Indie Studio Lead Discusses Creating a Game & How to Stay Competitive

Could you introduce yourself to our readers? What do you do? What's your role at the company? What are some of the interesting bits of trivia you can give to us?

Patrick McAvena: My name is Patrick McAvena. I am the President of Moving Pieces Interactive, a tiny three-person indie games studio based in Brooklyn, New York. I wear many hats, but my main role is crafting the look of our games. 

Kyle Erf, who is my business partner, is a technical genius, so I handle most aspects of development that are not super technical, with the exception that we both collaborate on game design. While our Studio uses Unreal, Kyle and I met while taking an in-person Unity Course in Manhattan. Before starting in games, I worked as a 3D Artist in VFX and advertising for a decade.

How did Moving Pieces come to be? What are the main elements behind this project? What are the important core ideas that helped you build this company?

Patrick McAvena: In my spare time while freelancing in VFX, I started tinkering with Unreal Engine and became more interested in trying to break into game development. Another friend and I started working on a game project together on nights and weekends. 

This project became our studio's first game, Dodo Peak. We were lucky enough to have successfully pitched it as a launch title for Apple Arcade, which gave us the opportunity to move full-time into game development. I then convinced Kyle to quit his engineering job at Google to help co-found Moving Pieces.

Dodo Peak was a fantastic learning experience for us, developing and shipping our first commercial project. After we wrapped on Dodo Peak, we started brainstorming ideas for our next project and fell in love with the concept of a smaller character riding on the back of a much bigger character. And thus the idea of Shoulders of Giants was born. 

Shoulders of Giants was a big leap in game scope from what we had done previously, which was a bit terrifying but also very exciting to us, as it felt like a real opportunity to build our dream game. 

Tell us a bit about the kinds of games that you are making. What is the core philosophy behind them?

Patrick McAvena: While some studios focus on a specific style or genre, we simply create games that we want to play, but also that we are incredibly excited to make.

Before we head into full production on a game, we come up with a handful of ideas and try to make quick prototypes, and then move forward with the idea that seems like it has the most legs.

I personally get excited about visuals and the worlds a game can take place in, so there is certainly a lot of thinking about that aspect of the game from the beginning.

How did the idea of Shoulders of Giants come to be? What are the main features and inspirations that defined the game? I kind of see some Risk of Rain influences.

Patrick McAvena: After our studio wrapped up Dodo Peak, we started tinkering with ideas for our next game. Rather than try to build a few different prototypes, we more or less moved forward with one core concept and kept tweaking its design until it made sense.

The main seed of inspiration was that we wanted to make a game about a smaller character riding the back of a larger one. This was our concept's anchor. Shoulders of Giants started as more of an RTS, then a puzzle platformer, before moving into the roguelike game that it is today. 

The process for making the game was very iterative. We had a bunch of ideas and would prototype those and put them into the game. The nice side effect of that is that the game truly felt like a team vision.

In terms of inspirations behind the project, both Kyle and I grew up on the PlayStation 2, with titles like ICO and Ratchet and Clank definitely influencing us in terms of game design and themes. We were definitely also inspired by the simple but very replayable gameplay loop of more modern roguelikes like Risk of Rain.

Could you tell us a bit about the production challenges and maybe some discoveries made along the way? How big was the team? What proved to be the biggest/smallest hurdle for development?

Patrick McAvena: This was by far the largest and most ambitious project our team has done. While the average team size was about 4, there were large stretches of production where it went up to 8+. This required us to be a lot more organized and deliberate with planning our development.

One of the biggest technical challenges was that this was our first multiplayer title, which required many members of the team (including myself) to do a crash course on things like client-server relationships, replication, etc.

When did you start thinking about the distribution of the project? What were some of the things that you considered? Platforms, publishers, collaborators?

Patrick McAvena: We started thinking about distribution from the start of the project. Our initial goal was for the project to be multi-platform, PC, consoles, and Mobile. We had initially designed a prototype running on iOS with the goal of pitching it to Apple Arcade (our first title was a launch title on the service).

However, we then pivoted to focusing on higher-end platforms (PC/Console) when it seemed like that direction was not going to be viable for a number of reasons. This was ultimately a good thing because it allowed the project to be less restricted from a technical standpoint.

With an ambitious project like this, external funding was a requirement. We didn't have a lot of experience at this point, looking for different funding options, so we decided to simply announce the project and try to explore what opportunities might be available. 

Soon after the announcement, we were contacted by some lovely folks at Xbox and were presented with the opportunity to be a timed console exclusive. This gave us the indication and resources that we needed to keep going with the project, but in and of itself was not enough to see it through completion. 

We also received an Epic Mega grant for the project, which was also very helpful. We reached out to Epic to see if they had any other insight on potential funding paths, and we started two different conversations with them. One was a potential opportunity to be a timed exclusive on the Epic Games Store, and another was to be part of a showcase they put together for developers and investors to help find one another.

In the end, we were fortunate enough to receive an offer to be a timed PC exclusive on the Epic Store, which was an exciting opportunity and allowed us to fully realize our vision. 

How do you get some visibility in this highly competitive market these days? Seems like an impossible task? How do you solve it? What's your approach?

Patrick McAvena: That is the million-dollar question. For us, it's making a game that is both fun and offers unique gameplay, while also having unique and exciting visuals.

For me, coming from a visual background, I normally think of the visuals first. But good-looking visuals alone will only go so far; the place and setting are also very important.

The visuals also need to have a hook, like the gameplay; if they are too generic and clean, even if visually attractive and well-made, that's normally not going to sell the game. We see many examples of indie games now that could be defined as outsider art, that do very well, the visuals are not traditionally good, but stand out.

How do you see the future of indie games in 2026 and beyond? Bigger budgets, higher competition, or new opportunities? Let us know.

Patrick McAvena: The landscape has certainly changed since we first started pre-pandemic. Funding opportunities are definitely harder to come by, and publishers are less willing to take a risk. I see ourselves and certainly other indies doing projects that are more narrowly focused, with shorter dev cycles and smaller budgets. This allows you to take more bets and less risk on each project. 

For us, this is quite exciting because it allows us to create more games, and the more games we make, hopefully, the better developers we become. 

I think the by-product of this is that there is going to be more competition with more experienced devs putting out more projects than they used to in the past. We'll see how this affects things over the next few years.

Patrick McAvena, President of Moving Pieces Interactive