30 Under 30: Small Indie Teams Making Big Waves With ID@Xbox

Although we’re not actually a studio, the TUNIC team is made up of some world-class folks. Kevin Regamey was the Audio Director, crafting the game’s soundscape along with the rest of his team at Power Up Audio. Terence Lee (Lifeformed) and Janice Kwan wrote and performed the soundtrack. Eric Billingsley was brought on as a level artist, but ended up working on everything from coding fish behaviour to implementing keyboard controls. Beyond that core team, we also worked closely with our publisher, Finji, as well as Felix Kramer, who helped with early business development and production.

When I quit my job in 2015 to start working on what would become TUNIC, I knew that I would need help with sound and music. I had no idea if I’d be able to support myself long enough to finish a game, so I certainly didn’t have the confidence to formally start a game studio. Instead, I partnered with collaborators on a rev share basis.

There’s a lot of problem-solving! Instead of there being an established way something is done (like there might be in a large studio), every task is a new puzzle to solve. That could be a piece of tech that you need to research or write, or it could be some sort of organizational method. How should you handle build distribution? Websites? Scheduling meetings? Going to a conference/show? A lot of this was helped by working with a publisher who had systems or wisdom for that sort of thing.

We haven’t launched Botany Manor just yet, but the main team we’ve had throughout production consists of 5 people. I started the game wearing many hats, though my primary job is programming and design, which then grew into the role of Creative Director once I assembled my team. I was really lucky to find some very talented people who wanted to join the project: Thomas Williams (Audio Designer), Tim Steer (3D Artist), Jim Bending (Animator), and Kitt Byrne (2D Artist and Designer).

Because we don’t have a physical studio and we’re all living in different parts of the UK, I’d say a big challenge for me was learning how to efficiently work remotely. There’s a fine balance between trusting each other, communication, having meetings, and, at the same time, giving each other space.

When you have limited time and limited budget, you want to make sure you’re all on the same page and check in with each other regularly, but you also want to allow people to do their own thing and decide their own schedules.

One thing that really helped our team was having a call every morning where we didn’t talk about work. It allowed us to become friends and joke around with each other, and it made sure we always gave each other the benefit of the doubt. We also met up in person a few times, where we’d play through the whole game to see everyone’s work put together, and then we’d go out for a nice dinner together.

Hello! We’re Cococucumber, a definitely under thirty people studio based in Canada. Although our team size tends to vary during production, we shipped Ravenlok with ten people full-time, filling multiple roles. It’s a formula that has worked for us on our previous game, Echo Generation, and it allows some flexibility for the team to try different roles depending on the project’s needs. We hope to grow our team on future projects and would love to retain the special feeling that comes with being part of a tight-knit team.

One of the most significant challenges for a small studio like Cococucumber is resource management. With a limited team size, each person often wears multiple hats, juggling between creative work and the logistical aspects of game development. This means balancing time between working on production and the administrative tasks that are essential to keep the studio running. For instance, while focusing on the creative aspects of Ravenlok, we also had to manage budgets, marketing strategies, and partnership negotiations.

Another challenge is staying competitive in an industry dominated by larger studios with bigger budgets and teams. This requires us to be innovative, not just in our game designs but also in how we market our games. We have to be more strategic in our decisions, often taking calculated risks to ensure our games stand out.

We’re a small tight-knit team of friends based in Vancouver, Canada, although during the development of Celeste a lot of the team was working remotely from Brazil and Seattle. After finishing Celeste in 2018, the rest of the team moved up to Vancouver to work in person full-time. The core team is under ten people!

When you’re a small team every individual ends up taking on a lot of varied roles, which is both really fun but also can be very challenging. It’s a bit of a balancing act, where you need to learn a lot of different things to get a game out the door, but don’t want to stretch yourself too thin. One day you might be programming some cool-looking clouds, the next day fighting weird issues with the save system, and the day after, in a meeting trying to figure out how a trailer announcement might work.

Usually, I’m in charge of writing the story, designing the gameplay, balancing in-game numbers, level design, background art, and all the gameplay-related programming in the game. Most of everything else was made using online commercial assets and/or outsourcing and then implemented into the game. This is a huge workload, but I really enjoy it because I can control the direction of game development however I want. Although it’s pretty time-consuming, I have a better grasp and control over the quality of the game.

Today, there are thirteen people in our team, not counting external parties. When we launched Valheim as an early access title in 2021, we were just four people (one programmer, one designer, one artist, and one community manager). Most of the game, however, at that point was made by only one person (me).

Well, the obvious one is to design our game in a way to enable us to actually complete it with a small team. The art style in Valheim was chosen to be unique and at the same time be something that I myself, as a non-3D-artist, could work with and create assets for.

Another challenge was using free/open-source software wherever possible. For me being a Linux user for as long as I can remember, this was, however, not a hard choice to make.

The team was organically built throughout the development process. Initially, it was just myself for about two years. At the peak of production, we had around ten people, and by the time of release, the team consisted of about six to seven members.

Specifically for Twelve Minutes, the biggest challenge was role overlap. Being solo for a significant duration at the beginning meant that, later in development, I found myself wearing too many hats. I was responsible for all the game’s programming, which became a bottleneck as the team expanded.

I am a solo developer inspired by libraries, bones, and bugs.

As someone who makes personal games, any negative reviews I get can feel especially hurtful. I have tried to build up a tough skin, but I am still very, very soft inside. Also, marketing a game is very hard, especially something niche like Birth. If I was to bring someone on in the future, it would for sure be someone that could handle the PR and marketing full-time.

We launched the original Slime Rancher with only two full-time staff (myself and Monomi Park’s other co-founder, Mike Thomas) with some additional help from a couple of our friends. This seems almost impossible in hindsight, and by the time we launched Slime Rancher 2 we had twenty-seven full-time staff at Monomi Park.

Everyone wears a lot of hats. Almost everyone at the studio is responsible for multiple different aspects of the project or works across multiple departments. So much of this is because you often don’t have the specific discipline or sometimes even the right department yet for the task at hand, and you simply need to figure it out with what you’ve got. But that also leads to trying a bunch of new things all the time, and it can certainly keep the week exciting.

Hi, we’re Plot Twist, a compact team based in Kraków, Poland. At the time of The Last Case of Benedict Fox’s launch, our team consisted of twenty-nine dedicated individuals that are pure game enthusiasts and love board games!

Operating as a small studio presents a myriad of challenges, with multitasking being a significant hurdle. Team members often find themselves juggling roles, switching from writing to producing or quality assurance, level design to tool creation, game design to working with voice actors, and so on. The ability to contribute across various domains is both a challenge and a testament to our team’s versatility.

We are Rocket Adrift, a three-person team made up of myself, Sloane Smith, and Titus McNally. We have been making games since 2018. Our Mission as a developer is to tell personal narratives that highlight the perspectives of LGBTQIA2S+ and BIPOC experiences while also showcasing an outsider lens to Canadian culture. We began development on Psychroma in 2021, a few months after the release of our first game, Raptor Boyfriend: A High School Romance.

We all wear many hats. Along with being executive producers, founders, and managers, we also have to work within our own specializations, including programming, design, asset production, composing, and marketing. Another challenge is maintaining a flat structure, with all of us at the decision-making table, from the overall studio operations to the level design of Psychroma.

Shedworks is a two-person company, run by myself and my business partner Gregorios Kythreotis. I was the lead programmer on Sable, and Greg was the art director and game designer. Though being a small team, we both wore many other hats as well. For the development of Sable, we brought on freelance contractors at different stages of development to help with the roles that we couldn’t handle between us, such as audio and animation. By the time Sable launched, the team was about a dozen people, including me and Greg.

I think one of the biggest challenges is that because you have so few staff, every team member has to take care of multiple different jobs. Besides what you might think of as your regular day job, there’s always a million other things like managing production schedules, doing payroll, handling social media comms – the list goes on. You will always find yourself doing things you probably didn’t have in mind when you dreamt of starting your own studio.

We had twenty-two excellent humans on our team when we launched Stray Gods with our publisher, Humble Games. Summerfall is a team of people from very different backgrounds and experience, many of whom have come from other industries, paired with some experienced senior talent and incredible junior talent! We’re very passionate about growing our team in the right ways and trying to give opportunities to the people who work for us whenever we can.

Budgets and resourcing are always very difficult but often become constraints that force us to be creative in clever ways. So much of Stray Gods was born from the inherent challenges of being a small studio, and while those constraints are always very difficult to deal with, they often lead to the most interesting results.

Ultimately, though, keeping a small team afloat, especially when we refuse to crunch and try to treat everyone the best we can, is tough! Money – and, therefore, stability – is always a huge factor.

For the majority of development, just me, and legally, it’s a studio of one. But I work with Benedict Nichols, who’s an award-winning composer, for all things audio, and Wired Productions has teamed me up with Stefan Wijnker for porting during the final phases. Beyond the marketing and QA folks at Wired Productions, that’s all.

Well, besides the regular challenges of getting any game out the door and finding sufficient success to make another one, my main challenges are maintaining a healthy mode of working, especially toward the release of a game. I found it easier to release a game with a team as some of the burden gets shared when things go wrong, which inevitably is the case. When you are by yourself, there is no one to share with, the good or the bad. I find myself working with my publisher to map out alternative launch strategies and roadmaps. For my new game, Bulwark: Falconeer Chronicles, this led to an “evolving demo,” basically shaping and updating the game while people play it – it’s an open development strategy intended to prevent some of the launch anxiety by giving folks a taste of the game at very early stages.

We were just about five people, and we are now more than double that. Twin Drums, on top of being a black and queer owned studio, has always been a majority women and non-binary company.

Fundraising can be very challenging, as well as finding the right balance between senior and junior folks (which is especially important if you want to hire more diverse teams)