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Explore the untold tales behind your favorite indie video games. Dive into our collection of articles detailing the history and evolution of these groundbreaking titles, based on the "Game Dev Docs" YouTube series.
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How Slay The Spire Was Made and Why it Failed on Release This The Slay The Spire documentary details the development of roguelike deck-building indie game Slay The Spire and goes behind the scenes of its creation. Discover why the two developers Anthony Giovanetti and Casey Yano wanted to fuse the genres roguelike and deck-building […]
How Balatro Was Made and Why The Creator Expected to Sell 6 Copies This Balatro documentary details the development of roguelike deck-building indie game Balatro and goes behind the scenes of its creation. Discover how the anonymous solo developer LocalThunk originally wanted to make an online version of the card game Big Two. After getting […]
How Inscryption Was Made and Started as Part of an Anthology Series This Inscryption documentary details the development of roguelike deck-building indie game Inscryption and goes behind the scenes of its creation. Discover how developer Daniel Mullins participated in a Ludum Dare game jam and came up with the concept that ultimately led to Inscryption […]
How Tunic Was Made and Why The Creator Designed Content for No One This Tunic documentary details the development of the indie action-adventure game Tunic and goes behind the scenes of its creation, showing early concept art and early in-game footage. Discover more about developer Andrew Shouldice and the team he assembled. After working at […]
How Death Stranding Was Made and Why The Team Disliked Hideo Kojima’s Vision This Death Stranding documentary details the development of the video game Death Standing and goes behind the scenes of its creation. After saying goodbye to Konami and the Metal Gear Solid series, Hideo Kojima’s legendary return to the video game world as […]
How Doki Doki Literature Club! Was Made and Why its Release Made the Creator Miserable This Doki Doki Literature Club! documentary details the development of the visual novel indie game Doki Doki Literature Club! and goes behind the scenes of its creation. Discover more about its creator Dan Salvato and how he went from being […]
Alx Preston’s Battle with Congenital Heart Disease Hyper Light Drifter, a 2D action role-playing game, is the result of Alx Preston’s unwavering motivation caused by his congenital heart disease. Congenital heart disease is a general term for a range of heart defects that develop during pregnancy or birth. While some individuals, post-surgery, lead relatively normal […]
Arnt Jensen’s Solo Journey “I kept believing in it for three years. I had no money, I just believed in it. I dreamed about it, this place called LIMBO. That was the beginning of it.” Arnt Jensen The story of how 2D puzzle platformer LIMBO was made begins with a young Arnt Jensen. Born in […]
Indie game “Cult of The Lamb” was born out of a desire to mix base-building elements with dungeon-crawling gameplay. Despite having that core idea in mind from the start, it took a lot of iteration before indie developer Massive Monster landed on the idea of creating your own cult. In fact, over 60% of the […]
In late 2012, two sophomore students, Duncan Drummond and Paul Morse, embarked on a university project focused on programming. It eventually culminated in the action platformer Risk of Rain the following year. What’s more, for the sequel, they transformed the first game’s pixel art aesthetic into fully rendered 3D characters and environments, all achieved with […]
The origins of The Legend of Zelda goes all the way back to 1984, when Nintendo was experiencing massive success with their very first home console, the Famicom, better known as the NES outside of Japan. To capitalize on its popularity, Nintendo started looking for a way to create bigger and better games without having […]
Freethinker: Joar Jakobsson’s Journey into Game Development The development of 2D pixel art platformer Rain World started with a simple prototype made by Joar Jakobsson, who was studying graphic design at the time. When the Swedish student wasn’t drawing illustrations or creating logos, he took the time to learn how to program and make sprites […]
Dwarf Fortress already has more than two decades of development history and if it’s up to its two creators, Tarn and Zach Adams, they’ll continue working on their management simulation game for the rest of their lives. To get a clear understanding of Dwarf Fortress’ origins, we have to go all the way back to […]
The Forest might not look like your typical indie game, but it’s perhaps more indie than a lot of games already covered on this channel. Initially, the studio only consisted of two people and the game was even self-published, making it a completely independent development journey. In 2011, creative director Ben Falcone teamed up with […]
OMORI’s origins go all the way back to more than a decade ago. In December 2011, an artist with the pseudo name Omocat, created an illustration of a boy, who she named Omori, and shared it on her blog. Omori isn’t just the name of the boy, it’s also short for hikikomori, a phenomenon coined […]
Stray’s development story started with two artists and the dream of making their very first indie game together. Viv and Koola, who have indicated in multiple interviews they prefer to go by their nicknames, left Ubisoft Montpellier to create their own indie studio. While coming up with an idea for their first game, they couldn’t […]
Enter The Gungeon was developed by Dodge Roll, a studio formed by ex-employees of game company Mythic Entertainment. In 2006, Electronic Arts purchased Mythic Entertainment. By early 2013, three employees from Mythic joined forces to work on their own projects. Brent Sodman and David Rubel, both programmers, and Dave Crooks, a designer, would often meet […]
“Let’s make the game we’d want to play. Let’s make something hardcore, ultra-niche, with pixel art and ridiculous difficulty. Let’s do the passion project and to hell with the consequences.” It’s with this mindset that development studio Motion Twin set out to create Dead Cells, according to Steve Filby, the games’ Marketing Manager. Motion Twin […]
Elden Ring’s development story begins in 2017, right after the Japanese game studio FromSoftware was done with the last piece of DLC for Dark Souls 3. As with most FromSoftware titles, renowned developer Hidetaka Miyazaki assumed the role of game director. He shared this position with Yui Tanimura however, as he was also co-directing Sekiro: […]
The story of how Disco Elysium was made, is one filled with lots of Dungeons and Dragons inspired game sessions, a very drunken night in Estonia, years of battling depression and alcoholism and eventually developing one of the best RPGs in recent times from an abandoned building. Disco Elysium’s inception goes all the way back […]
The origin of the first generation of Pokémon games is a fascinating tale that involves real life bug catching, trademark difficulties, almost losing years of work and defying the expectations of Nintendo, who didn’t understand the concept of collecting monsters. To get the full picture, we have to go all the way back to the […]
The initial idea for Don’t Starve was formed in December 2010, when indie developer Klei Entertainment held their yearly company game jam to blow off steam for the upcoming Christmas break. Developers Kevin Forbes and Ju-Lian Kwan teamed up to create a small prototype that would later be used as the basis for Don’t Starve. […]
Hades is another successful indie game carefully crafted by Supergiant Games, the creators of Bastion, Transistor and Pyre. While Hades definitely shares some of the DNA of those aforementioned games, it was developed in a very different way. In fact, before the team even had the idea for Hades, they had already decided to open […]
The Binding of Isaac was never supposed to become an immense success and yet, it’s now Edmund McMillen’s biggest game to date. It makes no sense to the indie developer, especially because he designed it to go against mainstream games at the time. From any mainstream marketing perspective, I designed Isaac to fail — and […]
I really just started with an idea. I know it sounds clichéd, but I’ve been working on my programming for a while, so when I had the basic idea of what I wanted to accomplish, I started working on it and never looked back!. Andrew “Redigit” Spinks With this mindset, Andrew “Redigit” Spinks and the […]
Shovel Knight is perhaps one of the best examples of a retro indie game, as it intentionally tries to emulate the spirit of 2D NES platformers from back in the day. While the game has garnered a lot of success during its almost seven year dev cycle, the company went through quite a lot of […]
“You play a border inspector at a contentious check-point. People are coming into your booth, and they want to get from one side to the other. You’ve got to check their documents and make sure everything’s in order before you let them through.” This is how indie developer Lucas Pope describes one of his own […]
This is the story of a game titled The Stanley Parable. The version that most people know and remember is probably the one that was released in 2013 and made by the studio Galactic Cafe. However, the version that started it all was a Half-Life 2 mod with the same title that was made by […]
You kill a lot of random monsters (sometimes even humans) in every RPG and the consequences for this are never addressed. What if they were?” Toby Fox This is the question that sparked the idea for the indie game Undertale, an RPG made by Toby Fox, who did all the writing, programming, music and some […]
Hollow Knight’s origin story goes all the way back to August 2013, when two friends from Australia decided to enter a game jam together. Ari Gibson, a skilled animator, and William Pellen, an all-round designer, first met each other through mutual friends about 10 years before development on Hollow Knight began. William used to be […]
Super Mario 64 was Nintendo’s first foray into 3D platformer games, but its history goes back well before Nintendo even started development on the Nintendo 64. In 1990, Shigeru Miyamoto, one of Nintendo’s most celebrated game designers, first came up with a 3D mario design when he was working on Star Fox for the SNES. […]
From Passion to Stardew Valley: Eric Barone’s Solo Journey in Game Development Most games are made by development studios that have multiple people working on the same game and triple A titles can even go into hundreds of developers, while small indie teams consist of at least two developers more often than not (or while […]
The origin of Darkest Dungeon, a rogue-like, turn-based dungeon crawler RPG, was very much a now or never moment between two friends that shared a passion for game development. Chris Bourassa and Tyler Sigman first met each other as colleagues at Backbone Entertainment in 2004. The following years they became good friends and eventually started […]
Journey was arguably one of the most remarkable games released in 2012 and its impact on the video game industry is still present to this day. However, the journey leading up to its release was one with many problems along the way. At one point, it even drove the development studio Thatgamecompany to bankruptcy a […]
Since the rise of Kickstarter and the Early Access model on Steam, many developers have tried to crowdfund their game, but Subnautica is probably one of the best examples that has done it successfully and even thrived because of it. After independent games developer Unknown Worlds Entertainment released the sequel to their popular Half-Life mod […]
Today we’re talking about a goose. A very specific goose among all the geese and one that might be the most famous goose on the internet. I’m referring to the goose that was made by House House, an independent game development studio based in Australia. Their newest release Untitled Goose Game starring the world famous […]
Just like any other form of art, developing a video game is no small achievement. While some game franchises have become a well-oiled machine, pumping out iterations every year, there are development studios that struggle immensely to get their games to the public. Whether you’re talking about an indie game or a triple A title, […]
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