Steve Gaynor took a gamble last year. Leaving the company that makes BioShock, one of the most popular blockbuster series, is a big decision. So is co-founding a studio with just a handful of people.

He’s not the first triple-A developer to go indie, but his is a unique case: Gone Home is completely nonviolent and emotionally resonating. A girl returns home after a year only to discover that her family is gone, and players must explore the house to piece together their stories. That’s a little different from BioShock’s decapitations and blood splatters. Here, the game designer talks about making Gone Home and the indie game creative process.

Steve Gaynor

After Gaynor left Bioshock maker Irrational Games, his team at new studio The Fullbright Company worked off of their savings. Limited resources forced them to use their assets wisely and form a clear picture of what they wanted to make.

“I would definitely rather have a situation where [we know] here’s what we have to work with and these are our constraints, how many people we have, the technology we have, the amount of time we have, et cetera, et cetera,” he tells Co.Create. “Because if you just have a big, giant blank canvas, and you can theoretically do anything, then it’ll take you a long time to figure out what your constraints are.”

He says, “I’d prefer to be in that situation early. We know what the boundaries are. We need to do something great with it.”





Making small changes to Gone Home was easy enough, but bigger alterations could have destabilized it. Gaynor said playtesters were dissatisfied because they couldn’t return household objects like trophies where they found them, so Fullbright added a “put back” feature. They were just “throwing physics objects around,” he said. They weren’t “a person in this house.”

He said, “It was all small stuff like that because for Gone Home, if we wanted to add a really big feature, [like], ‘Okay, there is going to be a character that you meet.’ That’s a massive change. You go from zero characters to any characters … Anything that we added outside of the original blueprint would have been hugely out of scope.”