Think small: Madison’s indie video game developers find success on their terms | Local News

After over a decade of working within Madison’s games industry, developing commercial releases for larger local studios like Filament Games, Human Head Studios, and Lost Boys Interactive, he felt 2020 was the year to finally take the leap.

“It was that bucket list item for me,” Low said. “If you’re an artist, if you like creating things, I think you have this desire to create your own things instead of creating someone else’s.” He was preparing to start a family with his partner Julianne Low, and didn’t want to lose the opportunity to pursue their development dreams after the birth of their child.

And so, in February 2020, just a month before the pandemic was declared a national emergency, Aaron and Julianne formed their own company, Basementmode.

“And that was really just because I had the means, I had the ability at home here, I have a partner with a good job,” AJ Low said. “And that’s tough; not everybody has that.”

That doesn’t mean starting an independent game studio is easy. From securing funding, contracting art and other work from freelancers, to the sheer number of hours that go into creating a full-fledged title, operating an indie game studio is a full-time gig.

In fact, after spending about a year and a half working on his latest game, Low ended up taking another position as a technical director at the PUBG Corporation this year to help supplement income. “Ironically, I took a job about a month ago. It was just an opportunity that I couldn’t pass up at the time,” Low said.

“Game development is oftentimes very unglamorous, and there’s a lot of meticulous work and care that goes into creating them,” said Eric Francksen, CEO of Sky Ship Studios and former director of the Wisconsin Games Alliance, a network of developers, investors, faculty and economic development agencies dedicated to promoting Wisconsin as a hub for game development. For Francksen and his eight-person team, indie game development is one full-time gig on top of another; Sky Ship Studios acts as their moonlight work they maintain after they finish their shifts at their day jobs.

The scene has never been better for indie game studios, including Madison’s own rising indie scene. But industry observers say some glaring inequities when it comes to gaining access and industry connections create a bubble where developers of color and aspiring game designers aren’t given the same opportunities.

What makes a game an “indie” game? The slippery nature of the word indie isn’t confined to the video game industry, as it can just be as hard to define an “indie movie” or an “indie band.”

“It’s kind of a loaded word,” said Aaron San Filippo, co-founder of the independent studio Flippfly, “and people have been arguing about it for years, to be honest.”

Gregory Shives, founder and lead developer of High Iron Studios said the term “indie” originally referred to a team that wasn’t funded by a publisher or a major development studio. Since the boom of the video game industry in the 1980s, some games have been developed by one-man coding teams and groups of amateurs.

However, the term has evolved with the rise of digital distribution platforms like Steam in the early 2000s, allowing smaller developers to bypass brick-and-mortar stores to get their products into the hands of gamers, and game developers to share their game engine tools at reasonable prices. The indie video game genre has transformed into a sort of amalgamation of many different identifiers.

There are some basic commonalities between games identified as indie, but the primary component is, as the name suggests, independence. That can mean financial independence, where games are not largely funded by major game publishers like Microsoft and Nintendo and are instead crowdfunded using sites like Kickstarter or costs are handled by the small development team themselves. It can also mean creative independence, allowing smaller game studios to create what they want without the scrutiny or direction of a major corporate overlord.

However, this term has also evolved over the past decade or so to refer to titles made with a retro or minimalistic aesthetic, often featuring lo-fi graphics, pixel art, or quirky games with saturated color palettes.

The latest indie video game phenomenon Among Us, a whodunit mystery game similar to the party game Mafia that reached about a half billion players in November 2020, encapsulates that aesthetic well: simple visuals, a quirky sense of humor, and a range of colorful Teletubby-like space crew characters to choose from. Developed by a Washington-based four-person development team at Innersloth, the game, although released in 2018, reached a meteoric peak of popularity in 2020 when celebrities on the streaming site Twitch like Pewdiepie, Sykkuno and Ninja began playing the game that summer before their subscribers.

So, what truly makes a studio indie? Is it a company that creates a game that’s primarily crowdfunded? Is it the size of the team? Being creatively independent from a major developer? Or is it a focus on quirky, minimalistic games that might otherwise fall outside of mainstream appeal?

The answer seems to be a bit of everything. Minecraft, which became the single best-selling video game of all time after selling more than 180 million copies, was initially created by Swedish programmer Markus “Notch” Persson. But as the game grew in popularity, Persson founded the formal studio Mojang with colleagues Carl Manneh and Jakob Porser to accommodate the player base, and eventually sold the studio to Microsoft. Mojang now has a team of about 600 employees with the financial backing of an industry titan. Does that mean Minecraft shouldn’t be considered an indie game anymore?

Tower defense games like Plants vs. Zombies make the player defend a location from enemies by building structures that will impede their movement or destroy them. Players place buildings that house citizens, provide defense from UFO attacks, and collect resources that will keep the city thriving and award XP points.

“Every time they collect resources, every time they destroy an alien, they’re awarded with XP points. These XP points will add up over time and they’ll unlock a research point,” Low said.

Research points can be spent to unlock specific abilities, provide upgrades for existing buildings, and give the player more defensive structures to play with. Rise Against the Invaders will contain an endless sandbox mode, where players can play for as long as they’d like, and a single-player campaign.

Julianne Low helmed a significant portion of the design work for the game, utilizing her own experience playing city building games to inform the mechanics of the game, while AJ took on the brunt of programming.

“All our designs are based on assumptions, so they need to be playtested rigorously,” AJ Low said.

Playtesting is a crucial aspect to developing Rise Against the Invaders, according to AJ Low. The game is currently available as an “Early Access” title on Steam, allowing select players to get instant access to the game and provide direct feedback to the developers on Steam’s forums. Although the game isn’t completely finished, it is in a playable state with minimal bugs, allowing an ongoing dialogue between developer and consumer. This can be especially advantageous to get a sense of audience for the title, as well as providing enough feedback to reach its projected release date sometime later this year.

Although AJ and Julianne Low both started work during the onset of the pandemic, production never really slowed as many other industries did. “I would say it didn’t impact us really at all because we’re a very small company… I contract out art and design services from freelancers and those people are always remote,” AJ Low said.

“Tech work in general lends itself to remoteness because your main tool is the computer and the internet,” AJ Low said. Though the team certainly felt the isolation and mental strain brought about by the pandemic, game development was already primed to handle the general population’s shift to remote work and video conference calls.

San Filippo of Flippfly agreed that the tougher aspect of the pandemic was the major lifestyle changes that came with it. “It’s made it harder to be productive in general – just the stress and the daily routine change and all that. For a lot of 2020, it was just a matter of trying to keep our heads in the right spot,” San Filippo said.

Aaron and his brother Forest San Filippo started their game studio, Flippfly, in 2011. At the time, Forest San Filippo was involved in graphic design work while Aaron was working on what are known as AAA games, games produced and distributed by large teams from midsize to major publishers. Aaron had been working at Raven Software in Monona, which was acquired by Activision Blizzard in 1997.

“I guess it was just the right time for me to just break off and do something more creative and small,” Aaron San Filippo said.

Their first major game release came in 2013 with “Race the Sun,” where players control a polygonal solar craft and race through an infinite procedural world – levels that are algorithmically randomized, so the player faces different environments and obstacles each time they play. After working on subsequent titles like the minimalistic vehicle drifting game Absolute Drift: Zen Edition with Funselektor Labs in 2015, and Evergarden, a flower-matching puzzle game in 2018, Forest San Filippo left the company in 2019 to start his own independent game company, the Wisconsin-based studio Shadows & Shells.

“He’s starting his own games business and following his own path, which is really cool,” Aaron San Filippo said.

Flippfly’s latest PC title, Whisker Squadron, is a roguelike, forward-scrolling aerial combat game that’s aimed to release on PC and consoles in 2022. Players choose from a selection of feisty feline pilots and fight their way through evil bots, tense boss fights and procedurally generated worlds. Roguelike games usually focus on several tenets like procedural generation, permanent death for the player character, and lots of replay value.

San Filippo says Whisker Squadron was born out of his love for rail shooters like the original Star Fox, which was released on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System in 1993. Rail shooters limit the control players have, leaving them only able to move their avatar around the screen and fire their weapon at incoming enemies. Think of it like a rollercoaster, where players are set on a predefined movement track.

Star Fox sees the anthropomorphic Fox McCloud battling invading forces that threaten his home world with a squad of wing mates. It was Nintendo’s second game to use 3D graphics and their first to use polygonal graphics – triangular-shaped surfaces created digitally to build three-dimensional figures.

“We’re not trying to make a clone, you know? [Whisker Squadron] is a procedurally generated game and you only have one life. So, it’s very different every time you play it and that includes the levels themselves as well as the end-stage bosses,” San Filippo said.

To accompany you as you soar through minimalist cityscapes and geometric alien landscapes is an original soundtrack created by award-winning freelance composer and Head Curator for BostonFIG Chel Wong, who has two decades of performance experience under her belt. Each environment will have two versions of its theme – one that will play as the player fights through enemies and another, more intense version that will play for boss battles.

Part of the benefits of working remote, Wong says, is having the freedom to work with people halfway across the world. Although Wong says that working remotely isn’t foreign to freelance composers, the pandemic has certainly affected productivity on composing projects. “It’s not that different but it’s just like the world’s more weary,” said Wong.

AJ Low believes this shift across industries to remote work could have some long-term benefits for Madison’s games industry. “I think it’s a boon to our industry because lots of other companies that felt like they needed to be in a very specific geographic place like the west coast or Texas or Washington,” Low said. “That’s no longer the case.”

That flexibility could lead to further growth for many indie and mid-size developers. Yet for many game creators of color and youth with an interest in computer science, the shift to a more digital industry could bring more challenges than opportunities.

A 2021 Developer Satisfaction Survey by the International Game Developers Association reveals that, demographically, women only make up 30% of the industry. Non-binary, genderqueer or two-spirit folks come in even slimmer at just 8%.

The numbers continue to show a drastic disparity within the industry when it comes to identifying as a racial or ethnic minority. Four percent of the games industry identify as Black, while Latinos make up 9% and East Asian developers just 7%.

“If you’re an underrepresented group, then there’s a certain amount of isolation and otherness that you would feel as well,” said Christina Outlay, an associate professor of Information Technology at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater and founded of colorcoded. Colorcoded is a non-profit that provides affordable IT programs targeted towards girls, minorities and low-income youth.

“Some of it is due to the industry environment but some of it does come from just not being exposed to the field,” said Outlay. “Many of the youth I’ve worked with never thought of working in IT, period.”

Part of this comes from the number of barriers that prevent underrepresented youth from even the opportunity to consider computer science, which primarily fall on the financial front. Whether it’s having access to computers or laptops with enough horsepower to handle game development software or even general access to the internet, Outlay says that computer science is an industry that requires a significant amount of capital to enter.

A Wisconsin Policy Forum analysis of data provided by the U.S. Census Bureau found that 370,000 Wisconsinites did not have broadband internet access, including 82,000 youth. Nearly 6% of white Wisconsinites lack internet access compared to Black and Latino folk, who average around 13.6% and 11% respectively, further transforming the issue into one that falls on many intersectional fronts.

Shives says to get equitable programs off the ground, it takes people’s interest and a concerted effort from the industry. “When you look at these larger societal issues, those just filter down into STEM.”

The University of Wisconsin-Madison has implemented some programs to tackle this issue within higher education. The student chapter of the Women’s Association for Computing Machinery collaborates with local companies for networking opportunities and mentorship programs, and holds social events for members. UW’s ColorStack chapter aims to increase the success and retention rate of Black, Latino, and Native American Computer Science students through academic support and other career development opportunities. But these programs can only do so much to systemically improve access to IT careers for people of color and low-income people.

“Where I think focus should be is that early exposure in early education and equal access to these opportunities that introduce you to the tech field and then set you up to be supported throughout your entire educational career,” Low said.

San Filippo, Low and Outlay all agree that addressing the root of these disparities lie in programs for K-12 students. Colorcoded has partnered with San Filippo for about a year now, developing programs like Game. Play. Go., an eight-week, online intro to 2D and 3D game development program that gives middle and high school students the ability to create a game from the ground up and obtain a mentorship with local developers. Outlay reached out to San Filippo after coming across a research project academics had done years back where they were able to bring more Black high school boys into gaming.

“They did that through teaching them to do quality testing and quality assurance in partnership with local gaming firms, and they were able to get internships and make money doing testing and make more money by taking classes to learn about development in gaming,” Outlay said. Outlay hoped to create a program that similarly provided mentorship and helped give students connections to experts within the community.

Other organizations like Gay Gaming Professionals help cultivate and provide community to the games industry’s LGBTQ+ professionals through scholarships for college students provided by the Entertainment Software Association Foundation, internships and livestreamed events focusing on industry insights with gaming development veterans.

Francksen is an executive producer for the GGP, managing events in cooperation with the gaming convention PAX, which hosts booths from major publishers and indie developers, panels with industry insiders, and more. “We run an event called PAX Together… we select six indie developers that, either within their game or within their studio, celebrate diversity and inclusion. And we actually bring them to the show floor at PAX to demo their game, which is something that most independent teams wouldn’t be able to afford on their own,” Francksen said.

The bottom line, San Filippo said, is that it’s the responsibility of successful developers like himself, especially when they run their own indie studios, to help pave the way for those who want to follow in their footsteps.

“What I’ve realized is that for those of us who are privileged enough to have been in this industry and successful at it, we build the most power when it comes to who gets that and we’re making decisions on hiring,” San Filippo said. “It’s a whole pipeline issue.”

“Rise Against the Invaders” is Basementmode’s city building survival strategy game where players build and manage a settlement harboring the last vestiges of humanity while fighting off nightly attacks from an alien menace. AJ Low describes it as a marriage between simulations like “SimCity” and “Cities: Skylines” and the tower defense genre.