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

Apr. 1, 2024

Interview | Edge sits down with Tomas Sala, Lucy Blundell, Madison Karrh, and Joe Richardson

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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

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.”

It’s certainly a freedom in which he has revelled. Sala believes that boiling game development down into a list of tasks, as encouraged by project-management tools such as Jira, can turn what should be a creative adventure into a slog. Instead, he prefers exploring, chasing “that subconscious flow” in the manner of “creators outside of games who aren’t stuck to that Jira fucking pegboard”. Though Sala insists he is “quite disciplined” and keeps track of the things that need to be done in any given week, he also allows himself the room to deviate from that path when inspiration strikes. Such as waking up with the idea of making flying eels with guns, for example, and then diving straight in to create it. “I love feature creep,” he says. “It’s my entire design philosophy.”

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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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.”

EA’s buyout of Chillingo had provided Blundell with a cash and stock payout, and she used those savings as a safety net while she established herself as a solo developer under the name Kinmoku. Knowing her programming skills weren’t fantastic, she decided to make visual novels, whose coding requirements would be relatively simple. By being thrifty, and taking the odd side job doing background art, proofreading and even wedding invitations, she reckoned she could stretch out her savings for a couple of years or more. But going solo had another cost. “I got really lonely at the beginning, because I’d gone from this really friendly office where all my mates were, and where I met my husband,” she recalls. “It was really sad to leave that and just be on my own.” Moving to Germany after her partner secured a job at Nintendo only exacerbated that loneliness.

Blundell says that, as a shy introvert, she tends to work well on her own – so she was surprised to find how much this affected her. “There are still days when I feel pretty lonely,” she says, adding that social media can help with the need for human contact, along with networking events and conferences such as GDC. “You go from nothing, pretty much not talking to anyone, to talking to everyone for like a whole week. Which I do love, but I’m always exhausted by the end of it. It’s not a nice [day-to-day] balance, like you get in an office.” She admits that when an event is coming up, she will practice talking ahead of time to get used to it again.

Blundell’s first big project as a solo dev, Love IRL, was never finished. After a year, she had coded the first half of the game (about three hours of gameplay) up to a point where the player makes a decision that could take them along one of four branches. “These routes are all pretty much as long as that beginning,” she says. She realised that coding those four branches, around 12 hours in total, could take another four years. “And it was like, ‘Oh my god, I can’t do that’.” She tried altering the scope of the project, but it felt like too much of a compromise. Instead, she put Love IRL aside, and made her debut, One Night Stand, as part of a game jam. “It was just done in like a month, and then I put it out. No fanfare, didn’t contact anyone, just put it on Itch.io – and then I went on holiday. And while I was away it started getting covered by really big YouTubers.” The resulting buzz meant the free version of One Night Stand ended up being downloaded around a quarter of a million times. So Blundell set about polishing and updating the game, then released a paid version on Steam for £2.99.

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

“In the last couple of years, the finances from One Night Stand were starting to go down, and I was like, ‘I need to get this done quickly!'” she says. “And that’s quite scary. So I had a lot of pressure on me – it was almost like there was someone behind me the whole time, [saying] ‘Work! Hurry up!'” Along the way, a lot of elements were cut – one positive, for Blundell, of working alone. “I’m only hurting myself when I do that. I’m not letting down all the artists, or the writers, or whoever’s made all that stuff.” But no work is ever completely wasted: some elements of Love IRL made their way into Videoverse, and Blundell files any unused art assets away in a library in case they come in handy another day. Plus, having complete control over her games means that she can decide to offset any setbacks in development by running a sale on old games or taking on side work to bring in extra cash.

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.”

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

“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.

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.”

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.

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.”

But what has allowed Richardson to remain a solo developer is the greater success of his next game, The Procession To Calvary. “For the two years after release, I was rich,” he laughs. “But I know I’m not. If that was my actual salary, I’d be rich. But that’s my income for those two years. If you factor in the previous ten years, if you think about the next ten years, it’s hard to get too excited.” There’s that fear again. “I don’t know how successful the next game will be,” he says. “I’m in a position where I know it’s not going to sell zero, which is nice. But it might sell, like, not well at all.” When Richardson set out as a solo developer, he thought he would be happy if he could make a living from his art. But now, with two children to support, he realizes he also needs a safety net, a sense of stability. He accepts that he might be able to gain that by signing a deal with a publisher, but he doesn’t want to do that, to cede that control. So for now, at least, it’s back to what he knows best. “Make a thing, then sell the thing,” he laughs. “That’s my plan.”

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

Lewis Packwood loves video games. He loves video games so much he has dedicated a lot of his life to writing about them, for publications like GamesRadar+, PC Gamer, Kotaku UK, Retro Gamer, Edge magazine, and others. He does have other interests too though, such as covering technology and film, and he still finds the time to copy-edit science journals and books. And host podcasts… Listen, Lewis is one busy freelance journalist!

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