashed by live service games"
You can find a way to make the games you want to make, even if that is as a hobby or side-business. You can also find an audience for those games if you are open about building a community incrementally. Don't let weird and callous tech people monopolise the world's definite optimism: channel this trait and use it for something positive.
Restore, Restart
Games have given me the creative outlet I always needed. I've been fascinated with them ever since my Dad showed me Chuckie Egg and Thunderstruck on the BBC Micro as a young kid. They've given me a format to work with others and a place to reach an audience - they've shaped my ideas of culture, engineering, art, commerce and friendship.
Make stuff and do things: people will always tell you that you're doing it wrong, or that there is some problem with the result but keep doing it anyway. If you appreciate anything I'm saying here then please don't take it as dogma - there are countless indie developers who have become wildly successful by ignoring all advice and just putting their heart and soul into a game.
I am currently contributing to a small dev project called Siegecaster. It started with small ambitions but already several very positive and unexpected things have happened! We don't know where it will go but the path is certainly interesting and it has taken me back to dev at a time when I didn't expect it.
Even this very small game would never have happened without calling a creative shot - put a stake in the ground and work towards something. Get your rewards from the process and not just the outcome.
When Frozen Synapse won the IGF Audience award in 2012, I attended GDC for the first time. I specifically remember looking out across the bay and thinking of all the potential we still had - all the stuff we could make and directions we could go. Yesterday, I got to look out at the same view and feel the same sense of possibility - seeing the awesome line-up in this year's IGF and getting a sense that people are still excited to make new imaginative games was hugely energising.
Ultimately, we are alive for a short time and have an even shorter window of time to produce anything worthwhile. Games are a great use of this creative window - they represent a positive connection between the abstract memories, systems and sensations in our minds and the experiences of other people. This will never change, despite trends, tech and the march of human progress.
I hope to still be here in another 20 years - if I am, I’ll let you know how it goes.
A great deal of experience here. Thank you for taking the time to verbalize all of that, Paul!