Like a lot of Colorado game developers, Megan Fox works independently, coding in the quiet of her home. As the founder of the Glass Bottom Games, she’s spent months wrapping up “Hot Tin Roof,” a film noir-ish 3D computer game starring a box-shaped private eye and her fedora-wearing cat.

But she’s not alone. Literally.

Thanks to a successful Kickstarter campaign last year, the Broomfield resident now has a team of seven artists, designers and animators who work out of their homes from Boulder to Sweden. And according to a new report, she’s part of a growing population of game developers in the state, making Colorado the 10th-largest state for game development, up from 16th five years ago.

“There are more smaller studios now because the industry has changed,” said Fox, who also runs the Colorado Independent Game Developers Association Meetup group. “And large, monolithic studios sometimes aren’t as stable as they used to be, and simply aren’t as necessary.”

The local scene appears to be thriving, thanks to the independents. There are more than 500 members in her group, the CiGDA. Another group, the Colorado chapter of the International Game Developers Association, has thousands of members on its mailing list. And the third-annual Denver Indie Games Expo, which takes place Saturday in Arvada, is practically sold out (you can sign up at limninteractive.com).

“If you’re the Colorado government and betting on tax revenue, the industry is healthier than it was before, because there are a LOT of us making bets for them,” Fox said in an e-mail.

Not too long ago, Colorado had a handful of big-name game studios. Sony Online Entertainment Denver, which acquired World Apart Productions in 2006, employed 40 at its peak before shutting down a few years ago. Lego Group, which acquired NetDevil in Louisville, had more than 100 employees when it was shut down in 2011. Mercury Active, parent to Denver’s Riptide Games, moved to Canada in 2013.

The local game industry has had its ups and downs, said Scott Martins, who started Worlds Apart in 1996 and went on to launch Dire Wolf Digital.

“There’s potential for growth, but it’s not growing as quickly as Austin and Seattle and the Bay Area,” Martins said. “I think there’s some comfort that if a job falls through, I can get a job next door. But Colorado’s probably not quite big enough to be a magnet of its own.”

The Entertainment Software Association’s ” Video Games in the 21st Century: The 2014 Report,” says Colorado’s computer and video-game industry is growing. It added $107 million to the state economy between 2009 to 2012. And area companies employ 795 people, more than double the number from five years ago.

That’s just a smidge of the larger game industry, which employed 42,000 nationwide and contributed $6.2 billion to the U.S. economy in 2012, says ESA, the video-game trade association. But it’s enough to rank Colorado as the 10th-largest in game-related employment.

“There’s a pretty healthy number of small teams. I would say it’s fairly indie. We consider ourselves that as well,” said Martins, of his 60-person team. Dire Wolf, which specializes in strategy and digital trading-card games, is working on a Pokemon game for Nintendo.

The area’s community includes a diverse group of traditional console and PC game companies, plus a new breed of mobile-game makers.

At this year’s Denver Indie Game Expo, a few dozen companies plan to show off games and share music, art and development resources, said Jet Ternlund, president of the expo’s sponsor, Limn Interactive.

“There is a lot happening here, and I think Colorado will continue to grow,” Ternlund said.

One of the larger game companies in Colorado today is also one of the newest. Backflip Studios was launched by former Yahoo! executive Julian Farrior in 2009. Even with limited experience in gaming, the Backflip team hit it big in the casual mobile-game market with “Paper Toss.”

Backflip quickly found ways to make money with in-app purchases, paid apps and cross promotions.

“When the iPhone came out, that sort of changed the game for everyone. We took our consumer-facing technology and put it on an iPhone,” Farrior said, “and almost overnight, we had 1 million users.”

Last year, the Boulder mobile-game maker sold a 70 percent stake to Hasbro for $112 million. Today, it employs “north of 100 people,” and is working on a half-dozen games, Farrior said. Backflip also is serving as a publisher to smaller developers.

Fox, who got her start in gaming nine years ago at Worlds Apart, agreed that there are more game companies in the state today. But the majority are small, with just a couple employees.

Some, such as herself, left larger companies to start their own venture. There’s a lot of opportunity for that. There is less opportunity for high-paid jobs at a big-name studios.

“If you’re a employee trying to get started in the industry, it’s probably a little easier to get a job now than it was, but it isn’t any easier to get a job that pays $60K with full benefits,” Fox said.

“The new jobs in the market are largely startup-type, with all the upsides (revenue sharing) and downsides (relative instability and lower upfront pay) that entails. Backflip probably only employs around the number Lego PlayWell did at its peak, so Colorado just traded one leading employer in the industry for another.”

And Backflip is hiring, with 10 jobs posted on its site.

Farrior, who attributes Backflip’s success to the “right place, right time,” added that while he started with a Silicon Valley lens, he has no plans. Everything he needs is here.

“Personally, I like being in a slightly smaller pond,” he said. “Boulder is such an attractive place to live and we’re able to draw AAA talent from the traditional console market and up-and-coming mobile developers. And once they’re in Boulder and Denver, we have a much better ability to retain talent.”

Tamara Chuang: 303-954-1209, tchuang@denverpost.com or twitter.com/Gadgetress