Bodycam Developer Talks the Studio's Growth, Bodycam Development & Future Plans

Bodycam generated massive viral attention when it was first announced, with its hyper-realistic visuals captivating the gaming community. Can you walk us through what happened in the days and weeks immediately after that initial wave of interest?

Luca Dassier, Reissad Studio Head: Bodycam generated massive attention as soon as it was in Early Access. In the days and weeks that followed this wave of interest, we had to handle a completely unexpected situation for a two-person team. The community and the press very quickly took an interest in the game, which suddenly put a spotlight on our work.

At that time, our priority was to keep a cool head, stay focused on development, bug fixing, and direct communication with players. Discord played a central role in maintaining a connection and reassuring the community, even though we still lacked experience dealing with that level of exposure.

You mentioned that 2025 was primarily a year of building the studio from an entrepreneurial perspective. What were the most critical business decisions you had to make during this transition from a small indie project to a studio of over 30 people?

Luca: Our core dev team is now 30 full-time people, and we also have some external contributors from time to time. The year 2025 marked a major transition for us. The most important decisions involved fully structuring the company and the teams. It was no longer just about developing a game, but also about building a studio capable of supporting it over the long term. We had to recruit and strengthen our development team, get external help on certain aspects, implement professional tools and solid internal workflows, and set up a clear organization so the team could work together. Adopting tools such as Jira and Perforce to facilitate teamwork was a key choice. This period taught us how to better structure the way we work.

After the huge public interest in Bodycam, did you pursue or receive investment opportunities? How did you approach funding the studio's growth, and what was your strategy for maintaining creative control while scaling?

Luca: After Bodycam attracted so much attention, we received several investment and publishing offers. Despite that, we decided to remain independent and keep full control of the project. We chose not to open up the studio’s capital in order to preserve our creative freedom. Players had already placed their trust in us through Early Access, which gave us the means to strengthen our team and build a structure capable of making our vision for the game a reality and self-publishing it.

Growing from 2 people to 30 is an extraordinary expansion in a short time. What were the biggest challenges you faced in scaling the team so rapidly, and what lessons did you learn about hiring, team structure, and maintaining the original vision?

Luca: Going from a two-person dev team to a much larger organization has been one of the biggest challenges of our journey. With this rapid growth, we now have 30 people in-house working on the game. Our collaborators are spread across several countries and work remotely for the most part. That required major adaptation. The main difficulty was dealing with the natural inertia of such a larger structure, where everyone has to find their place and quickly understand how communication flows. We had to learn how to hire intelligently and balance very experienced profiles with younger talent. It showed us the importance of a clear distribution of responsibilities and constant follow-up to maintain both the game’s coherence and the cohesion of the teams.

Many indie studios struggle with the transition from viral success to sustainable business. Were you able to leverage the early interest into presales, early access revenue, or other monetization that helped fund development? How did you balance community expectations with business realities?

Luca: Since the launch of Bodycam in Early Access on Steam, players have placed their trust in us and supported the game. That success made it possible for us to remain independent.

Even though our vision for Bodycam is very ambitious, we now know that we have the capabilities and the means to deliver a 1.0 version that lives up to that vision, under good conditions and within a reasonable timeframe. But we also know there’s still a lot of work to do.

Obviously, we still have many ideas for Bodycam, but the most important thing is to deliver a gameplay experience that satisfies players. The community has been receptive to the game and its potential, and, beyond its support, gives us a lot of feedback on the game. We are looking forward to bringing them new content and improvements in 2026.

You mentioned spending significant time on the entrepreneurial side of the project in 2025. Beyond team building, what specific business infrastructure did you need to establish? Publishing relationships, maybe?

Luca: In 2025, a big part of our work was to actually build the studio’s internal infrastructure. On the development side, running a project with dozens of people requires solid production, project management tools, and get to learn how to work together. We had to set up internal systems to track tasks, share information, coordinate teams, and handle all the administrative work. The idea was to put proper professional processes in place, while still keeping control over the creative decisions.

On the other side, there was publishing, which was completely new to us. We chose to bring in experienced people and build a dedicated team to handle communication, marketing, and all the distribution aspects we hadn’t yet mastered. Today, that team allows us to move forward much more confidently on that front.

With 30 people now contributing to the project, how have your roles and responsibilities changed from when you were just two people working in a bedroom? What aspects of the original development process did you have to let go of, and which did you fight to keep?

Luca: The studio’s growth has profoundly changed our day-to-day work, but above all, it has allowed us to do far more. When you are a tiny team, you don’t always have the means or the time to do everything you want. For an ultra-realistic game like Bodycam, it gets even more complex because you need, for example, to do 3D scans from real-world locations or create highly detailed content.

Thanks to the team expansion in 2025, we have been able to go beyond our initial limits and design more advanced, larger, and more varied maps, for instance. And it also gives us better organization to both deliver new content and improve what we have already developed throughout Early Access.

We have been able to redo all our animations to reach a much higher level of quality. Some of these will be arriving in the game soon.

Creatively, this has opened up more opportunities and significantly enriched the project. One of the most notable impacts for players in 2025 was the decision to focus on major updates to bring more significant progress to the game. That doesn’t prevent us from reacting quickly with hotfixes when needed, but we have evolved the way we update the game at the same time as our development processes.

In parallel, our roles have evolved. We have hired talented developers and artists to free up time for us to coordinate the game and the studio, but we remain at the heart of the game’s design and direction. We define features together with team members and make sure that everything produced follows our original vision. The most important thing is that this team allows us to do more, without the limitations we had as just two people.

Looking back at the journey from announcement to where you are now, what do you wish you had known about the business side of game development before experiencing this rapid growth? What advice would you give to other indie developers who suddenly find themselves in a similar position?

Luca: With hindsight, what we wish we’d known earlier is that sudden success brings just as many responsibilities and admin tasks as creative challenges. My main advice to other independent developers would be: don’t stay alone too long when you’re dealing with that kind of growth. In the meantime, you need to make sure the audience is really responding to the game, that they want more, and that they see its potential. In our case, many players told us they saw Bodycam as the future of realistic, tactical multiplayer FPS.

Bringing in experienced people early and adopting proven processes helps you save time, avoid expensive mistakes, and, most importantly, build a stable work environment that attracts talented devs so the project can reach its full potential.

That said, we chose to grow the studio step by step, with the goal of keeping a reasonable size and strong human connections between everyone on the team.

You mentioned having strong ambitions for both the game and the studio. Beyond what you can announce, can you share your broader vision for what you want Reissad Studio to become? Are you building toward being a multi-project studio, or is the focus on making Bodycam the best it can possibly be?

Luca: Our ambition for Reissad Studio is to build a studio that can last and eventually handle multiple projects. For now, though, Bodycam is our one and only focus, because we believe the game has huge potential. We’ll keep working on it until we’ve fully delivered on our vision and players feel they’ve truly had their fill. Our priority is to make Bodycam the best game it can possibly be.

As you head into 2026 with this much larger team and infrastructure in place, how has your development roadmap evolved from your original plans? What can the community expect in terms of the pace and scope of updates now that you have the resources of a full studio behind you?

Luca: As we head into 2026, our development roadmap has evolved a lot compared to what we first had in mind. One of the main technical challenges with Bodycam is its level of ultra-realism, which demands a huge amount of detail, not just visually, but also in animations, interactions, and new features. As a result, integrations take longer than they did when we first started, so we decided to adapt our organization and split the teams to stay agile.

One part of the team now focuses on major features and long-term updates that require deep development work, while another part is dedicated to multiplayer experience, matchmaking, rankings, progression, and so on for the future. This is another key area where we plan to make significant progress.

This new studio organization should allow us to roll out bigger updates that both expand the game and improve what’s already there. We’re very excited about 2026 and can’t wait for players to discover what we’re working on.

Luca Dassier, Reissad Studio Head