Indie Developer Talks Creating & Shipping an Action Parkour Game

Launching the Studio

We started Makea Games in 2022. There’s a great write-up I put up here about the history of Makea Games and Supermoves for context. We were a metaverse startup focusing on making games that can be built with a controller, like a Minecraft editor, but for making entire games. Supermoves was supposed to be our first title.

I gathered a crew of five incredibly talented founders to start Makea Games, and it turned out we got a lot of traction around the idea of enabling a user-generated content universe. I wanted to fuse together something like a console-friendly “Garry’s Mod,” but with a controller focus – and for our first game to feel like “Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater meets Mirror’s Edge meets Fall Guys.”

I was designing the core idea as early as 2020, but we formed the company in February 2022 and ran it until April 2025. The name “Makea” is both “sweet” in Finnish and “make-a-game,” reinforcing the idea of us building tools to make games. It made more sense when the long-term plan was to fuse multiple games together using the Makea Editor.

Early Projects

I’ve been making games since I was eight years old. The rest of the team had worked at places at Rovio, Remedy, and other game startups before. One bigger project I worked on before was Taphouse VR, a bartending simulator for virtual reality that became a bit of a sleeper hit in the VR market.

After that, I worked on projects like The Spy Who Shrunk Me, a spy shooter with a shrink ray mechanic, and a prototype called Starship Saboteur, which was about infiltrating massive spaceships and causing faction-based chaos.

I’ve always wanted to make slightly crazy games with novel design twists, and that’s what ultimately pushed me toward doing a parkour + “make your own game” spin on the platformer genre.

We were also aiming at the Fall Guys-style audience – massively multiplayer, highly social, and community-driven. Early prototypes focused on first-person parkour (inspired by Mirror’s Edge and Dying Light), fused with multiplayer chaos and trick systems like in Tony Hawk. It all clicked together nicely.

Idea for Supermoves

I’ve always been obsessed with skateboarding games and watching speedrunners tear through older video games. The fusion of those two things was the original spark behind Supermoves.

I also had this idea that players could make their own worlds, similar to Minecraft or Fallout 4’s settlement system. Over time, the design evolved into what I’d describe as a “multiplayer Mirror’s Edge” that lets you build and share your own levels and courses.

This eventually grew into a franchise-level idea: starting with action sports, then potentially expanding into FPS, racing, and other genres – all powered by the same easy-to-use Makea Editor that worked entirely with a controller.

At the time, creator ecosystems were extremely popular with both players and investors – Roblox, Fortnite UEFN, and YouTube-style platforms for creation. Supermoves was meant to be our entry point into that space, and honestly, it was a dream project to work on and by far the biggest game I’ve ever made.

Challenges in Creating the Game

There was a major drop in investor interest in games around 2023. Focus shifted rapidly from metaverse to blockchain to AI, and early-stage funding for games became much harder to secure across the board – something that’s still visible today with all the layoffs and studio closures. Adapting to changing market conditions is risky when you're neck-deep in developing something this big and ambitious, like our UGC editor game engine powering our multiplayer game.

That hit us right in the middle of seed round discussions. We had grown from five founders to eighteen employees and were still about a year away from release, with very limited resources earmarked for marketing.

The hardest part was trying to keep momentum while the broader market climate changed so drastically. I take full responsibility for not being able to spend as much time on investor relations as I would have liked, while simultaneously trying to ship a very ambitious game with a relatively small team. In hindsight, it was largely a scoping issue. Maybe we didn’t need eight unique environments and such a massive amount of content to start our "Makeaverse."

That said, cutting scope would also have meant cutting ambition – and when you’re building a venture-backed startup, ambition is kind of the point. We took a big swing. It didn’t land the way we hoped.

By far, the hardest moment was letting go of so many talented people once it became clear we couldn’t secure additional funding. It was very close, though – and honestly a bit of a miracle – that we managed to ship the game in as good a state as we did.

In the final weeks before Supermoves shipped, it became clear how uphill the launch would be, given the trade-offs we had to make simply to get the game out the door. Our marketing budget was small, and we didn’t choose our marketing partners as carefully as we should have. We weren’t present at festivals, and while our Next Fest demo performed well, it was still a year away from release at that point.

So the struggle came down to shifting investor attention, a very ambitious scope, and a marketing push that never fully connected.

Overview of the Project

Supermoves took about two and a half years to develop. It was a large game, featuring a substantial single-player campaign, eight environments, and tons of levels across six game modes.

The entire game was built using the Makea Editor, which took a significant amount of development time. It allowed players to create levels collaboratively inside the game itself. It was a huge hurdle, but it worked out great.

Multiplayer supported up to 40 simultaneous players with rollback netcode (and later P2P code), recorded runs (bots), custom tournaments, Photo Mode, and localization into ten languages, including Finnish, which I translated myself. We also had a 100-level battle pass-style progression system for unlocking cosmetics.

From a design standpoint, we hit almost all of our internal goals. The main things that didn’t ship were fully voice-acted story cutscenes (I had written a 7000-word dialogue and storyline for the Career Mode that ended up getting cut) and a few experimental modes, like a Counter-Strike Zombie Mode-style parkour-to-the-helicopter mode. Some scope was trimmed late – for example, bots filling multiplayer lobbies – mostly due to time constraints.

If anything, I wish we’d had more time to polish animations and visuals. What we shipped was good, but not at the level I personally wanted.

Toward the end of Makea Games, we were also prototyping Superstrike, an FPS powered by the Makea Editor. Early tests were promising, but given market conditions and Supermoves’ performance, we ultimately had to stop work on it and wind the company down.

Marketing

Here’s a slightly controversial take: marketing Supermoves was extremely difficult, and very little worked the way we hoped.

We made the first trailer ourselves and didn’t manage to create much buzz. We then worked with a publisher, but ultimately decided to part ways. Later, we brought in a larger marketing agency, which helped produce a much stronger trailer and a noticeable bump in wishlists – but visibility was still limited. We weren’t featured in festivals, didn’t get meaningful streamer coverage, and didn’t have the resources for hands-on community activation.

There were some bright spots. The speedrunning community picked up the game, and some user-created levels were so good that we featured them in official playlists. For a moment, it felt like Supermoves might still find its audience over time. Unfortunately, 2024 was an exceptionally tough year to launch a game. We released the game in an extremely crowded window, and without scale or momentum, it was hard to cut through. What I’m most proud of is that player reviews were genuinely positive. The biggest complaint was simply that there weren’t enough players for multiplayer. The game itself was thought to be very fun to play, and the community liked it.

Pricing was also a tough call. At $14.99, the game offered a lot of content, but for a multiplayer-first title, a lower price point – or even a different monetization model – might have made more sense. Overall, timing, market conditions, and limited resources all worked against us. It was frustrating, and yes, it still stings, but it was also an enormous learning experience.

Reflection on Launching Supermoves

We should have engaged the community much earlier, even before large-scale playtesting. We also underestimated how critical showcases and festivals are for multiplayer games.

We expected more support from partners, but in the end, responsibility always lands with the team – and ultimately with me. When everything piled up toward the end, I was responsible for too many roles at once, and some things didn’t get the attention they needed.

One important takeaway is that multiplayer games live or die by momentum. Players will understandably refund if they don’t see activity, which means you need streamers, events, tournaments – the whole ecosystem – lined up before launch. That requires resources we didn’t have at the time.

Current Game Development Practices in the Industry

It’s never been easier to make games. There are incredible learning resources online, and yes, tools like AI can genuinely help developers prototype and learn faster.

I’m particularly excited about Godot shaking up the Unreal/Unity duopoly, and I say that as a huge Unreal fan. Small teams are shipping breakout hits like Balatro, Cloverpit, and Megabonk, which is incredibly encouraging.

The challenge is the squeeze in the middle: traditional publishers and early-stage funding mechanisms are pulling back. We need more ways to support developers at the beginning of their journeys. Still, creatively, this is one of the most exciting times I’ve ever seen.

Making Games in 2026

The market is oversaturated now, so I would do a lot of research before creating a game. That's the only thing you can do in this weird time. We've seen so many good games, roguelikes, and small games, developers fitting their games into that specific genre. 

So maybe it's not about the size of the market, it's about reaching the right people inside that market. I was betting on the SpeedRunners and the old Mirror's Edge fanatics, maybe Tony Hawk's players, but that was a small crowd. But then we saw a weird thing happen. For example, the Tony Hawk's players got disappointed in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 + 4. They went over to Skate, a franchise they used to hate. A lot of those players became Skate players when Skate was now free to play and from EA.

And now that's winding down, now there's another audience. There's Skate Story that came out, maybe not much for the arcade skating, but more of the storyline variety. But what I mean is there are so many little niches and genres and sub-genres that you can go into. I'm doing some very cool things in this space. I cannot reveal all my Machiavellian super plans, but I have two great small games probably coming out either this year or next. And then I've got a third one that I really want to cook hard on for four or five years if I could, but probably I can only do just for a couple of years.

I would say if you go to this market in 2026, just avoid the period when GTA is releasing. Watch out. There's not going to be a lot of air around that.

The second thing is, of course, try not to stumble on your first game: make a couple of them. If you go for your dream project and you fall flat on your ass, it's all fun and games. But maybe you'll end up more disappointed than you could have been if you just did three or four smaller games instead.

What if you manage to gather your fervent fan base that way? You make smaller games, and people go, 'One of my favorite games a couple of years ago was Fights in Tight Spaces.' So I'm now thinking, are there already games that you could remix and riff on, get inspired by, that already have a big fan base but no sequel or no more content?

So, could you make something that already exists with your own unique twist to it and steal somebody else's fan base, basically? Because there are a lot of those games that people are craving back. Old games like Black and White or Dungeon Keeper, for example. Is there anything like that anymore?

And one final thing: in 2026, there's too much doomerism and gloom. We keep beating ourselves up with baseball bats, but then there come games like Megabonk and Clair Obscur. I sunk so many hours into that game. That's a masterpiece. You can do anything here. The only problem is that we need to scope. We need to drop the resource amount and try to find out what we can do with fewer folks and less money.

I know it sounds rough and harsh, but if there are no midsize publishers, if there are no early-stage investments, then we get the lunatics like me. We just make stuff. You know, get me in front of a keyboard and make me too bored, and I will make you a video game. That's what I do.

I don't think we're going to see 2008 again, which was, you know, the first Assassin's Creed, Mirror's Edge, stuff like that, where we get this double-A indie. Maybe I'll be wrong about this, but 2026, I think, is a good time to look at the market, research it, but a great time to make smaller games and weird stuff.

There are bound to be some very good ones that just didn't quite hit the mark, and you could bring them there if you had a good publishing and marketing plan. If you could engage that audience, they would buy it.

How Indie Studios Should Adapt to Changing Conditions

I think developers should be cautious but curious. There are more paths than ever – building inside UEFN or Roblox, starting with game jams, or growing a small prototype into something bigger.

Personally, I’ve been using new tools to make bold prototypes and reconnect with old teammates. Even though Supermoves is a bit of a cautionary tale about timing and markets, I’d still rather ship projects than never try.

I don't have a defeatist mindset. I love making games, and I’m genuinely excited about what comes next.

Marketing & Promotion

I think a lot of games are becoming kind of cookie-cutter. They're made of a template and everything's there, but there's no unique twist to it. A lot of new games like ARC Raiders are doing this very well. They're showing cool visuals, animations, stuff like that, trying to get ahead of the pack with the extraction shooter genre. But when you're making something really odd, like, for example, our parkour game, I think you need to entangle people very early on. We tried everything: esports organizations, a marketing agency, we had a publisher, and yet we still failed.

There is no one single recipe for success. I think many of the things and challenges we were facing were that we didn't have enough of the game to show early on. We didn't have a build of the game that was in such a visually polished state. You could see that in our earlier trailers. It was kind of janky. And that kind of reflected every player's sentiment because they don't get to play your game. They get to see your game. They see the first trailer, and they have already made their opinion in five seconds, and then other streamers might be getting on top of that and going, "Hey, this looks kind of like crap. It's not ready yet, and it's not going to be good." And that kind of early player sentiment is something that I want to look at and discuss.

I think if you have a dedicated streamer base or a community that you're already resonating with, and you can double down and go there like, "Hey, I've been a part of this community for years. Here's what I'm working on. You know, you're all my friends, check it out." That's something that we should have utilized more.

The second thing is very important. I would immediately get a marketing agency the second you have something to show from your game. Get a person who can do trailers. There are individuals and companies, and the individuals are usually better than the companies at this. Doing something that really resonates with your target audience is hard because you don't know what they want. They don't know what they want. You need to show them something that they love without them loving it yet.

That's the worst thing that you can do because then they go, "Oh, it's like BioShock. It's like Tony Hawk's. It's like Halo." They draw these comparisons because that's what you should be doing. You should be making a game that is maybe 50% or 60% something old, maybe 40% to 50% something unique and refined that you have added, and a 10% special sauce, as I like to call it. So that's some kind of unique kicker that nobody else has.

I know for a fact there are a couple of publishers who do things in a very clever way. They do not make a video game. They make a trailer. They make a Steam page for that trailer and they see how many wishlists it gets. And that determines basically whether they are going to continue with that project or dump it just based on the trailer. They never did anything more than maybe a little prototype. And that's one way to do market analysis and engagement. You can go check out which genres work and don't. But I think in many cases that sort of user testing is missing from games, and that can help other people. And I wish we had the time to engage with this.

We were a tiny team, and often, we didn't have time to do marketing. So my third piece of advice would be to get a dedicated person for this. Just get somebody from your team who can go be like, "Oh, I'll be the community manager. I'll engage these people. I'll talk to these people, market it this way." That's something that I think we should have had early on. We tried that many times in many ways, but we didn't get it working. But just once, if we had it working, I bet Supermoves would be something people would talk about. It's a slippery slope.

Looking Forward

There’s a complicated situation around the rights to Supermoves, largely tied to how public funding and loan structures were set up. As a result, the game can’t currently be relisted on Steam.

I hope this can be resolved in the future. I’d love to bring the servers back online and let people experience the game again. For now, my hands are tied, but I’ve committed to keeping the Supermoves community informed.

Personally, I’m starting a new startup, and some former Makea Games team members are already involved. It’s early, but it’s something I’m very excited about.

Plans for Supermoves

My hope is still to resolve the current situation and bring Supermoves: World of Parkour back in some form. Right now, even showcasing the game by our old teammates to future employers is difficult, which is frustrating for everyone involved. I’d love nothing more than to host the servers again, run tournaments, and show people what the game is.

There’s ongoing discussion around game preservation, and Supermoves ended up in a uniquely complicated spot due to how funding and rights intersected. With enough dialogue and a bit of luck, I hope there’s a path forward.

For now, my focus is on making new games. I’ve got a lot of ideas cooking, and creating crazy new video games is how I contribute to this industry. Hopefully one day, Supermoves can return – maybe even in a remastered form. Until then, we wait and see what comes next.

Tomi Toikka, Founder & Creative Director at Makea Games

Interview conducted by 80 Level