Indie Game Development: Focus Over Scale Strategy Guide

Abubakar Salim learned the most valuable lesson of his game development career while working with Ridley Scott on Alien: Covenant. It wasn't about visual effects or storytelling techniques. It was about ruthless focus. "That's why we're able to make games faster," Salim explains, describing how this philosophy shaped Tales of Kenzera: Zau. While AAA studios chase the next 200-hour open world, indie developers are discovering that doing one thing exceptionally well beats doing ten things adequately.

The Hades Reality Check

Salim dropped a truth bomb that should wake up every aspiring indie developer: even Supergiant Games, the creators of Hades, would struggle to break into today's market as newcomers. Think about that for a second. The studio that made one of the most celebrated indie games of the decade might not survive the current landscape if they were starting fresh. This isn't about talent or creativity. It's about market saturation and the noise level indie games face.

The numbers back this up. Steam releases over 14,000 games annually, with indie titles making up the majority. Your 2D Metroidvania isn't competing against other indie Metroidvanias anymore. It's competing against Hollow Knight, which cost $57,000 to make and sold 3 million copies. That's the bar, and it's only getting higher. The solution isn't to make your game bigger. It's to make it more focused.

"Even Hades' creators would have struggled to break into the modern industry" (Abubakar Salim, Tales of Kenzera: Zau)

This reality forces a fundamental question: what can your three-person team do that a 50-person studio cannot? The answer isn't scope. It's specificity.

The Owlcat Approach: Human Vision, Smart Tools

Owlcat Games understands this balance perfectly. For their upcoming Expanse RPG, they're using AI for "vision coordination" and "inspiration" while keeping all content creation human. This isn't about replacing developers with algorithms. It's about using tools to maintain focus on what matters: the creative vision that only humans can execute.

The studio learned this lesson through their Pathfinder games, which succeeded by mastering tactical combat systems rather than trying to revolutionize every aspect of RPG design. They took existing mechanics and executed them better than anyone else. No reinventing wheels, no feature creep, just exceptional execution in their chosen specialty.

This approach scales down beautifully for indie teams. Instead of building your own engine, use Unity or Godot and focus on game design. Instead of composing an orchestral soundtrack, find the perfect synth palette and nail the atmosphere. Every hour spent solving problems someone else already solved is an hour not spent on what makes your game unique.

Platform Strategy: Start Where You Can Win

Xbox's indie program leadership recently advised developers interested in next-generation platforms to start developing for Xbox and PC today. This isn't just technical advice about development pipelines. It's strategic guidance about market positioning. You can't optimize for platforms you don't understand, and you can't understand platforms without shipping games on them.

Job Simulator's developers at Owlchemy Labs exemplify this focused platform approach. They didn't try to make a VR game that also worked on traditional screens. They made the best possible VR experience, period. Their new project, Dimensional Double Shift, continues this philosophy by evolving their VR expertise rather than chasing new market segments.

The lesson here applies beyond VR. Pick your platforms based on where your game concept works best, not where the biggest audience lives. A perfect mobile game will always outperform a mediocre PC port, even if PC has more potential revenue. Master your chosen platform's unique characteristics instead of treating it like a generic distribution channel.

The Anti-Feature Creep Playbook

Tales of Kenzera: Zau succeeded because Salim's team resisted every temptation to expand beyond their core vision. No crafting system. No romance subplots. No multiplayer mode. Just a focused narrative platformer that executes its chosen elements flawlessly. This restraint requires more discipline than adding features, but it's what separates shipped games from development hell.

Start every design meeting with the same question: does this feature make our core concept better, or does it just make our game bigger? If you can't explain how a feature directly enhances your main selling point, cut it. Your game should have one sentence that describes what makes it special. Everything else is support for that sentence.

Even successful studios struggle with this. Fortnite's recent mass layoffs highlight how even massive successes can lose focus when chasing too many directions simultaneously. Epic's developers admitted these cuts will impact development "for the rest of the year and likely beyond." If a billion-dollar game can suffer from scope problems, your indie project definitely can.

Building Your Focus Framework

The most successful indie developers treat limitations as creative catalysts, not obstacles to overcome. When Hollow Knight's Team Cherry limited themselves to hand-drawn 2D animation, they weren't settling for less than 3D. They were choosing to become the best 2D animators in indie games. When Papers Please restricted itself to bureaucratic paperwork mechanics, it wasn't lack of ambition. It was laser focus on an unexplored design space.

Your constraints should feel like creative superpowers, not compromises. A two-person team can iterate on game feel faster than a 200-person studio can schedule a meeting. A $10,000 budget forces innovative solutions that million-dollar projects never discover. Limited scope means you can polish every detail to perfection while larger teams manage complexity.

The indie developers thriving in 2024 understand that focus isn't about making smaller games. It's about making more concentrated experiences. Your game doesn't need to last 60 hours if every minute feels essential. It doesn't need photorealistic graphics if your art style perfectly serves your vision. Master the fundamentals of your chosen specialty, then execute them better than anyone thought possible with your resources.