"What the hell does this have to do with video games," I asked myself. I was staring up at Provo Canyon in the middle of Utah, jaw dropped at the scale of it all. There was no cellphone reception, no technology and certainly no video game in sight. Just nature and the sound of falling water. I'd never felt so far from games in my life.

The answer was curiosity. I was out here talking to a game developer because I wanted to know what it was like to develop independent games in different places. How one person in a small town of 1,300 compares and contrasts to a nine-person team in a city of 8.5 million. How their surroundings influence their work.

So I did just that. Along with my friend and photographer, Levi Ryman, I spent a month between February and March of this year in my Ford Escape traveling 9,000 miles across the United States and back, visiting families, communities and developers in an effort to create a scrapbook of sorts, full of stories and profiles showing what it's like for developers across the United States to create games.

What I learned is that, just as no two people are the same, no two games are made the same way. Everyone we visited had a different story about how their location and the people around them has influenced the way they work and the games they put out.

PART ONE: THE SOUTH

Brandon Goins: Alone for now

Brandon Goins walks through the front door of St. John’s Episcopal Church looking like he knows exactly where he's going. It's a convincing act considering he's never been inside before.

Minutes earlier, he was driving around Johnson City, Tenn., a small college town, looking for stained glass windows he could photograph as reference for his upcoming 2D platformer, Orphan. He didn’t seem to know the area very well, getting lost several times. Eventually, though, some caught his eye.

Walking past the front desk, he shares a brief pleasantry with the clerk but never stops to give any indication he doesn’t know where he's going. Once inside, he quickly darts from room to room, looking for the windows. Spotting them, Goins pulls out his camera and snaps dozens of photos. Satisfied and excited with his find, he leads us back the way we came, says bye to the clerk and returns to his house.

Goins and his family live in a town near Johnson City called Gray — two parts of a tri-city area — which, from an outsider's perspective, may seem like it's specifically built for people driving through. It's the kind of small area you've stopped at countless times driving from state to state, stopping to stretch your legs.

The roads leading to Goins' home are narrow, winding across numerous hills. In his basement, he sits in his grandmother’s old recliner — it’s more comfortable than sitting at a desk — and works on Orphan. It's here where he spends the majority of his time, he says.

Originally from Harlan, Kentucky, Goins came to Gray in 2012 looking to escape. Spending several years as a reporter for Harlan's newspaper and then several more working for the county government, Goins says he eventually knew everyone in the small town, and everyone knew him. Covering and working for the town gave him an intimate look at the community's problems. And while he says there was a lot of talk — from himself included — of wanting to fix the "depressed area," it was always an effort in vain, as infighting within the community led to nothing ever being accomplished.

"I just got to where I really didn't care about it, didn't want to see it, didn't want to be a part of it, didn't want to hear about it and moved away," he says with his southern drawl. "I wanted to get back [to] how fun it used to be to play video games and be young and have ideas instead of [working] for a bunch of hateful people all day."

Away from everything he knew and wanting to do something artistic, Goins decided he was going to make a game, something he'd always been interested in trying. His troubles soon followed.

"I underestimated everything about [game development]," he says. "I had no idea what I was doing at that time. I was foolish." It's led to dark times for Goins. His company, Windy Hill Studio, is a one-man operation. He doesn't know of any other game developers in the area; he has no one to relate to. The realities of game development, coupled with his new location, have affected Goins in ways that show.

"I wish I could be rescued," he says. "I wish somebody would come in here and be like, 'I know what this game needs.'"

Listening to him talk, you can almost hear the area's effect in his voice. At times, it quivers just a little bit as he describes his worries. When he's stressed out, he has no one to commiserate with and no one to really talk to, he says. All of this channels back into the game. In Orphan, a young boy finds himself on an alien ship with no other humans in sight. He must fight his way through robots and aliens. It's about loneliness and isolation, ideas Goins brings up a lot during our five hours with him.

"You're this one boy," he says. "He's been orphaned. His parents are assumed dead. There's no other living people, it's all robots around him. That's probably my life."

He also shares another similarity with the boy in his game: He ran away. Faced with a life detrimental to his own happiness, Goins had to leave. The boy in Orphan finds himself lost in caves, forests, mines and even a dark, bizarre alien ship, fighting robots and aliens and dodging lasers. The pressures weighing down on Goins' public life in Harlan forced him out, to get away from his unhappiness and make a game about himself.

"It is a depressing-looking game and it is a depressing [situation] to be in," he continues.

He shows us Orphan and I immediately think back to walking through St. John's. After hours of talking about his fears and insecurities, Goins finally presents the light at the end of the tunnel: He enjoys making his game. Just like the excitement I saw in his face at St. John's, he watches us play Orphan with pride in his eyes. At the very least, this game is his catharsis, a way to come to terms with leaving his former life behind to live in a new town he doesn't know his way around. He's scared now, sure, but maybe when it's all said and done, and the game is released, he'll understand both himself and his surroundings better.

Goins strikes me as an explorer. Like the boy, he keeps going despite his fear, because he wants to know what's next; he wants to make another game after this, he says. His speaks of his home as if it's both intimidating and influential, and through Orphan, he's trying to make sense of it all.

"If I could express it verbally, then I would sing a song," he says. "But I can't, so I'm making a game."

Nicholas Laborde and Matt Wallace: Who's ya daddy?

Nicholas Laborde loves Lafayette, La.

We've only just met the CEO of Raconteur Games when he begins reciting its history as if it's part of his morning routine, coming somewhere between combing his hair and brushing his teeth.

He romanticizes the city, which is covered in statues dedicated to its Acadian settlers and littered with Cajun restaurants. He talks about its people and history with reverence and respect, often pointing out how nice everyone is and how they all want to help each other as much as possible. He believes in Lafayette's people, that no matter what industry they're in, they will not only succeed but will make it — and, in turn, Lafayette — better.

"It sticks in your heart," Laborde, sitting on his apartment couch with Raconteur developer Matt Wallace, says about the city. "We joke in [Lafayette] that the question is, 'Who's ya daddy?' Because you're going to talk to people here, and they'll be like, 'Who's ya daddy? Who's your grandparents? What do they do?'"

"Yeah, it's either, 'Who ya family?' or 'Where'd you go to high school,'" Wallace agrees.

"Because everybody wants to know. It's all about the family," Laborde says.

And for Raconteur's "short first-person experience" game, Evangeline, named after a Lafayette-inspired poem, that familial influence is immediately evident. Inspired by the death of Laborde's grandfather, it encourages players to reach out to loved ones, to call their family members and tell them they love them.

But this influence isn't limited to just games.

Lafayette is, itself, like a big family. Waiting in line at a coffee shop with Laborde earlier in the day, a random stranger walks up to us just to see how we're doing, taking time out of his day to crack jokes and laugh just because he overheard us talking about the city. This sense of camaraderie, of ubiquitous appreciation for the city, is something Laborde and Wallace hope to build in Lafayette's still-new indie scene.

The two say they could easily see Lafayette facilitating a healthy independent game development scene, and they're doing their best to make that a reality. Raconteur is the only Lafayette indie to launch a game — it's shipped three to date — and by being an active member of the new scene, as well as proving the city's a worthwhile place to set up a company, it hopes others will follow suit, coming together to make an indie scene comparable to the city itself.

"I know for a fact if we had a Katrina-style hurricane here, Lafayette would be back up and running in two weeks. Just by the fact people here will help each other out in a second," Wallace says. "I think that mindset could easily translate to an indie community."

While it's not there just yet, it is growing thanks to the local government, schools and what few indies there are.

"We have these wonderful film and game media tax credits where if you spend money on in-state labor and expenses, you literally can make that back from the state to some degree. In Lafayette, the [startup scene] is just starting to get to that maturity where you can come; you can get your funding," Laborde says.

Two local colleges, University of Louisiana at Lafayette and the Lafayette campus of the Academy of Interactive Entertainment, both offer game design degrees. And Lafayette's Independant Game Developer Association chapter is bringing around 30 people a month to meetings, Laborde says. Interest is building.

"[If] we had more of that infrastructure there, I think you would easily see a community evolve using the Lafayette and Louisiana culture in respect to development," Wallace tells us.

It's hard to say whether or not Lafayette will become the independant hub Laborde and Wallace dream it can be. Right now, it's growing, but it's still small. That's not going to stop these two, though. They live in Lafayette, where people help each other, lift each other up. Inspired by their city, they want to do the same for their scene.

"Just being here and being exposed to those around me makes me want to help this community and the people in it." Laborde says. "And so many of these people want to stay in this lovely community, and I've always been a doer who makes things happen, so I knew that I had to do everything in my power to help our community by establishing it as a place for games to be made, to make sure that those who come after me have all the tools they need to be successful."

Patrick Curry and friends: Open spaces

In Austin, Texas' independent development scene, people like working together. So much so that our liaison for this stop, Patrick Curry, CEO of FarBridge, a VR and AR software company, set time aside during the day of his interview for us to sit in his new office at a local co-op space and work.

He’s sharing a space here in Austin's North Central neighborhood. Occasionally, someone leans over to the person beside them asking for advice, or just looking at what's happening on a different screen. It's very relaxed. Right at 5:00 p.m. someone from a different office comes in, holding a six-pack in each hand, asking, "Does anybody want a beer?"

These co-op spaces are all over Austin. They represent an idea that, even if people are working on different things, they're working together.

We meet Curry early in the afternoon to visit the Austin community, eat barbecue and see the city. As FarBridge has just begun, we don't really see anything it's working on or talk much about the company itself. Rather, Curry's itinerary for the day involves spending time with dozens of developers talking simply about what it's like to develop in Austin.

"There's a really good sense of community [here]," Curry says. It's basically like the independant developers' neighborhood, he tells us. "There's four or five really solid co-working groups or Facebook groups that put on events and get people together. And then there's an indie co-working group that meets in coffee shops around town."

Austin has a deep history of game development. Richard Garriott started Origin Games here. Ion Storm Austin developed the original Deus Ex here. Today, Arkane, BioWare and Retro Studios all have offices here. This foundation, combined with Austin's low cost of living and start-up culture gave birth to a massive indie game scene. One where AAA luminaries start up new, small ventures and developers flip-flop across different projects of scope, size and companies. There's also lots of freelance development work people can find in order to make money to fund their own projects in the AAA and indie spaces. And at the heart of it all is a sense of community like no other we saw during our trip. A community facilitated, Curry says, by how friendly, welcoming and collaborative people are here.

"I have a lot of good friends from when I lived here before and worked in games and software," he adds. "But I've got just as many friends who have moved here in the last five years." But there's nothing dividing those two sides. For all the new developers getting their feet wet, there's an "old-timer" willing to give direction or advice. Curry himself, he says, finds himself falling into that latter camp, having spent time at Midway, Marvel and Unity.

And that community seems to be the main influence of developers around here. It's not something you can simply put your finger on, like a mechanic or stylistic choice in a game, like with other developers we talked to during the month. Rather, it's a way of thinking. To show his community, Curry introduces us to well over a dozen different developers and friends, from Davey Wreden of The Stanley Parable and Beginner's Guide fame, to members of Owlchemy Labs, Taco Illuminati and even Rooster Teeth. One of the recurring motifs of nearly all these people? They're Austin transplants; they came here to be a part of the community. Met with open arms, they've been influenced to turn around and give back.

"Interestingly, I didn't think I was going to stay here that long," Wreden, who moved here from Sacramento, Calif., says. "And I remember thinking, 'Gosh. I've come to really like the people here. It would be really nice if I stayed here long enough to launch The Stanley Parable so I could do it with this community, with these people.' And it took a while for it to sink in that 'You don't have to leave.' I had never felt that way before, but it was the fact that I wanted to share it with the rest of the people in this community here, that was the thing that held me down."

"I came here to go to [University of Texas at Austin], but the game industry kind of latches on to you and pulls you in," says Knowledge Purveyor and Media Master Autumn Taylor at Owlchemy Labs. "It's very infectious, the type of creativity everyone has. I didn't intend to end up in games and VR, it just kind of pulls you in."

All day, we hear similar story after similar story of "I came here for games," or "the game industry pulled me in." Dozens of developers tell us how open the scene is and how, like they themselves were accepted, want to turn around and give back. Be that through collaboration, support, starting meetups or simply hanging out.

Austin is the most unified independent development hub we saw. A place where people come at the drop of a hat to enjoy, create and facilitate game development.

Conor Mccann: Voyeurism

Spur, Texas looks like it's been hit by a bomb.

The small town sits in an empty part of Texas, a sight to behold. Its small houses, often separated from each other by large empty lots, have mostly fallen down or are in the process of doing so. Knee-high weeds grow everywhere. There are no cars driving on the roads, no people walking around. It's so quiet outside you can hear your own blood pumping, interrupted only by the occasional dog's bark or truck horn from the highway a few miles away.

It's out here that we meet Conor Mccann in his tiny house at the end of the road.

Mccann is 38, he thinks. It takes him a second to remember. He's bearded, covered in tattoos and a little disheveled. He has a soft, thoughtful voice and often takes several seconds to answer a question. He came to Spur from Los Angeles two years ago after his then-significant other didn't agree with him leaving his job in advertising to teach himself to make video games.

"She liked that lifestyle a lot," he says, "[but] it's not what I wanted to really do with my life. Because to sustain that kind of thing, I'd have to stick to a career I didn't really like. So I just did a hard look at my situation and what was best for her and what was best for me and I just kind of bowed out and looked for a way to make me happy."

So, here he is.

Mccann lives in a tiny home: a house designed to feature merely the necessities one needs to survive. He has a kitchen, a sleeping space, shower and toilet. A small standing desk rests in the only open corner of the 84-square-foot home. Mccann lives in Spur with his two dogs, Luke and Wesley, at the end of a shoddy road. He has no real affinity for the place, nothing really ties him here. It was simply where he could make the minimalist lifestyle he wanted work.

Google will tell you Spur is a town of 1,300, but Mccann will tell you there's probably fewer. As we walk the dogs around town, only one car passes us. There's nothing that would give any inclination anyone ever lived in the area, aside from the dilapidated homes.

"I think it's becoming abandoned because the majority of the population [is] elderly people, and, you know, there's like three deaths a week," he says. The young people, he continues, often leave the area because there's nothing to do. There are no job opportunities, no colleges to attend.

With so little going on, the locals have gotten creative with ways to pass the time. "At the junkyard, whenever there's a crash, they bring the car there and everyone in town comes and drives by to look at the crashed car," he says.

He follows that with something curious. People are most likely watching us, and they have been since we showed up earlier that day. People are always watching him, he says. He's the town's other form of entertainment.

Mccann doesn't exactly fit the mold of the typical Spur resident: He's a game developer, he lives in a little black house, he has tattoos of inverted crosses and the "Jane Doe" album art from the metalcore band Converge. Compared to other residents in the town, who are typically elderly or exist off a diet of Mountain Dew and cigarettes, as he says, he doesn't exactly fit in. Spur residents find him kind of weird, and they like to look at him, observe him, he says. Kind of like an animal in a cage.

"They pull to a stop [in front of the house], take photos. They creep around, do a U-turn at the corner there and come back around," he says. "There's just a constant presence which creates a feeling of paranoia, where most of the time when I look out the window, there's somebody there staring back at me." Coincidentally, his house is right across the street from the junkyard.

It makes work hard, he says; it's a constant distraction. Several times during our interview, he talks about his voyeurs. He's quick to point out how much it bothers him. And for a while it seems like there's nothing Mccann even likes about the place. Until he hears a familiar sound.

A few blocks from his house, Mccann stops, gets quiet and says to listen. Off in the distance, the faint creak of an oil pump jack can be heard. He smiles. He loves its sound and its motion. It's his favorite spot in Spur, he says.

His game Black Gold features two characters sitting, drinking and talking under an oil jack, modeled after this one he likes so much. The scene, he says, references a group of young guys that party and shoot guns in the field late at night. Unexpectedly, it makes the player a voyeur of sorts, watching these two guys pass the time.

In his games, Mccann's trying to create a virtual snapshot of what it's like to live in Spur. There's something about the simple nature of the people living here, how they entertain themselves, the way they speak without a lot of big words, he says, that he does like.

"It's the slow pace of life, I guess," Mccann, who's only lived in big cities, replies when asked how the town influences him. "I've met all kinds of really weird people here. I just want to kind of capture that in some way."

"[I want to] use this experience, not have this be for nothing," he adds.

He speculates that a lot of Spur's history's been forgotten; no one's chronicled its people or culture. Mccann may, for the first time, be letting others know what it's like to be a resident here. He's a storyteller with an outsider's lens, a town oddity that finds his surroundings just as odd but worth documenting. He's watching those watching him.

"It's something that's very foreign to me," he says. "I think, in the process of making a game about it, I hope to, I don't know, internally process it somehow or make sense of this whole thing somehow."

When it comes time to move away, Mccann says he'll know, but he's not sure when that will be. So for now, he works, lives, watches and is watched in his tiny house at the end of the road.

PART TWO: THE SOUTHWEST

Numinous Games: Finding balance

People don't so much know Ryan Green or his wife Amy Green, as much as they know the struggles their family’s been through. The game they're best known for, That Dragon, Cancer, developed by the studio they co-founded, Numinous Games, follows the Greens' dealings with their son Joel's fight, and loss, against cancer. It's an intimate look inside the family's personal and religious lives.

Over the years, dozens of articles have been written about the Greens. So when we show up to their Loveland, Colorado studio, tucked in a nondescript office building in the small mountain town, I imagine, after years of being asked, they don't want to talk about themselves anymore. And yet, family, religion and their changing perspectives on both are frequent topics during our time with them.

As Ryan tells it, Loveland’s family-focused nature is why his family chooses to stay here, keep their company of five and one intern here. They can stay in the town he and Amy met and grew up in. They can keep their actual family next to what they consider their other family: their church.

"I think the common touch point that keeps us rooted [in Loveland] is the church people. Because they've been our friends, family and community for as long as I can remember," he says.

"And at least for me, my faith is why I want to create games," Amy says. "[It] feels like the only thing that I have that's worth sharing is my faith and my hope. And those pieces of me, I feel like, are the truest pieces of me."

Loveland's religious influence is all over That Dragon, Cancer. The game is covered in religious iconography and prayers. It also explores the family's questions about the existence of God in the wake of their son's illness, something they're still wrestling with.

"[My church is] a group of people that I used to just be totally lockstep with. Like, 'I believe what they believe.' And it was a very comfortable place to be," Amy says. "And now, I have more questions than I used to have. Some of the things they believe, I totally believe. And some of the things they believe, I'm like, 'Hm. I don't think it's that simple anymore.'"

Talking to the Greens, it makes sense as to why religion played such a big role in That Dragon, Cancer. It seems not only easy but obvious that the team's religious families, beliefs and doubts would influence its games. Finding a balance between the games and its biological families, though? That's been a bit more difficult.

Game development is notoriously time consuming, so making time to be a family isn't always easy. Numinous' goal now is to find a way to combine professional and personal lives in healthy ways. Be that by creating games from its children's doodles, teaching them, if they're interested, to program or design or just hanging out outside work with each other's families.

What he really wants to do, Ryan says, is prove Loveland can be a city where independent developers can live and have a family. Like he said earlier, it's is a family-focused place and its cost of living is such that developers may be able to make it work, even with four kids, like the Greens have.

"It's not like we're going to make millions and millions of dollars," he says. "We just want to [be a part of] a small business that can pay a decent wage and people can raise families with it and we can create." If Numinous can prove it can be sustainable here, maybe others will follow suit, joining a community encouraging, raising and being a part of families.

The religious influence in check, that family is in their work. But while neither of the Greens are ready to say if they're any good at finding a work-life balance for their biological family, our time with them felt like a good start.

Numinous is having a pizza party during our visit in celebration of its recent game, Untethered, selling 1,000 copies. The music is loud, the pizza is hot and many of Numinous' team members' children are running around, laughing and playing pingpong. It feels like Ryan's dream: a work space, a play space, a place where he and his coworkers can do their job and enjoy time with their families.

David Wehle: At the feet of giants

David Wehle is standing at the base of Provo Canyon in Utah County, Utah, watching water cascade for what looks like miles. Its peaks are swallowed by clouds; snow rises to our ankles. I don't think Whele means to, but he keeps smiling.

"It's just funny. Utah has a way of not letting me go, even though I tried so hard to leave," he says. "I never expected to stay here longer than a few years."

Wehle moved from Virginia to Utah in 2010 to go to film school, planning to leave soon after to work for a film studio. "I was interviewing at DreamWorks. I almost got the job and then they laid off 25 percent of the company the day after," Wehle says. "I believe in God. I have a faith in God, so I want to say it’s divine intervention."

There was also a girl, Elise, and Wehle married her. They have a daughter, Evelyn. They live in the suburbs of Orem, about 40 minutes from Salt Lake City, and have no intention of leaving. He has friends here and a career at the virtual reality experience company The Void. He adores Utah, he says. However, wrapping his mind around his new life and leaving his old dreams behind has been — and still is — difficult for Whele.

So he made a game about it.

His second game, The First Tree, an exploration-driven adventure game, tells two parallel stories: A fox looks for its lost cubs while a man learns to reconnect with his father. In it, Whele draws from his own experience with loss — the loss of his father — but also draws from his surroundings, both geographically and biographically.

"My games are about memories, about growing up and dealing with a new world," he says. "The first level [of The First Tree] is a mountainscape. It's based off of Utah. It's based off living here."

Wehle loves to explore the Utah mountains; he can walk alone with his thoughts in them. "Man, honestly, it recharges me. It really does," he says, looking up at Provo Canyon, snow collecting on his black jacket. "It refreshes my soul. ... [It's] so quiet."

Sometimes he goes to the mountains just to feel small — to juxtapose something big and grand with something small and intimate, like his time alone. Being small, standing at the feet of giants, helps him appreciate what he has. "It helps me try to treat life as precious as it is," he continues.

When he shows us some of The First Tree later at his house, the inspiration is evident. The level is calm and quiet, mountains surround it like hugging arms. A drawing of Provo Canyon hangs on the wall in the room adjacent to where he works. As Wehle plays, I notice he drifts away from his own beaten path, perhaps unintentionally, exploring the way he does the real mountains just a few miles away.

Utah is now an intrinsic part of who he is. When he leaves, he says, to visit Virginia, he finds he misses his new home. "I miss the people most of all," he adds. He says he's inspired by those around him, especially his friends and colleagues. Wehle started making his own games in Unity after seeing friends use it. He works alongside IGF winners and former Pixar interns at The Void, too.

"There's always this thirst to learn, to be creative [here]," he says. "Maybe because it's Utah, there's a desire to prove [ourselves] a little bit. To make art that really talks to people, even if [we're] not in the typical art cities."

He says it over and over again, that he never expected to call Utah his home. Learning to accept that has been a process for Wehle, and The First Tree reflects this; his new life and responsibilities are also influencing his game, just like the mountains do.

The First Tree is about coming to terms with things you can't control. About letting what will happen happen, whether it's coincidence or divine intervention.

"[The game is] a love letter to Utah, it's a love letter to growing up and how it doesn't have to be scary," he says, adding he's drawn to finding the light at the end of the tunnel. "It's cool how at home I feel [here] now that I've shed my pride."

"I'm the happiest I've ever been."

PART THREE: WEST COAST

Jenova Chen and Bannon Rudis: A city of contrasts and contradictions, in two parts

Part one:

Jenova Chen, founder of thatgamecompany, is looking out at the Pacific Ocean crashing against Venice Beach’s shore. He likes the beach in the dark, even if it unsettles him.

"It's like when you're standing on a cliff. Your body is somewhat interested in jumping off and your mind has to [stop] it," he says. "Seeing the ocean in the night, it has that same quality. Somehow there's a magical force trying to lure you and bring you into the depths of the water."

Chen is reserved when he speaks, almost as if he's carefully thinking about each word. He doesn't laugh much. He's a slow walker and often stops along Venice Beach's boardwalk to look at what various art vendors are selling or even just the other people spending their weekend here.

"This part of L.A. is the part I found interesting, because I never quite understood these people," he says. "They spend all their time on the beach. What is there for them to long for? I've kind of kept the beach as this nice meal [that] I only have a few times a year. But if you are already on the beach every day, [where] do you go to have a good time?"

During our time with Chen, originally from Shanghai, China, he constantly brings up the contrasts of L.A., its dichotomous nature. It's full of things he finds both beauty and ugliness within. Nearly every time he brings up something he likes, he counters it with something he doesn't. As he grows older, he says, he looks for variety to make him feel something. If something is all good all the time, he forgets about it. Present him with the other side of the coin, though, and it sticks with him.

He mentions the glitz of Hollywood and Beverly Hills, for example. "It's filled with people that are here for the vanity. They have plastic surgery. They look nice. People drive expensive cars. [They're] dating models, [going] to the expensive shops," he begins. But to Chen, the allure of success, the beauty of riches just mere miles away, that's all ugly. The ones that haven't made it yet but still long for fame and fortune — they attract him.

"It's one of the purest desires," he continues. "Especially these people who haven't got it, but still they're hoping. That's the most beautiful thing. You know? Most beautiful and most ugly thing in the same location."

To Chen, this is all part of having "a cynical mind." He looks for things, he says, that he can grow to hate, because at the same time it strengthens his bond with what he likes.

What he likes and dislikes aren't lines drawn in the sand, though. They can change simply depending on the time of day. He turns his back to the ocean and looks back at the boardwalk, the city itself.

"In the night, I like all that, and I'm afraid of this," he says, referring to the water behind him. "I like that because [there is the] city light. It's like you are standing next to the danger, yet the other side is safety. I don't know. I like the contrast."

In the middle of the day, though, he'd rather face the other direction. "In the day, this is pretty good, but I don't like that," he says, contradicting himself. During the day, he can see what he doesn't understand about L.A.: the vanity, the architecture that he thinks is "hideous," the people spending every day at the beach.

He never comes out and says all of this is a direct influence — despite me asking — but one might be able to see how this interest in L.A.'s dichotomous nature has crept into his games.

Thatgamecompany's 2012 game, Journey, tells an allegorical tale of birth and death. He describes his 2009 game Flower as "an interactive poem exploring the tension between urban and nature." The 2006 game Flow encourages players to play how they want, either passively or aggressively.

Chen is tough to understand at times. When he speaks, it's often cryptic or, appropriately enough, in contradiction to himself. For a little while he seems to romanticize the beach, the times he brings his wife here to enjoy sunsets, and then he says, "A couple on the beach when the sun sets is supposed to be romantic; I don't know who told us that."

For most of the interview, I can't tell if he's having a good time or if he just wants to leave. "I'm enjoying this beach, but I'm wasting every minute because I'm not working on this current game that is already behind schedule," he says. That game, Sky, has since been announced and is scheduled to release soon. "So it's like, you're enjoying something while you know [it's guilt provoking to do so]."

What I do know, though, is at the end of the list of things he says he doesn't like or understand is one contradiction: He loves living in L.A. He loves the weather. He loves his job. Because of that, he says, he wants to give back to the "world at large."

"[I feel lucky] to be here and to actually have a passion [for] something that I'm good at. Many of my friends are still searching. They still haven't found what they love, and even if they are making money, [that] money they made does not fill their heart."

I ask him if he believes in luck.

"I think I believe in giving back," he says. "If the God has arranged me to have this thing I love to do, I better keep doing it and give it back to the people."

Part two:

Bannon Rudis is standing on a busy Los Angeles sidewalk in front of a cement plant. It's hard to interview him over the sounds of traffic.

Rudis is the total opposite of Chen. He operates at a mile a minute, telling me one second why L.A. is like a River City Ransom level and convincing me to make an impromptu In-N-Out stop the next. He laughs a lot.

We're visiting Rudis on a special day. Today, February 27, he's releasing his first game, River City Ransom Underground, a licensed follow-up to the 1989 brawler and a collaboration with Canadian-developer Conatus Creative. In a way, he tells me, it's an homage to California — there's a San Francisco-esque level and a level inspired by his hometown, Sacramento. But L.A., the city where he lives, the second largest city in the country by population, has had the biggest impact.

As of 2016, over 4 million people of all different ethnicities, political and religious backgrounds and financial statuses call the city home. As L.A. has adapted, it strikes me as a weird hybrid of, well, everything. Driving around the city, its neighborhoods and districts change rapidly. One moment we're at the beach, the next surrounded by multimillion dollar homes. Drive a little further and you're in Chinatown or Little Bangladesh. Want to go into the mountains? It has those, too. For Rudis, L.A. is the perfect palette for him to work with.

We're on La Brea Avenue in front of a cement mixing plant in the middle of West Hollywood. It's where Rudis wanted to be photographed — in front of this industrial machine a few streets over from the Sunset Strip. It's a giant piece of industry right across the street from a Best Buy and next door to a high-end imported furniture store. A few miles east of us is the infamously impoverished Skid Row. A few miles west of us is the Playboy Mansion. Caught between the two is Rudis, influenced by it all.

"I think I want to recreate [L.A.] because it looks like different levels," Rudis says. "It's just like a game: You're in the waterfront district, and then you go to the next screen and it's, like, Egyptian tombs."

Rudis points out the way it changes from street to street, and the way it changes multiple times on one street. It changes so quickly, he often can't keep up while pointing out examples. "I don't even know what's behind this wall," he says. "That looks pretty clean. It looks clean now. It looks like they just freshly painted it.

"But then there will be actual areas like this right here — that place is just torn apart," Rudis says, pointing to a dilapidated building.

Everywhere we go, it's loud, busy. Car horns blare, drowned out only by sounds of construction, seemingly building something new or renovating something old on every block. The buildings are packed together like sardines, but no two look the same. A new fusion restaurant may be next door to a methadone clinic. The only ubiquity tying any of them together is created by the large colorful billboards that hang on nearly every building, promoting everything from new movies to bail bondsman to professional sports teams.

"In River City I [put] up billboards everywhere," he says. "There's always construction happening in River City, and that's even part of the game itself. It looks different because there's been some renovations [since the original]." He's inspired by the streets of this city, the way they change, the people that walk them and the art that fills them — he actually recreated street art found in L.A. into Underground.

Rudis calls L.A. dirty, a direct juxtaposition to the cliche that it's a place where the magic happens, where hopeful stars go to be discovered. Those would-be stars are now waiting tables. That fusion restaurant from a few paragraphs up? It may be fancy, but you might get mugged right outside it.

"It's good and it's bad, because it is both worlds. When family arrives, or friends arrive, I'm like, 'Yeah. This is where I live. [But] you can shut your eyes for about a block now, because we're going to the lava level,'" he says, laughing.

And yet, all the different cultures tend to embrace each other, he tells us. No one stays to their own neighborhood just because it's where their culture set up shop. "It's segregated, but the lava enemies are hanging out in the ice world," he says. "I thoroughly enjoy that."

All of that "randomness," as Rudis calls it, finds its way into Underground. Different levels have different NPCs; you might fight on a busy street, through rough areas of town where trash litters the level or in suburban neighborhoods bedecked with holiday decorations. You may also find yourself fighting on top of freeway traffic — which there's a lot of in L.A. This randomness comes from Rudis' interest in the city around him.

"If it was too much like a grid, the game would [feel like] you're playing math instead of it being just randomness," he says. "[Wherever you go in L.A.], you're going to a different level, a different zone, a different world."

Johnnemann Nordhagen: The face of a changing city

As Johnnemann Nordhagen walks down San Francisco's Haight Street, multiple people stop and compliment his Grateful Dead backpack. Which is fitting, since he's taking us to see the house the band once lived in on Ashbury Street. It's just a few blocks from the famous intersection of the two streets, an intersection at the heart of the city's counterculture and Free Love movement of the 1960s. A movement that tried to bring people together through positivity, art and liberal drug use.

Walk through the streets of the Haight neighborhood, and you can still feel the reverberations of the movement 50 years later. People are easy going, often taking time to strike up conversations with passersby. Street music echoes around the block; it smells strongly of marijuana at all hours. It reminds Nordhagen a lot of the independent game scene here.

He finds himself drawn to the city for its deep history of art and counterculture, he says, the way it's always on the cutting edge of something. He likes the character of the place, the different cultures and personalities crammed into seven square miles. It's a place where he discovered he could be who he wanted to be, that he could try new things.

"I think that's kind of the history of the city," he tells us. "There was [the] Wild West gold rush era of it, when people were not necessarily coming out to escape other things, but where it was this weird, lawless, anything-can-happen kind of place. And then there's, like, obviously the '60s and all that, when all the kids put flowers in their hair and fled over here."

It's the Haight, where the latter primarily took place, that he's particularly gravitated to. As someone who found himself in San Francisco, Nordhagen finds constant inspiration in the famous stories and landmarks of the Haight neighborhood. A character in his new game, Where the Water Tastes Like Wine, Rose, "The Hippie," moves to the area, finds an awakening in the face of the Vietnam War and witnesses the backlash against the "Summer of Love."

"So that is drawing very explicitly on the history of the Haight Ashbury and the area that I live in now," he says. "I love [the Haight]. It's been a sort of cool inspiration for my life."

San Francisco facilitates a lot of communal activity, he continues, such as the Free Love movement in the area we're walking through. The independent developer scene is no different. It's huge in San Francisco, and Nordhagen is an active member.

His own sense of community, in part, comes from living in this neighborhood and seeing the way the "Haight Street kids" stick together and watch out for each other. "They come from all sorts of different places to follow this dream, but they have to work together to survive here at all," he says. "I feel like this whole neighborhood is about that, and I think that's one thing that's come out of here for me. I really like building community and I really like the idea of working together."

While he romanticizes the area, it's impossible to ignore the fact San Francisco is a quickly changing place. It's arguably the most high tech city in the world, and with that comes good and bad, he says. While the companies within it are challenging the ways we use technology, it all comes at the cost of rapid gentrification. That culture Nordhagen speaks of being affected by, of loving so much, is quickly going away, he tells us.

"It feels like this place is changing [in ways] that I don't really like a lot of," he continues while we walk. "I mean, this city is all about the neighborhoods. They each have their own special culture, and that's changing a lot recently as the same type of people move into each neighborhood."

"I also have to recognize I'm part of the problem with that, obviously, right? I moved here to get a job. I'm not part of the most recent wave of tech immigrants, but I'm definitely a white dude with a computer science degree who moved into San Francisco," he admits. "So I'm not totally innocent here."

On one hand, he's surrounded by numerous talented programmers, game creators and coders to work with and be inspired by. On the other hand, he's losing the city and people he loves in more ways than one.

"It's like, I have to live somewhere, and the places that I can afford to live are almost always pushing someone else out," Nordhagen says, adding he's not sure how to live in San Francisco in an "ethical" way. "It's something I wrestle with constantly, and everyone else that I've talked to wrestles with it as well."

"The money thing will be a big deal. It's going to be hard to survive that," he continues.

In more ways than one, Nordhagen is the face of a changing San Francisco. He loves the city, the history, the culture in its streets. Like many before him, he found himself here; he's inspired and affected by those around him. When he talks about how quickly it's changing, you can hear the disappointment in his voice. But he's also a transplant, "a white dude with a computer science degree." To many, even himself, he's still part of the problem, love for the city or not.

Two things remain to be seen for Nordhagen: whether he will be able to remain in the city he loves and whether San Francisco will remain the city he fell in love with.

Hagen Deloss: "What the fuck do I actually want to make?"

There's no pie in the sky in Portland, Oregon's independent game scene, Hagen Deloss tells us over coffee. There's not a large competitive job market, not many independent developers biding their time before joining a AAA studio, as someone might in Seattle or San Francisco.

"[In Portland], we don't have that many bigger studios, so it's kind of like, 'I'm just going to create for creation's sake,'" he says.

Deloss is a local artist and game developer. His art looks something like a cross between Lisa Frank's and Ed Roth's: cute but gross. Colorful but dark. It's a relatively good representation of Deloss, too. He's charismatic, has colorful hair and cusses a lot.

Deloss is quick to talk up Portland's creative community, to tell you what sets it apart from other cities: It's a noncompetitive, “art for art's sake” place. It's a city, he says, that pushes boundaries.

One of Deloss' projects, Queer Quest, which he does art for, is an example of that spirit. Written by developer Mo Cohen, it's a humorous point and click adventure game about the LGBTQ community. And it's very upfront with its subject material — Cohen calls the game "Queer as fuck." Deloss says it's a game that needs to be made, that it's "like no other game out there."

That need, he says, is a direct result of the city's inherent desire to make certain voices heard because they need to be heard.

"[Here] in Portland, it's like, 'What the fuck do I actually want to make,'" he says. "I absolutely love off-the-wall [stuff]. I don't censor myself. I do crazy shit. … I want to push the bar; I want to keep pushing people's concept of what's appropriate and what's OK in games."

He takes us to where he lives on 82nd Street: a refurbished dormitory housing artists of all kinds. His room is small but cozy. He has a desk in one corner, a couch in the other. One wall is lined with books and comics, the other three sporadically covered in art. He's inspired by the place, he says, living with so many other creators.

Deloss' building seems to encapsulate the vibe of Portland he praises so much. The art hanging all over its walls is weird and interesting. While we're there, the gallery on the first floor is exhibiting artist Kimberly Bookman's "Death By Glitter" series, featuring art that is gorgeous and violent, as if challenging perceptions of beauty by contrasting it with scenes of decapitation and suicide.

He shows us another project of his: Plunge, a "turn-based dungeon plunger," as he calls it. It's cute but gruesome. Dark yet vibrant. It looks like one of Deloss' adorably macabre drawings come to life.

Deloss and his work are kind of like Portland itself: weird yet approachable. He embraces his city, one that promotes and encourages artistic freedom. He creates only what he wants to create. He's influenced by those around him doing the same thing, as if Portland's creative community has its own feedback loop.

"Just being around people that I know are creating because they're fucking just fueled, they're just like, 'I gotta get this shit out of me,' is great," he says. It inspires him to, in turn, create.

PART FOUR: THE MIDWEST

Beach Interactive: The vikings up north

It's cold in Fargo, N.D.. Really cold.

It's the kind of cold where the wind punches whatever air you have in your lungs out, your lips immediately chap and your eyes water. It's the type of weather, I'm told by local developers at Beach Interactive — perhaps a bit of an ironic name — that makes people want to stay inside and tinker. Which is exactly what independent game developers here do, they say: lock themselves inside and work on games.

"You're going to see a lot more people want to get into a cozy place and then work their butts off than if they were like, 'Oh. I can just go out and enjoy the day. I can just go out and sit in the park in the sun and do nothing,'" Alex Gwaltney, a programmer at Beach Interactive, says. "Instead they're like, 'OK. It's cold out there. I can't do anything. I'm stuck inside, might as well be working on something.'"

"I do think that, like, 'wintertime blues' gets people excited to work on stuff," Kyle Weik, one of Beach's founders, adds.

One of the things that strikes me about our conversation is that they bring up the weather as an influence — it's not something we heard a lot of during the rest of our trip but something we constantly asked about. When describing the winters here, they use words like "oppressive." Being outside for extended periods of time during the worst of it can actually be harmful to the body; it can lead to frostbite. But the members of Beach Interactive see the winters as something to reflect back into their work.

"It's just part of everyday life," Gwaltney says. "[The] best way you can tell a story is to tell something that's real. And that's part of our life, [these] oppressive winters where we're shut in. … And yeah, it definitely affects the game, because this is the environment we grew up in, we want to incorporate that in there, tell our own stories."

Beach's most recent game, On My Own, is a randomly generated survival game set in the wilderness. As they tell it, it's directly influenced by Fargo, their experiences camping and surviving the elements here. Players are thrown into the wilderness and tasked with surviving the changing weather, establishing shelter, finding food and crafting supplies. Not exactly how a lot of Fargo tech workers are living, but it's definitely influenced by their spirit of making it work in the face of challenge.

"It's like, 'Hey. We can sit here and complain about things, or we can make the best of it,'" Weik says. "And we're really interested in making the best of it."

The weather comes up a lot in our conversation. And though, yes, it is extremely cold and difficult to deal with, especially for an outsider, the developers at Beach Interactive never talk about it as if it's something they dread or suffer through. Rather, you can hear the pride in their voices, as if the winter is a yearly challenge that tests their love for Fargo, a challenge they always welcome. As they tell it, they're not the only creators in the area that feel this way. A lot of the art that comes out of the area, they add, is very nature focused, influenced by their surroundings.

"I'd say there is the pridefulness of, you know, 'We survive here. We're the vikings up here in the north,'" Gwaltney says. This survival, this togetherness is an inherent feature of Fargo's population, they say. When the going gets tough, the vikings band together.

They call their community "scrappy." If they don't know how to make something work, they'll find a way. They feed off each other, enjoy the work others in the area create. They're the vikings, and they're all in it together, and they want you to know that. Right now, there's a lot of people in Fargo creating, feeding off their surroundings, and as long as it stays cold and they can't do anything, they might as well be working on something.

Howling Moon Software: Don't talk about it, be about it

We're sitting in Glam Doll Donuts in Minneapolis, Minn. with members of Howling Moon Studios during the restaurant's weekly indie developer meet-up. Lizzy Siemers, artist on Howling Moon's upcoming game Verdant Skies, points to a nearby table where other indie developers are playing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild on a Nintendo Switch, not working like her and her team, not getting anything done.

Oddly enough, this influences the Howling Moon team to actually make, well, video games.

The team's four members are quick to talk about the talent in the area, how friendly and inviting everyone is. They'll tell you how independent developers in the area want to bring awareness to their community, for it to be recognized as an indie hub. They'll also tell you, conversely, the community hasn’t taken many steps to make those dreams a reality.

"It feels like it's always a conversation," Siemers says. "[They wonder], 'Why doesn't anyone make money in Minneapolis?' And it's because you do shit like this. You got to finish your games. You got to sell them. You got to make money."

"We would love to be the hero game," Producer Beth Korth says, adding she hopes the studio's upcoming life simulation game, Verdant Skies will be successful enough to bring attention to the indie scene.

Minneapolis has large creative communities, art schools, festivals and the like. But the city hasn't recognized games as a worthwhile investment yet. And because of that, Siemers says, being a full-time developer here is difficult. A lot of Minneapolis developers are hobbyists, with full-time day jobs to attend to; they can't dedicate 40 hours a week to making games. Siemers, who is developing full time, says she applies for city grants, but since they don't offer anything for game development, she has to apply under "arts and technology," rather than anything specific to her actual job.

It's a bit of a vicious circle where developers aren't producing enough work to get the city's attention, and, in turn, not receiving funding. The scene may be thriving, but no real progress is made. Talking to the members of Howling Moon, they seem to have personally put the responsibility of changing this on their own shoulders.

"We need to make a splash. Fast," Siemer says. "Not just talk about it. We gotta do it. I've been working on Verdant Skies literally every single day for the last year, and it's all in hopes that it'll be done."

"We're having to make our own opportunities," composer Troy Strand adds.

But despite their frustrations, the four love living in Minneapolis — the low cost of living, the art scenes, the fact that it's a diverse, liberal city in a conservative region of the country. Their annoyances aside, they have a lot to say about their community. They call the games being developed in Minneapolis "works of passion."

"People just love making games here and that's why they're making [them]," Siemers tells us.

That scene they dream of, it's diverse, welcoming all different walks of life. It's a place "where [there's] truly a space at the table for everyone," Strand says.

"There's so many stories that could be told here that are just not being told in the video game world," Siemers adds, speculating the stories of the large immigrant populations here could make for great games.

They're frustrated, but they're optimistic. "Honestly, I think it will come together," Siemers tells us, but she and Strands add they don't think it will be immediate. When asked to project, they estimate it'll be another five years before the scene becomes what they want it to be.

And so for now, Howling Moon is using their scene's inactivity as an impetus. It hopes by walking the walk, not simply talking the talk, and getting its game out the door, it'll spark a fire in Minneapolis' scene to turn the passion they speak of into something tangible.

Adam Saltsman: The search for silence

Adam Saltsman, co-founder of developer-publisher Finji, looks out at his backyard from behind the sliding glass door of his Grand Rapids, Michigan home. A chickadee keeps trying to move into the owl box he "painstakingly" built, messing up the nest inside, he says.

Saltsman loves his yard. He spends a lot of time explaining all of the different wild animals he sees from his house, like the the two small gangs of titmouse birds and nuthatches that have "some kind of weird rivalry." On clear nights, he takes a Chinese radio outside to listen to foreign radio channel signals from Cuba and China. Compared to the noisey life he once lived, these quiet distractions are almost all he needs these days to be happy.

Saltsman came to Michigan in search of a change of pace from his old life in Austin, Texas, a city he and his wife Bekah moved to in the early 2000s, before its most recent tech boom. It was an exciting time to live there, he says.

But as time went on, and as the Saltsman got older, Austin kept getting more expensive to have a family and a company in. He now had kids, and Austin's housing market was getting scarier by the minute. It was time to make a decision.

So, the Saltsmans packed up and drove 1,300 miles north to Grand Rapids, a moderately sized artsy city in west Michigan, to live a cheaper, quieter and more stable life and to be closer to parents and extended family.

When we visit Saltsman, his time is split down the middle between two projects: publishing the 2D adventure game Night in the Woods, which was released on February 21, 2017 — a couple of weeks before we showed up in early March — and developing Finji's internal game Overland, a survival game in "early-early-early access," as Saltsman says. Speaking on that latter game, Saltsman says developing it in Grand Rapids has resulted in a more healthy development cycle than they would've had in a bigger city.

"We're not overextended living here at all," he says. "That's huge for us. Like, if we control our personal burn rate, it changes the production budget of our projects. It's crazy."

"So, for all the positives in Austin, this constant thing of like, 'Oh, hey. I was going to do a little side project tonight, but instead we need to go through and fill out this form to try and only have our property taxes go up by 8 percent' [is now gone]" Saltsman says. Where Austin once enticed the family a decade ago with a low cost of living, rising housing prices and the costs of running a company there led to the Saltsmans needing to make some changes. With a more stable life to operate his and his wife's company in Grand Rapids, he has the extra time and then some.

Life in general is quieter for the Saltsmans now, too. "Like, no cars have driven by here. That's super important to me right now," he says during our interview. And, to be fair, compared to all the noise around us when we were in Austin, our time with Saltsman feels far more intimate, personal. We're just sitting at his dining room table having a chat. It's nice. There are fewer distractions.

"[At the] point that we're at right now, the distraction for me is getting to go sit in the backyard," Saltsman says. "That, for me, is the kind of distraction that I need right now. Because left to my own devices, it would just be like game making 24/7. And the game making suffers for it radically."

His company and family have been affected in numerous ways living in Grand Rapids, Saltsman says. Life is more stabile. He's closer to his family. He has his birdhouses, and his company is kind of a big deal. In Austin, he claims, Finji was small-time, especially compared to local companies like Arkane and Retro Studios. In Grand Rapids, though, Finji faces far less competition.

"[The Chamber of Commerce sends] out a thing, 'Top Grand Rapids Businesses,' here, and when we look at the tech companies and computer companies," Saltsman says, "I think we're going to be the biggest tech company in Grand Rapids this year." He starts laughing, saying how unremarkable his office, his "$100 IKEA desk and an iMac from 2012," are compared to such a title.

After over a decade in Austin, Grand Rapids is the next phase of the Saltsmans' lives, he says. They lived through the noise, and now they're wrapped in the quiet, learning how their business and personal lives can be affected by fewer distractions. It's now on to the next 10 years. "This could be a good phase for us," he says. "It's not scary to live here."

"And then after that, I don't know. We'll give everything away and move [on to] a sailboat or something."

Michael Block: The other side of the tracks

When it comes time to talk to our last subject of this trip, Michael Block, about his city, Chicago, Illinois, I'm burnt out and afraid I'm repeating myself.

During the early parts of our chat, we talk about the city, its large indie scene, the types of games that come from it. And, to be honest, nothing strikes me as all that unique compared to other large scenes we visited. Maybe because it was the last interview of dozens, but by the time I talked to Block, I initially felt like I was going through the motions.

That is, until we dug a little deeper and talked about Chicago as a whole. More specifically, the city's issues. "[The] stuff that influences me is unfortunately not stuff that's super positive [about] the history of Chicago," Block says.

“[The] stuff that influences me is unfortunately not stuff that's super positive [about] the history of Chicago.”

"I think there's a lot of interesting things that are happening politically in the city," he says, citing the large protests that occurred when then-presidential nominee Donald Trump visited Chicago during his campaign. "There's all this outrage about Trump — and rightfully so — but at the same time, we don't kind of grapple with a lot of the things that our city has done on a more personal level, right?"

The city ignores a lot of its own issues with segregation, racism and the "really terrible local policies that are hurting a lot of people," he continues. "That kind of stuff is the stuff that's interesting to me, and the stuff that I want to make games about and talk about in games."

Chicago is one of the most segregated cities in the country. Where Block lives on the north side, he says, it's easy to ignore the city's high crime rates in the south and west sides. Most people "can very easily disconnect from things with a very minimal amount of distance between them and something they should be observing or seeing or thinking about," he adds.

Block's most recent game is a game about Chicago. Aptly titled We Are Chicago, the game tackles the city's aforementioned issues with violence, poverty, unemployment and education. Developed by Culture Shock Studios, founded by Block, it's a magnifying glass on an often-ignored area. His motivation, he says, is to get the game in front of people so they "have to talk about it."

Block never looked at the city's rougher neighborhoods from afar during development. As he tells it, the studio scouted developers from the area to work on We Are Chicago and they did interviews with people who lived in the area for firsthand stories of poverty and violence. He didn't get his facts from a newspaper, rather he let the communities themselves be his influence.

"Like, you hear about the shooting statistics and you hear about thefts and burglaries and whatever else [from the media], but you don't really hear about, like, someone's experience living through being held-up at gunpoint or being told they had to join a gang or that they were already in a gang because they lived on a specific block," he says.

“I don't think I can even change anybody's mind by myself, but if I can put some more information out there and help somebody share their life story, I think that's moving in the right direction.”

"When we were doing one of the in-depth interviews [for We Are Chicago], one of our interviewees was basically saying that his friends had parents who weren't in their lives, specifically because of some housing project policies that basically gave families less money if the husband was there," Block continues. "Because they felt the husband could be gainfully employed, and so therefore they didn't need as much assistance. And so basically those policies would, in effect, incentivize the husband to not be part of the family anymore and to not live with the family."

"Those sorts of stories, I think, were hugely impactful on my decision to make this sort of game," he says.

Block wants to start a discussion. He thinks the city's issues aren't personalized enough; when boiled down to statistics, he says, things get abstracted. We Are Chicago puts the players into the role of a teenager living through the the real-life issues of Chicago's west and south sides. It's an effort to get people talking in specific and personal ways, to stop ignoring what's on the other side of the tracks.

"Obviously, I can't fix it by myself, and I don't think I can even change anybody's mind by myself, but if I can put some more information out there and help somebody share their life story, I think that's moving in the right direction," he says.

PART FIVE: THE EAST COAST

This is the part of the story where I admit we made a mistake.

We traveled for a month, visited dozens of amazing developers and learned an equal amount of fantastic stories. But we left out one of the largest areas for independent development in the United States: the east coast.

So here's where we jump ahead in the timeline — to October, more than six months after our initial trip. We packed the Ford Escape back up and set out traveling about 2,000 miles in six days from our home, to three new cities and back.

This is that story.

Francesca Carletto: Breaking the rules

You don't make eye contact in New York City's subway system. It doesn't matter what someone is doing on the train. Mind your business. This is the rule.

Francesca Carletto takes me on my first trip on the subway, going to see the NYU Game Center in Brooklyn where she goes to school. I start to wonder where everyone is going. I look at the woman across from me. She has short blond hair and is wearing a black pea coat. Her umbrella rests underneath her legs, slowly making a pool of rain on the floor.

We make eye contact.

I quickly look back at Carletto and strike conversation back up, mildly embarrassed I broke the cardinal rule of the subway.

Carletto only recently moved to New York, so she, too, is learning the rules of the city. It's a difficult transition. Living and working in Massachusetts for a number of years before moving to Brooklyn's Park Slope neighborhood for graduate school, Carletto admits she wasn't used to the type of transit system she now rides daily.

"I want to people watch and I want to kind of observe people," she says. "If somebody gets on and they're being loud or they're doing something that's a little strange, you just don't eye-contact. I'm learning that's the New York way."

New York City is kind of a paradox. It's full of people all living and commuting in cramped areas that want nothing to do with the other. If it's your first time in the city, as is the case for me, it can be a remarkably cold place. Checking out at a bodega, when the person behind me thought my card was taking too long to process, they simply walked around me and cut in line — never once acknowledging my existence. For a city of more than 8.5 million people, there's a surprising level of anonymity. No one cares what you're doing. They just want to get to where they need to go.

Carletto, though, is different. She wants to know about all these people. She wants to know where they're going, what they're up to. One of the main draws for Carletto moving here, she says, was the opportunity to work on different types of games for school, the chance to experiment with "weird shit."

"I like making tiny games that can make people smile or make people confused or make people cry sometimes," Carletto says, sitting in her apartment drinking coffee, her dog Olive lying near her feet.

She likes making games about people or "personal experiences," she continues. It almost strikes me as ironic, wanting to tell stories about personal experiences in such an impersonal place. But when I think about it, it kind of makes sense. All the best stories coming out of New York are always about its people. Dito Montiel's book A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints reveals what it was like to grow up in Queens in the '80s. Larry Clark and Harmony Korine's groundbreaking film Kids is a pseudo-documentary about skate culture during the aids epidemic of the '90s.

It's almost as if Carletto is just the newest in a long line of creatives that flock to the city, wanting to crack open its people, learning their stories.

"Even just getting on the subway, like, the number of different people you see who are very involved in their own lives and their own little worlds that's completely separate of yours and you're never going to experience, that's something I'm thinking about a lot as I design games," she says. "I'm super inspired by the subway."

She's making a game about cuddling. Cuddling is so personal; you're holding a person, folding your bodies into each other. You're sharing not only a space, but warmth. You're invading the other's personal bubble. It's the exact opposite of New York. It's Carletto cracking into personal experiences in one of the most impersonal places in the United States.

We ride the subway all day; Carletto takes us from Brooklyn to Manhattan and back. We see her school, we go to the Nintendo store, we go get tacos and see Times Square. I feel like I'm getting better at being a New Yorker by the end of the day. I've found how to stay in my own bubble.

I can't say for sure, but I feel like I keep noticing Carletto looking at other people. I wonder if people are looking at me, drenched in rain, talking about how I want to buy my first Amiibo. What do they think of us? Do they wonder where we're going? I don't look around to see if anyone's looking at me.

Carletto is still learning how to be a New Yorker. She's a storyteller, gaining intimate inspiration from people who want nothing to do with her. This is the "Melting Pot," as it's called. A hodgepodge of different nationalities and people all living in close quarters, living their own lives. They might not know it, but Carletto is watching, learning, wondering about them.

"Every culture or every weird subculture you can think of you can find in New York," Carletto says. "I feel like this is where I've always wanted to live, just because it seems super interesting. I'm still exploring."

Shawn Pierre: Go it alone

We're sitting in a co-op work space in downtown Philadelphia, Pennsylvania with Shawn Pierre. I ask him, "How would you describe the game scene here?"

He takes a second to think.

"Scrappy," he replies after a bit. "Everyone is just doing what they can to get by and figure stuff out."

Philadelphia, he says, is different than other large cities with independent game scenes. Namely, there's no AAA studio here. There are no companies offering advice, freelance work or influence over the area, like you might see in Austin or San Francisco. There's never been any of that here, and that's what, he thinks, makes the scene's story special.

Pierre, originally from Northern New Jersey, came to Philadelphia for a job. He worked for an email company and had no real intention of being a game developer. Initially, he says, he just wanted to be a modder. When he decided he wanted to at least try to make something of his own, he looked up the local game scene here. He didn't find much.

But there was enough. Enough, at least, for monthly hangouts and game jams. Over time the scene grew. Now, the once-small community Pierre tells us about is thriving; it's something he sounds proud of when he speaks of it. Every month there's a game jam and meetups. He says the scene has a "small town" mentality, where everyone knows each other, every one helps each other.

But there's still work to do.

"There are a lot more, I'm sure than many places, hobbyists than professionals," Pierre says. Not a lot of people here are doing game development full-time like he is, or like many do in major cities where there's contract work to pick up from outside studios.

And Pierre says he wants to change that, he wants to give back. A company he helps organize and run, Philly Game Mechanics, is a charity organization. Pierre and the other members, he says, are working to get game grants from the city they can in-turn re-grant to developers, helping them finish their projects.

"My mission with it is: How can we make everyone better at what they do? And how can we get everyone to the point where they're able to just focus on their games and focus on their work," Pierre tells us. "A lot of people have full-time jobs still or part-time jobs; they can't just do game development full-time. But we want to do what we can to get closer to that point than where we are now, maybe."

You can kind of see this mentality in his game Henka Twist Caper, a multiplayer motion-based game where "players must twist and turn their controller until they find the correct orientation." It gets people together. It makes players work together. But more than that, it feels like Pierre simply working on games here is a reflection of everything we're talking about. For someone wanting to facilitate a large development scene, developing games at all times is leading by example.

There's an underdog mentality here, he says. Philadelphia is a big city, but in terms of independent development, it's one that's had a larger uphill battle than other indie hubs. That used to be discouraging for people. Now, he says, it's a point of pride.

"There used to be, I think, a moment in time where people said, 'Philly's the only city without a AAA studio,' and people felt bad about it," he says. "But now I think a lot of us think that's a good thing."

Without the influence of a AAA here, Philadelphia's scene is able to carve its own path. It's able to figure out how it can make it work without the other luxuries large cities have. To Pierre, that's something that can be a global influence for other communities.

I ask him what he thinks Philadelphia does or will contribute to the independent game scene at large.

"Depending on where we wind up in a few months [or] a few years, our story is one that can really shape communities, maybe, around the rest of the United States or the world where people feel like, 'There's no big studio here, we can't do anything," he says. "There's a path for you to be successful and you don't need a million resources, or you don't need as many resources as an L.A. or Portland, or New York. All those places are great, yeah, but if we can find a way to ... hype that up and help people figure out how to get to a higher platform, that would be a great story or a message to share."

Jo Fu and Conrad Kreyling: Pissed

We're standing in front of the United States Capitol Building in Washington D.C. near the base of its stairs. Right in front of us are guards wielding assault rifles. Jo Fu and Conrad Kreyling are flicking the building off. They've had a few drinks.

But they're angry. Barely two miles away is Donald Trump: the president and the source of a lot of Fu and Kreyling's anger.

An hour prior, we're sitting at the bar Gordon Biersch in D.C.'s former warehouse district. It's a nice bar in a nice area; I like it enough. Fu's opinion, on the other hand, differs. 15 years ago, when she first started coming to the city to go clubbing during her "goth" phase, none of these high rise apartments that all look the same existed, she says. It was dangerous; you weren't supposed to walk down certain streets. If you parked your car on the wrong block, you didn’t expect to come back to a vehicle with hubcaps.

But more than that, this area had culture. It was a predominantly minority area. There were no buildings taller than two stories, Fu says.

Then in 2008 D.C. built a $600 million-plus baseball stadium blocks from where we're sitting. It's where the Washington Nationals play. It changed everything.

"[When they built it] they were still telling people to take the second train and do the transfer rather than walk," Fu says, adding it was so tourists and more-affluent baseball fans could bypass the neighborhoods formerly here. "Now it's all entirely new development. All the cool neighborhoods are gone, like they were never here."

Now the area has Starbucks, start-ups and Gordon Biersch. A lot of white people. The area Fu and Kreyling describe is just a story now. Nothing here looks remotely like it.

Fu and Kreyling are fighting against these changes, much like they are fighting against the larger political changes happening in America at the moment.

In a way, America is a completely different place from when the two started their development studio, Pillow Fight Games. It was 2016. Obama was in office. But Trump was on his way. He represents something they find hateful. For Pillow Fight, he's the antithesis of everything its founders stand for.

"We want to represent trans women, people of color, women who want to make games who are quirky and art-forward and aren't game designers," Fu says. "[We] actively seek out [freelancers] that are traditionally marginalized or can't get their foot into the AAA or even the big indie door."

Fu and Kreyling say that coming to D.C. to start their company was simply a matter of convenience. Fu, from the area, and Kreyling, who's lived all over New York state, are a couple. Wanting to start a company, and wanting to no longer be part of a long-distance relationship, the two chose D.C. for its marginally cheaper rent. There was nothing specific about D.C. that made them want to work here.

D.C.'s changed since Trump took office. "It's become angrier," Fu says. "Fights have become more intense. ... Just being near here is awful."

They're fighting, too, though. They were at the Women's March. They call their congressman. They do charity streams for friends who make a pro-choice comic. They make games about minorities and their ever-changing neighborhoods.

But it's been a struggle for the two, thanks to the new administration.

They can't get money to one of their contracted translators and editors who lives in Puerto Rico, Fu says. When Hurricane Irma hit in August it left one million people without power, their contractor included. They can't guarantee the check will come in the mail.

"We have a Jordanian-American editor and background artist who we had to delay [our most recent game] on their behalf because they were worried about their family getting deported when that first travel ban came down," Fu says. "Everyone on the core art team — so me doing the creative direction, plus our UI artist, background artist and sprite artist — are all second gen immigrants. We all [had] this moment of, like, 'What's going to happen to our family.'"

"It feels like the stakes are higher," Kreyling adds. "I think that informs how we've approached a lot of stuff both in our personal lives and creatively."

Their most recent game mirrors their frustrations with D.C. Ghosts of Miami, though set in Miami as opposed to D.C., tells a story about a changing city. It takes place in the '80s. It's an homage to the neighborhoods and cultures that used to be there. The two took a reference trip to Miami, but they also could simply look out their window and see the same thing happening to their city.

"We wanted to make a visual novel about people talking about how sad it was that those communities [are] disappearing," Fu says. "It's just sad because I never got to know D.C. in the '70s. I literally just watched the ghost of a place vanishing."

But maybe it doesn't have to. People are trying to make it better. Every day, people remind others on social media to call their senators. There are marches and rallies going on all the time. If you speak, someone will hear you. Fu, Kreyling and their host of freelancers and contractors are just a few voices making up a louder shout. D.C. right now is a hotbed for change.

We end our night standing in front of the capital. Fu and Kreyling are flicking off the monolithic building. They're pissed, but they're laughing. It's going to take work — a lot of it — but Fu and Kreyling aren't backing down.

"In terms of creativity, we get to find the talent that we always wanted to because they're willing to speak out louder, too," Fu says. "And they're using games and artwork as a medium to really express how much they want to 'hashtag resist' [and] fight against an administration that seems to hate them."

HOME: AN ADMISSION

After more than a month traveling across the country and back — with six extra days added in October — I had dozens of stories I wanted to tell: almost getting run over by a semi, a bad run-in with a guy named Sebastian, almost getting arrested, getting locked out of my Airbnb while I desperately had to pee, nearly driving off a mountain, peeing on my Airbnb, the list goes on. I almost felt like some gonzo video game journalist in the trenches. Like Hunter S. Thompson with a controller in his hand, barely surviving the elements, eating, driving and drinking my away across the country.

But I was being selfish. And I don't actually like Hunter S. Thompson.

My main takeaway is that from cities of 8.5 million to towns of barely 1,500, developers are creating wherever they can plug in a computer — and the game industry is better for it.

Besides, if I told even half of the stories from this trip, Polygon would never hire me again.

Special thanks: Nicole Carpenter, Reid McCarter, Will Partin, Kenneth Shepard, Mo and Wick