There's a clear before and after moment in the career of (mostly) solo game dev Mike Klubnika. He's been making short, grungy games for years, but it wasn't until the 2024 release of Buckshot Roulette, a Russian roulette-style gambling sim where you let a shotgun decide your fate in a wager with a monstrous underground casino dealer, that he saw massive commercial success. And it was massive.
With a game made in two months, first launched on Itch.io and then on Steam, and later expanded with a hotly demanded multiplayer update, Klubnika sold over 6 million copies, putting him in the coveted position of essentially never again needing to worry about what he creates or how it performs. On top of that, Buckshot Roulette has put millions of eyes on his next game, Split (or s.p.l.i.t), a short psychological horror game where you navigate hacker terminals, which is out on Steam today, July 24.
Klubnika tells me this success hasn't changed his life all that "dramatically" apart from the obvious thing: "I can do game development full-time and not really worry that much about the commercial side of games. I feel like I can come up with an idea for a game and I can make it in a more peaceful way, knowing that if it doesn't sell well, or if it doesn't reach enough players, then it's not as big of a deal as it could be. So in a way, it's quite freeing. But it's also not really that different to what it was before, because I was never really worried about, oh, what if I put this game out and it doesn't sell enough copies? I wasn't even selling games that much. It was like, what if it doesn't get any downloads? I'm very grateful for it."
The Buckshot Roulette launch was "pretty crazy," he recalls. "I remember I was at a friend's place, we had a movie night, and I had just released Buckshot like a week ago. We were looking at Twitch on the big screen. We're looking at people playing the game, and there were so many people streaming, and there were so many viewers. You could also see that the chat in the streams was going crazy, because everyone was like, oh no, that one's a blank, shoot yourself instead of shooting the dealer. It was just chaos. It was very insane. I was not expecting it at all."
I asked Klubnika how he might explain Buckshot Roulette's meteoric launch. "I've been thinking about it for quite a bit," he begins. "I think, generally, obviously, it's just luck. Right game, right time." It's simple to pick up and play, he reasons, and it's fun to watch over a friend's shoulder or, indeed, on Twitch. He reckons the indie horror scene, the perfect home for the "dirty, grungy, sort of hostile" games and worlds he creates, was pretty quiet at the time, leaving the door open for a hit to dominate conversations. He tips his hat to Inscryption, a superb card game roguelike and a big inspiration for Buckshot Roulette, for its style of presentation, which people have clearly latched onto.
"My final theory is that gambling is very fun," he adds. I think he might be onto something.
With Split, Klubnika doesn't want or need a repeat of Buckshout Roulette. The joy of making short games, he says, and working on games like these two as a solo dev – though overall, he "wouldn't necessarily call myself a solo dev" between minor collaborations or outsourcing – is acting on ideas quickly and getting them out into the wild fast. He's "thought about" making a bigger game, but something like Split is perfect right now.
Split is a bit more video game-y than most of Klubnika's games, he says, and has more narrative to it as well. You can beat it in under two hours, he reckons. It's $2.99 on Steam, like Buckshot before it, or $2.54 with the launch discount. This is just how he likes to create – the inverse of the enormous games that dominate the industry through update after update after time-devouring update. (The reason Split took a bit longer to make is Klubnika couldn't help himself from embellishing a separate game jam project called Fused 240, co-developed with Wriks).
Increasingly, short games are punching far above their weight, and Klubnika, like me, hopes that trend continues.
"Especially recently, I've kind of noticed that [trend] with Balatro and Peak," he says. "It's pretty crazy. I feel like, in terms of industry, it might have more of a focus. Shorter timelines. But I'm not really sure."
Separately, he adds: "When we're talking about dev timelines of four months to five months, it just keeps it fresh. I'm already really looking forward to next projects, and it's always very interesting finishing something and starting from scratch all over again. You get to just explore new ideas, rather than just making the same type of content for the same project. So I just find it very refreshing and also very, I guess, scopable as a solo dev."
