Dev behind roguelike city builder thought "it will maybe sell some 100 copies" – 20,000 copies later, it's one of the biggest surprise hits of the year

Italy doesn't have a massive game development presence, so when Michele Pirovano decided he wanted to make games for a living, he narrowed his career path down to two main options. He didn't want to join the country's few big companies, so he decided he could either freelance for some smaller companies or make a game on his own. For the past nine years, he's done both, balancing clients for his day job with his own game as a veritable second job – something to keep the lights on while he pursues his dream. "I could have chosen a lot of easier jobs for that," he tells me. 

That dream game ultimately became DotAGE, a cute but merciless roguelike city builder released on October 4, 2023. Pirovano thought it might sell a few hundred copies. "I know that most games don't do anything, and I did not need the money," he says. As of November 13, about five weeks after launch, DotAGE had sold over 20,000 copies and amassed hundreds of reviews that put it in Steam's coveted 'overwhelmingly positive' bracket. And so, Pirovano's jobs traded places. 

"It was my dream – actually, not even my dream, because I'm quite a risk-averse guy and I have my feet on the ground," he says of the runaway launch. "So I was not thinking it would be good. So when it did that, it was very, very exhilarating. It was perfect for me – for a week. And then I realized how much work keeping up with so many players would be. 

"It became some kind of game for me. People were playing DotAGE, I reached 1,000 concurrent players in the first week, and now it's come down but still selling. While they did that, I was reading over reviews, reading all the comments, answering everybody. I have never slept so little in the last nine years. But I never slept so well. I'm still working late a lot. I love it. It's perfect. A lot of work, but it's what I wanted to do." 

Pirovano hasn't actually received a single euro of the game's revenue yet, but he's already feeling the effects of this unexpected success, even if it doesn't feel real. He refers back to an emotional, pre-launch post to the game dev subreddit, where he described a weight in his gut. "I need to get money, we have a house to buy, we have to put food on the plate," he recalls. "Suddenly, the day after release, I did not have the same weight I had been having for at least five years."

"I feel like I am one of my friends who have their parents gift them a house," he jokes. "It's not a gift in this case, but it's that kind of life-changing. I've not changed anything. I just bought a new mouse because mine was 20 years old. Apart from that, yes, I think this will allow me to focus on what I really want to do. It removes the weight of having to do freelance work. I was working 60 to 80 hours a week, and then still doing that because I have a contract. But yeah, it is life-changing. In a couple of days, my life changed." 

Post-launch fever   

With his freelance work slowly winding down and taking more and more of a backseat to DotAGE – "the contracts I had, they immediately understood the situation" – Pirovano can focus on improving and building on the game, now with a shiny new mouse. He's eyeing expansion after expansion, idea after idea that didn't fit into the launch build, and readily recognizes that his eyes are bigger than his stomach here. He alludes to "my five different files named 'keep these out for expansions'" and reiterates, perhaps to himself, that you've got to tackle things one by one or else "you won't ever finish one, two, three, four, or five." 

The core idea for DotAGE was born from his background in gameplay AI and programming, as well as his love for – and freelance experience with – interconnected systems in games. Meanwhile, he had to learn pixel art pretty much from scratch to do the graphics himself, and admits the game looked "very, very bad" at the start. (I quite like the cute, classical final art style.) He struggled most with UX, and since launch has been working to make the game more user-friendly and intuitive, making quality-of-life and balance improvements while squashing bugs. "You don't realize it, but it is a really hard skill to make things simple," he reasons. 

Looking further ahead, he has more ambitious patches in mind. "The DLC, whether it be updates and so on, it all depends on how the game continues to go," he says. "What you see in the game is many hours, thousands of hours of gameplay. Still, it's just part of what I iterated on. I have three, four, five times as much in prototypes, ideas, features. This gives me an opportunity to do that. I don't know in what form, but definitely, that's what I want to do."

I ask if he thinks he'll ever hit a point where he considers DotAGE to be done, and he pauses for a moment. "That's a really good question," he says, seemingly to himself. "Because when I released the game, I was not at a point that I believed it was done. I spent the last four years trying to reduce it to something that was the base game. One thing I never had an issue with is having ideas to expand the game. That's what made it so big over so many years. I cannot seem to stop having ideas on more stuff. Will it ever be finished? It's hard to say. I have some ideas that, if I put everything inside, would probably take my whole life. Will I do that? I don't know yet. I will keep adding stuff until I feel like it's enough.

"Of course, like any game developer, my goal is not to make one game in my life. I want to make games, multiple games. And I have many ideas for other games. Actually, when I did this, my goal was to make it in a few years, like a couple of years, and then I dragged it on. But I did not have the experience I have now. So if I started now, I am confident I will take a lot less time unless I make the scope even bigger. Which could happen knowing me because, you know, dreamers. We want to make the things. 

"When I released DotAGE, my goal was, let's release it, see how it goes, and then I will start working on the next game. Secretly, I was hoping, well, let's hope that it does well, because there's so much stuff I would like to add to it before doing the next game. And so I will definitely work on a second game. But first I will focus on DotAGE for a good while."