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Designer Darenn Keller was thrilled to land a position at Ubisoft and work on multiple entries in the Assassin's Creed series as well as Ghost Recon. But around the time COVID hit and his work became more isolated, new creative endeavors began to creep into his mind.
Ready for more creative control, he ended up leaving the studio and gave solo development a try, learning new skills and wearing every hat himself. After a lot of prototyping, he landed on the idea for Dawnfolk, a hard-to-describe mix of survival, puzzle, and city-builder elements that's earned 94% positive user reviews on Steam (and is also on Nintendo Switch). It was no Balatro-sized hit, but Keller tells me Dawnfolk has done well enough to make his indie career livable, which is the dream for most devs, and more than enough for him.
Dawnfolk is a grid-based city-builder about gathering resources and using them to "protect your people from oppressive shadows," as its Steam description puts it. It's a choice-driven microcosm of grand strategy rendered in adorable pixel art backed by relaxing music, and it's one of the most approachable city-builders in years. But if you are looking for more depth, you'll find it in challenges so devious that, Keller tells me, barely 2% of players have finished them, despite the considerable development time that went into making them.
Life as a solo developer is still overwhelming at times, especially in the "business side of things," but Keller says he's learned a lot about how to create on his own versus as part of a humongous AAA team.
"I make all the decisions," he says, which is good and bad. He can iterate or pivot quickly without clearing checks and balances, but he has to do it in a vacuum. "I do believe humans are made to work with other humans, and that's why we love working even in small teams," he continues. "It's very cool to have a few people and share this thing with someone. When you're alone like this, it does feel very lonely. It's difficult to keep the motivation. It's difficult, when you wake up in the morning, to force yourself to work on the game. Nobody is going to tell you to do it because nobody cares."
Landing a publisher helped Keller stay motivated as work on Dawnfolk began to wind down – and also gave him some runway to be more particular with the launch – and he's stayed motivated enough after launch to get another game, currently called B-Type: Space Builder (a name likely to change), listed on Steam. Keller says Dawnfolk had "sold 26,000 copies and still pays my rent" as of two months ago, letting him focus more on his next project.
If he could do it all again, Keller wonders if he'd opt for self-publishing. "At the time, it was really all about the money, to be honest," he says. "I was just running out of money, and having a publisher gave me enough money to finish the game and have something in reserve in case of a huge failure. Here, I'm not in this situation anymore, at least for now. In four years, if I don't release a game, I'm gonna need to release something or sign a publisher."
This tees up something I hear from a lot of solo and small developers: make the next game smaller and faster. "I would love the next game to be like one year, one year and a half," Keller says. Dawnfolk took between two and three years depending on how you size up the Switch port work, so Keller says "half the time would be great" for his next game.
Working solo has also let Keller dial into his own creative goals. He's a strategy diehard and keeps coming back to the genre in some form. "I think all of my games will always have this little bit of strategy mixed with something that has nothing to do with strategy," he says. Type-B: Space Builder involves planetary facilities and resource collection, for instance.
Despite a focus on Steam – handily the biggest store in PC gaming and the best store for indie games – he also makes games with a controller, not a mouse and keyboard, in mind. "For my next game, I really want more of a fun toy that can be hard to master, but is very easy to use," he says. "It's very easy to play with that toy. And the strategy around it is also simple. Not aiming to do Civilization, Endless Legend type of complexity. I'm really aiming to do simple games with a bit of strategy."
Keller says he began posting about his journey with Dawnfolk online in part because, "I believe we show too much of the big successes and not enough of the small successes." Workaday games and quiet hits are a huge chunk of the industry, but "most people" won't hear about them. "But still, it's the game that allowed me to start my career and to actually continue it," he says of his own small success.
