Indie Game Dev Talks Management Hurdles & Multi-Platform Publishing Challenges

Introduction

Hi, I'm Dave Gagné, Co-founder of RageCure Games, where I act as Producer, Sound Designer, Composer, and sometimes Level Designer, Lighting Artist, and whatnot. As you can see, I get to take on various roles, as is often the case with a lot of indie studios. Teams our size usually see their developers working many roles, which, to me, makes things more exciting day-to-day.

We have released Goons: Legends & Mayhem in 2024 on Steam and consoles, and then Hockey Super Squad in Early Access later the same year. Both games are hockey-based, but they are very different experiences.

G:LAM is more of a mix of an adventure game with multiplayer sports mechanics. HSS is a pure arcade hockey experience in a free-to-play format.

Production Challenges In Recent Projects

Scope has to be the most difficult part of game development for teams of any size. Everyone wants to make great, ambitious games, but there's only so much time you can spend on developing a game unless, you know, you are some sort of mega studio with really deep pockets. And even then!

For Goons: Legends & Mayhem, we wanted to do a local multiplayer game first, and then realised the market now expects those kinds of games to be multiplayer. So we decided to scrap the game after a few months of development and rebuild it as an online multiplayer experience.

We've always had this vision for a hockey adventure, but we focused on the multiplayer part of the game first. It's at this point that our publisher realised that we made a watered-down version of the adventure mode because of time constraints. They actually helped us bring that vision back by giving us extra time. So you see, you have to be able to stay flexible and change scope on a whim, twice a year sometimes. In the end, we are really proud of the game we made, considering the team size, budget and our experience as developers.

For Hockey Super Squad, we actually wanted to spin G:LAM for players expecting a pure arcade hockey experience, without the fantasy aspect found in our first game. In many ways, this was a weird undertaking, because we spent weeks deleting systems we had polished for years. HSS eventually became its own thing, with RPG-like stats, new hockey mechanics and customisation, but we had a much smaller scope to deal with. Our acquired experience made this development cycle much smoother.

Approach To Planning

When you manage a studio, you are constantly juggling your current production, its marketing, as well as thinking about what comes next. Budget is always a reality, which makes things complex. As a smaller team, you always want to keep the team you learned so much with. You are basically investing in individuals who carry the studio's expertise with you, and you need to keep that in mind as you plan your next production. You need to make sure you keep your team involved and engaged.

As far as planning goes, you would think that you just plan once for your production, and you are good to go. But the reality is that you keep revisiting this planning, because it WILL change. You might get invited to a cool festival. Shoot, now you need a demo, this will push the production over. You might have an opportunity to release on consoles. That's good news! But that potentially pushes you a year back.

But to me, that's good news. Opportunities mean you are doing something right. You learn that not all opportunities are equal, but you also learn that you gotta make space for the right ones.

Self-Publish Or Partner Up?

The short answer is pretty boring: It depends.

Let me offer a longer answer: For indie developers, in 2026, it often makes sense to self-publish. Still, if your game is the type of product that would only sell well on consoles, and you have absolutely no idea how to release on consoles, you probably need the expertise of a publisher.

If you need substantial funding, you might get a publisher or some help from an organization such as the Canada Media Fund or Kowloon Nights. There are many options for funding; it really depends on your needs and the type of game you are building.

There are many indie success stories that started with a publisher-published game, only for the team to self-publish subsequent games. That's the thing, even if you have a publisher taking care of your quality assurance, marketing, and localization, you need to keep a close eye on this and learn as much as possible.

Distribution Strategies

Influencers and streamers have become really important for any developer. Some of the best traction we've had came from organizing tournaments with streamers from Latin America, for example. Our games typically stream really well, offering the perfect way to show the potential fun you could have with them with your friends.

I would suggest that, as a developer, you really need to try different channels and see what works best for you, what audience reacts to what messaging. That's how you manage to build lasting communities that will become champions at talking about your game with passion.

Publishing Across Multiple Platforms

I believe there are a lot of assumptions around publishing, porting, and cross-play. Maybe the most misguided idea shared around is that cross-play is simple and that developers don't do it because they're lazy. I'll try to paint a better picture of what publishing on multiple platforms is actually like.

First of all, you need to get approved for release on every platform you want to release on. You might want to release on Nintendo Switch 2, but unless they allow you to, that will never happen. So you have to get in touch with first parties, show them gameplay, and get thumbs up. This can take months just to get this thumbs up.

Then, you have to actually port the game to all those platforms. What does that mean exactly? Aside from fixing the usual performance hurdles, it means respecting a list of technical requirements that are unique to those platforms. Without being too exhaustive, it can be things like making sure that you display the right console-specific controls, managing the game behavior as you leave the game back to the console hub, sending invites to friends for them to join your lobby, etc. And the thing is, as soon as you add multiplayer, this list of requirements gets longer. Does the game take place online? Here are the new requirements. Does the game have multiplayer and online? Here are even more requirements. Factor in that these requirements are console-specific, and you then start to realize how hard it is to release on multiple platforms on day one.

For cross-play, you would actually have to respect all those requirements, per platform, all at the same time, to all the first parties' satisfaction. This creates so many edge cases, especially on games that are relatively complex.

So once your game is 100% completed, you actually have a last 20% or more left to be done. I will skip the certification steps, but let's say that you have to plan many months, sometimes a year, just for porting alone.

Bigger studios will sometimes build games on all platforms in parallel. In most cases, though, you will usually build on a first platform, let's say PC, and then branch out to other consoles as development is nearing completion.

That way, the team is focused on development first, the creative part of it, and then gets to tackle the technical challenges associated with porting.

There's a reason most indies will release on PC first, then consoles. Releasing on Steam/EGS/Itch is really straightforward, requires minimal costs, and the technical requirements are relatively negligible. Steam offers a great set of tools to help build your game pages, hold playtests, send review keys, etc. Those tools keep getting better every year and come with super useful documentation.

While I have less experience with the other storefronts, it is generally agreed that Steam is the gold standard for ease of use.

Balancing Community Expectations, Timelines, & Production Realities

Oh, you don't actually! To be honest, I wish I had a great answer to this, because I would tell everyone! It is quite the delicate balance between creating hype too early that you can't sustain, failing to gather enough attention for release, or even preparing marketing for a release, and then moving the goalpost because the game is not ready.

Truth is, even the biggest studios have this problem. Rockstar, Bethesda, CD Projekt Red, some of the most successful studios have either announced games too early, released too early, and/or had to push unfinished games.

There are the things that you control and those that you don't! You could have the best marketing run-up of any indie studio in a decade, but then a AAA game ghost releases two days before you and steals your thunder. Those things happen! Remember, Silksong, one of the most anticipated indie games ever, got its release date revealed only a handful of days before launch. You can't plan for that!

In the end, you try to build a great community as soon as possible, prepare cool trailers that you show at cool events, and announce a release date a few months before release, or otherwise as soon as you're confident you're ready to ship.

Indie Development Trends To Watch

There seems to be a new breed of indie teams that go back to developing in their free time, out of the stress of funding and deadlines. With better tools, better engines, and more knowledge being passed around, it looks like smaller teams have never had a better chance to make great, commercially successful games. The real challenge here is that it's the case for everyone, so there's also a much bigger influx of games being released. On top of that, you are not only competing against other games, but you are also competing against social media, Netflix, older games, etc. So the less financial stress you can put on yourself to release a game, the better your chances at crafting something unique and that will, hopefully, catch an audience's attention.

In short, as a small team, it feels like if you can afford to self-fund, self-publish, and build a community around a strong game with an actual audience, you’re giving yourself the best odds to create something that stands a chance in this market.

While I am not the biggest fan of AI, be it generative or not, it's still going to be interesting to see how small teams leverage technology to create new, interesting experiences. Time will tell!

Dave Gagné, RageCure Games

Interview conducted by 80 Level