Esposito, the game’s co-creator and director, and his wife, co-creator Geneva Hodgson, worked out of their home near Los Angeles to lead development of Neon White over the past three years. At the height of production, about five people worked full time on the game. Add friends, contractors and freelancers and it was still fewer than 20 people who touched the product, Esposito said.
, about a cute cat navigating the alleyways of a post-apocalyptic city; another game about a cult led by a possessed lamb; and the retro-looking Vampire Survivors that pits its hero against a constant stream of monsters. Games that Esposito describes as having middle-tier budgets in the $2 million range — neither cheap to make, nor as expensive as the “I think we’re seeing that kind of mid-budget game start to disappear,” he said. “I think that’s really sad because that’s the kind of budget that I think can produce really interesting, odd, risky but well- realized projects and I think Neon White’s one of those.”
Stray captured plenty of people’s attention this summer with its cinematic visuals of a realistic-looking tabby cat scampering around a city menaced by robots and other hazards. Its maker was BlueTwelve Studio, a small team of developers in the southern French city of Montpellier, some of whom previously worked at the nearby office of big game-maker Ubisoft.
It used to mean “you have a small team, they do everything themselves and they release it without a publisher and they do not care about success. That was part of the original kind of indie spirit.” Now it sometimes describes anything that doesn’t come out of big studios making the highest-profile games.
“There’s this interesting balancing act that’s taking place that the opportunities now are greater than they’ve ever been” for independent developers, Bailey said. “But the competition itself is absolutely massive.”