Some of the best games in recent years have come either from lone developers or from very small teams, and there is a good reason for it. While they may not have the budgets or workforce of major publishers, they have something truly unique, the freedom to experiment with ideas nobody has tried before.
Balatro, Vampire Survivors, and Downwell are three vastly different games on the outside, but they share similar stories of creation. Each game started by taking a relatively simple idea that was iterated on until it became something players had not experienced before.
Not every game needs an enormous sandbox world or ultra-realistic graphics to be engaging. Some games can offer a mechanic that is easy to grasp at first and then keep expanding on it as players spend more time with the game, exploring what it has to offer.
Novelty does not always come from inventing an entirely new genre. Sometimes it comes from one person looking at a familiar game, asking what would happen if a certain rule changed, and having enough courage and freedom to find out.
Hidden Inside a Deck of Cards
Anyone who has ever played poker knows that a pair is worth less than a straight and that a royal flush is something one can hope for. Balatro starts by taking those familiar rules, making its basic concepts relatively easy to understand even before the player invests a few hours into the title. In Balatro, you play poker hands to earn points, but the real fun comes from the Joker cards that can totally change how those hands work. The first Joker you draw may reward a particular suit, while another one can shift the value of the cards you hold. Before long, the player is no longer simply trying to make the best traditional poker hand, but is wrestling with building the best strategy around a set of rules that apply to the cards they hold.
Balatro was created by a solo developer called LocalThunk and released in February 2024, with mobile versions following the initial release in September. While LocalThunk may have wished for success, one can only wonder if he could have predicted that he would send not just ripples through the entire gaming industry, but entire waves. By early 2025, Balatro had sold more than five million copies across all platforms. The mobile release also gave players a particularly convenient way to enjoy the familiar cycle of making a decision, seeing the result, and trying to build a stronger combination in the next round.
What makes Balatro so interesting in the context of the broader indie development world is not just the fact that one person created such a successful game, but that it is part of a broader trend.
What should be talked about more is the way this game finds novelty in something people already understand. Poker has existed for generations, and deck-building games were well established long before Balatro hit the market. LocalThunk did not need to replace either of those ideas; he simply needed to take the most interesting parts and discover how they could work together and lead to something completely unexpected.
This kind of experimentation is easier to imagine when the person making the game has direct control over its direction. Developer can test an unusual Joker, discover that it creates an interesting combination, and decide whether the game becomes better because of it without spending hours trying to pitch the idea to superiors. That does not mean every experiment succeeds or that working alone is always an advantage. What it means is that the distance between having an idea and deciding to try it can be relatively short if developers are given space and tools to experiment on their own.
Balatro also captures something very interesting about the world of mobile games. Smartphones do not need to reproduce the scale of a console experience to offer a game that is worth returning to. Engaging mechanics, combined with enough room for discovery, can be more than enough. The question, however, is whether the game continues to surprise the player after the first few sessions.
Zero to One
Vampire Survivors approaches the experimentation problem from a completely different direction. At first glance, its gameplay looks almost too simple. The player moves a character around a field while various enemies approach from every direction. If that were not basic enough, attacks happen automatically, which means the player spends much of their time concentrating on movement and deciding which upgrades to choose as the run progresses. Sounds rather boring, right?
It would be easy to assume that removing direct control over attacks would make an action game less interesting. What many fail to notice is that, in practice, it changes where the interesting decisions happen. Players have to understand how different weapons work together, when to take a risk for experience, and how to position themselves as the number of enemies grows. The game gradually turns a straightforward survival challenge into a situation where the screen can be filled to the brim with effects, enemies, and the consequences of earlier choices. It may look chaotic, but there is a method in this mess, and what’s important is that players are the ones who design and control the chaos that takes over the screen.
Vampire Survivors was originally developed by Luca Galante and when it first arrived on mobile, it brought the same central idea that almost any mobile game runs on: short loops leading to a high number of repeated runs. This way, the player can jump in, play a few games, and understand the core concepts almost immediately. What takes time, though, is understanding how to survive.
The game is also a perfect example of why simplicity and depth should not be confused with each other. Game can ask players to do very little with their fingers while still giving them plenty to think about. In fact, removing certain actions can sometimes make other decisions even more important. That said, Vampire Survivors does not become interesting despite its limited controls. Those controls are part of what makes the experience so unique.
For an independent creator, this is a great way to approach game development. Instead of beginning with a long list of features, the developer can ask themselves whether one mechanic is interesting enough to support the entire cycle of game replayability. If the answer is yes, the next logical step is to find out how much can be built around such an idea. This may not necessarily be the fastest route to success, but it gives a small team a manageable problem to work on before the project grows beyond its original idea.
Mobile Limitations & Better Ideas
Downwell is perhaps the clearest example of a game that takes mobile limitations and makes them a part of its design. Created by Ojiro Fumoto, the game asks the player to descend through a dangerous well, avoiding enemies and firing bullets from a pair of gunboots. The idea is fairly easy to describe, but only when you play the game can you fully understand how carefully its mechanics fit together.
Gunboots can be one of the examples here, simply because they do more than attack enemies. Their recoil also affects the player's movement, which means firing a shot can change where the character goes next. The player has to think about attacking and moving at the same time, even though the controls remain simple. In a talk about the game's development, Fumoto explained that he had designed Downwell with mobile in mind and wanted to keep the number of inputs to a minimum. The gunboots helped him work within those limits while giving the game a mechanic of its own.
This is a different approach from merely taking a game designed for a controller and attempting to fit all of its buttons onto a touchscreen (as some games naively try to do). Downwell takes the device and asks what kind of action makes sense. Its vertical movement also works naturally with a phone held in portrait orientation, making the shape of the screen part of the experience.
The lesson here is that a limitation can sometimes point toward an idea one might not have considered before. Small screen encourages clearer visual information, touch controls make complicated button combinations less attractive, and short sessions encourage the creation of games that can establish themselves rather quickly. None of these restrictions automatically makes a game better or unique, but they give creators a problem to solve, and maybe find a million dollar solution in the process.
Freedom to Try Something Strange
While all the games we’ve talked about share similar qualities, it would be misleading to suggest that indie developers are naturally more creative than people working in large studios. There are talented designers in every part of the industry, and major publishers have produced plenty of unusual games themselves. The difference, however, often lies in the conditions under which ideas are developed.
Large projects usually involve more people, more financial commitments, and more reasons to be careful about changing direction. That is why implementing an experimental mechanic may require explaining it to several teams before anyone has had the chance to play it. Publishers may also have to consider whether the idea fits an established audience or supports the business model around the game. Concerns such as these are quite reasonable, taking into account the level of resources involved, but they can make unusual concepts harder to pursue.
On the other side of the table, we have an individual creator who faces a different set of problems. There may be less money available and fewer people to help when something goes wrong, but the creator can often make decisions directly. If a prototype shows that the most interesting part of the game is something unexpected, they can choose to follow it, even if it’s just a gut feeling. If an idea does not stick, they can discard it and move on, without the need to reorganize the entire project.
That freedom, however, has a cost. Independent developers still need to finish games, find an audience, and make enough money to continue working. The reason games like Balatro make such waves in the industry is precisely because most projects do not reach the same level of attention. Working alone can also become exhausting when the same person is responsible for development and many other tasks surrounding the release.
Even with those difficulties in mind, independent development gives the industry something that is hard to find elsewhere. It allows more people to explore ideas that do not yet have an obvious market or that simply have not been tried yet. Some will remain small, others will find niche audiences, but there will also be those that reach the global scene and influence the entire gaming industry in ways no one could have predicted.
Not that every indie game needs to become a hit. What matters is the experimentation that happens in the process.
Small Creators & Room to Experiment
There is one more part of this story that deserves attention. Creative freedom matters, sure, but a developer also needs the means to turn an idea into a game people can actually play. For a single-player game built around one key mechanic, that might be relatively manageable, but when a creator wants to add competition between players, the path may be more challenging.
Imagine a developer has built a simple mobile game centered around the idea of timing. The basic interaction is enjoyable, and early testing suggests that competing against another person could make it far more interesting. Now, the project requires more than simply refining the mechanic. The developer needs a way to connect players, run matches, and make sure the result reflects what happened during play. If those systems have to be built from scratch, a small experiment of adding another player can become a much larger engineering project that can even kill the entire endeavor.
This is where tools and existing infrastructure can save the project from falling into the drawer labeled tried-but-not-finished. What Elympics offers is an infrastructure layer for developers creating competitive games in Unity, including support for multiplayer gameplay, matchmaking, and server-authoritative game logic. These systems do not decide whether a game is fun, but they can reduce the amount of supporting technology a creator has to develop independently, and that is more than enough.
Having such help within reach gives small teams more room to concentrate on the idea that made them want to build the game in the first place. Developer can spend more time testing whether a competitive mechanic feels good and less time solving problems that have little to do with its creative direction. It does not remove the need for technical knowledge or careful design, but it changes what a small team may be able to attempt.
The next generation of interesting mobile games may therefore come from more than one kind of innovation. Some creators will discover unusual mechanics, as LocalThunk, Galante, and Fumoto did. Others may find new ways to make familiar ideas competitive or social. What matters is that the tools available to them allow those ideas to be tested without every project having to begin with a large studio behind it.
The Origins of Next Great Game
It is tempting to look only at a successful indie game and focus on the fact that it was made by one person or a small team. That fact alone, however, is not the most interesting part of the story. The best part is the fact that the creator found something worth exploring and had the opportunity to keep working on it until the idea became a complete game.
Balatro found new possibilities for playing poker. Vampire Survivors shifted what players need to control in an action game. Downwell used the restrictions of a mobile phone to turn them into a key part of its identity.
What connects all these games is that a single idea or question can bring results that, if given enough freedom, can blossom into something that will change the entire industry.
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