You might ask why? Especially when Ubisoft can crank out a new Assassin’s Creed every year, while Naughty Dog made a new Uncharted & The Last of Us in a few years? What’s wrong with this picture? What does it take to create levels, a few enemies and puzzles, a simple mechanic and some non-interactive dialogue?

On that note — why has it taken us 2 years to come out from the shadows since we won the #cyberpunkgamejam in March 2014? Let us explain. First, there’s something you have to realise:

Making A Game Involves Loads of Not Actually Making The Game

When you’re indie, you don’t have a ready-made structure that is production-ready and enables you to go into an office, sit down with a team, rules, a canteen, and work daily on a video game. When you’re indie, you have to start from scratch.

Sketches for our logo. It was a painful process.

It means that you have to create a company. If you’ve never had prior experience with that, good luck. First, you have to find, convince, and hire your talent to compose a team that can achieve your vision. Second, but no less important to get right at the start, is the legal side. There is a ****ton of admin to get through, but it’s essential in order to be professional and give your team some security. No-one likes to work on trust, and you certainly can’t eat excitement for lunch.

It’s also a little trickier when you’re not yet funded of course. Banks don’t care. Family can be supportive but usually they don’t understand how serious your business is, and unless you’re very lucky they’re not going to do the bank’s job.

If you never had experience with management, suddenly you have to learn how to manage your team, schedule and split the workload, and it’s even harder if you’re split across continents. You have to find the right tools like Trello, Slack, Google Docs, Dropbox, Github, whatever, pay for them and learn how to use them. You have to create logos, emails, business cards, in-depth design documents, both for business, funding purposes and for your team.

Our final logo. We love it.

If you’re an easily stressed person, good luck pitching your dream to seasoned publishers who answer to the bottom line. You have to make the game known among the community, before and during development: gamers, YouTubers and journalists. You have to learn and teach yourself how to make the best out of what’s available on the market to create a game. Unity? Unreal Engine 4? CryEngine? Lumberyard? Are you going to write an engine from scratch?

Making a game is largely about making good calls at important moments. For instance we wanted to use normal mapping in pixel art back in 2012. No game ever did that before. 4 years later, there are plenty of tools available on the market. If we paid someone in-house to do it, it wouldn’t have been worth it. It would have been worse than just a waste of money.