Workflows & Challenges of Developing Games as a Two-Person Team

Introduction

Thunderrock Innovations is a two-person indie studio focused on mechanic-heavy games built for strategy lovers and players who value replayability. The studio is run by Daniel and me (also Daniel). We've been friends since school and have been making games together for as long as we can remember.

For nearly 15 years, those games never left our inner circle. They were experiments, playgrounds for ideas, and learning projects shared with friends. In hindsight, that period was invaluable: we learned how to finish games, how systems interact, and most importantly, what we personally enjoy building.

After our studies, we both followed more traditional paths in the software industry. Between us, we worked as Developers, Scrum Masters, Product Owners, and Project Leads. On paper, everything looked great. In practice, something was missing. The desire to build our own products, make our own calls, and take responsibility for both the creative and business sides never really went away.

Like many indie teams, we always had a side project. At the time, that project was Keep Keepers. Eventually, it reached a point where we felt we had something genuinely special on our hands. So we leaped: we quit our jobs and set out to publish our first commercial game. That launch taught us some hard lessons about production, marketing, and our own limits, but it also did something crucial: it earned enough money to fund a second game.

Initially, we hoped we could continue developing Keep Keepers long-term, the way some highly successful indie teams can. Reality set in quickly. Our budget dictated our next move, and that meant starting fresh. In hindsight, this turned out to be a very positive outcome for us.

Keep Keepers taught us a lot, and with Islantiles we were able to clearly apply those lessons. The improvements in our design process and execution are something we’re genuinely proud of. We went back to brainstorming and prototyping, but this time with a much more deliberate approach to choosing what we would make next.

That experience fundamentally reshaped our decision process. As a small indie team, scope is everything. We're confident in our ability to build games that generate enough wishlists to reach "Popular Upcoming" on Steam, but visibility does not automatically translate into financial stability. With our previous project, the margin was razor-thin. From that point on, we set a clear constraint: roughly one year of development per game.

That constraint drives all our decisions. We focus on a single core mechanic and polish it relentlessly. Our ambition hasn't shrunk, we still aim to create something fresh and innovative, but it's now grounded in reality. One key lesson from Keep Keepers was the importance of genre clarity.

No matter how interesting a mechanic is, players need to quickly understand what kind of game they're looking at. If a game is too unique without familiar anchors, many players will simply move on because they don't feel an immediate connection.

Today, our process is about balancing innovation with focus: interesting idea mashups, tightly scoped execution, and clear genre signals. That balance hopefully allows us to stay independent, ship games consistently, and keep doing what we set out to do in the first place: build the kinds of games we love to play ourselves.

Given our focus on strategy and replayability, certain types of game concepts naturally fit better than others. Roguelikes are an obvious match for us. They inherently support replayability, but just as importantly, they are games we can keep playing ourselves without burning out.

I have played Keep Keepers for well over 1000 hours during development, and Islantiles is steadily catching up. If we are going to play a game for that long, both during development and after release, it needs to feel fresh with every run, offer new decisions, variations, and emergent outcomes each time you play it.

We are also strongly drawn to genre mashups. From a pure marketing perspective, that's sometimes a big risk, but creatively it's simply how we think. Combining familiar systems in unexpected ways is what we consider innovation. The key for us is not novelty for its own sake, but creating new strategic spaces by letting mechanics from different genres interact.

That said, we're not developing in a vacuum. When we evaluate a new concept, we always look at how a genre performs on Steam. Choosing a genre with a proven audience doesn't guarantee success, but it does make life as a small indie team significantly more sustainable and provides more security around discovery and monetization.

Above all, strategic decision-making is non-negotiable for us. We love games that spark conversations, where players discuss builds, optimal paths, failed experiments, and ideas they're still excited to try next time. Those moments, when a game lives on outside the screen in discussions with friends, are exactly what we aim to create with our own designs.

Balancing original IP with the creative identity and sustainability of the studio is largely about being intentional with constraints. For us, originality doesn't start with a completely unfamiliar concept, but with gameplay systems.

With Islantiles, the goal wasn't to invent a new genre, but to create a distinct identity through how mechanics interact and how much strategic depth emerges from relatively simple rules. That approach allows us to build original IP without overwhelming players or ourselves as a small team.

From a sustainability perspective, we're very careful about scope and reuse of expertise rather than assets. Each new project builds on what we've already learned: engine knowledge, tooling, production pipelines, and most importantly, design patterns that have proven to work for strategy-focused, replayable games. This lets us move faster and reduce risk while still creating something that feels new.

Maintaining a clear, creative identity for us is also about consistency. Players should be able to recognize a Thunderrock Innovations game by the type of decisions it asks them to make: long-term planning versus short-term gains, meaningful trade-offs, and systems that encourage experimentation. For us, that promise in our games is more important than the IP itself.

In practice, this balance means we don't chase trends blindly, nor do we lock ourselves into a single genre or franchise indefinitely. We aim to create original worlds and mechanics that fit our strengths, are financially realistic for a two-person team, and can sustain both our creativity and the studio over the long term.

Taking Risks

We approach risk management pragmatically, focusing on the areas where a small two-person studio can realistically exert control. Market timing is relatively low-risk for us. We don't chase short-lived trends, and our development cycle is intentionally short (roughly one year).

That cadence means we are unlikely to miss a market window entirely, and it also allows us to react and adjust between projects rather than being locked into multi-year bets. Platform selection is more straightforward. As a two-person team, focus is critical.

Steam is the platform we know best, both as developers and as players, and it offers the ecosystem our types of games perform best. Concentrating on a single platform reduces technical overhead, simplifies marketing, and allows us to build deeper expertise rather than spreading ourselves too thin.

Audience reach is by far the most challenging and risk-heavy part of the process for us. There's a common piece of advice in game development: "Just make a good game." The problem is that "good" is surprisingly hard to define. If you define a good game as one that sells well, that becomes a tautology. Review scores are also an imperfect metric, there are many games with 80–100% positive reviews, but only a few hundred reviews.

Are those great games? If so, why didn't they sell better? And if not, why do players rate them so highly? We tend to align with Jonas Tyroller's framework of Fun and Appeal as a more practical way to reason about quality and risk. Fun is the easier part for us to measure.

We track median playtime, especially in our demos, and we iterate until that median reaches roughly 50 minutes. For us, that indicates solid onboarding and enough mechanical depth to keep players engaged beyond initial curiosity.

Appeal is much harder to quantify. Steam metrics like the view-to-wishlist ratio can be useful, but they are heavily influenced by traffic sources. A player coming from a streamer already has strong intent, while a player coming from an ad may still be figuring out what the game even is. Comparing those numbers directly can be very misleading.

Our current understanding is that appeal can come from many different angles: a strong fantasy, social play with friends or a partner, a compelling narrative, pure mechanical depth, or ideally, a mix of all of those. Daniel and I both love gameplay mechanics, so we mostly focus on that. For mechanic-heavy games, appeal often has to be communicated instantly, sometimes through a single screenshot.

Players need to grasp why the core mechanic is interesting at a glance. The translation from something that is deeply fun to play into something that looks immediately appealing is one of the biggest ongoing risks we manage. It's also an area where we're constantly learning and improving. To us, reducing that risk isn't about finding a silver bullet, but about iteration, observation, and steadily building intuition over multiple releases.

Developing the Games

When evaluating new game ideas, the first and most important signal is whether the concept genuinely excites us. As a two-person studio, we know we'll be living with an idea for a long time, so intrinsic motivation matters. If we're not eager to explore a mechanic ourselves, it's very unlikely we'll be able to carry it through a full year of development.

From there, we move quickly into prototyping. We build small, focused prototypes and share them with a close circle of friends who are experienced players and developers. Their feedback is often very direct, but the strongest signal isn't what they say, it's what they do.

If they keep coming back, ask for the next iteration, or want to try a new build every few days, that's usually a clear indication that the core idea has legs. Over time, we've learned that this isn't enough on its own. Internal excitement and early fun don't automatically translate into broader appeal.

We're becoming increasingly conscious of evaluating how a concept reads from the outside, even at the prototype stage, whether the core mechanic is understandable, communicable, and visually readable. That part of the process is still evolving for us.

We don't yet have a perfect early signal for appeal, but we're actively experimenting with screenshots and short clips to see whether the idea can hook players before they ever touch the game. Balancing gut instinct, early playtesting, and outward-facing appeal is one of the key challenges we continue to refine with each new project.

We make the changes on the weekend. Jokes aside, handling mid-development changes is mostly about prevention. We try to front-load risk by prototyping heavily early on and locking down the core mechanic as soon as we're confident it works. Once production starts, the scope is treated as a fixed constraint rather than a flexible one.

When changes do happen, they're rarely about adding more. Instead, they're about refinement or replacement. If something isn't working, we're willing to cut it, even if it hurts, because shipping a focused game is always better than shipping a bloated one. Every potential change is evaluated against a simple question: Does this improve the core experience enough to justify the time it will cost us?

Ultimately, staying within budget comes down to discipline. As a two-person team, we can't afford uncontrolled iteration. Clear priorities, a strong sense of "good enough," and a willingness to say no (even to good ideas) are what allow us to adapt without overextending ourselves.

Challenges

From the creative point of view, the biggest challenge we had when starting was that we were unable to produce the models we would like to use. We had to stick to asset packs and modify them, slowly learning how to model 3d objects ourselves. Thankfully, that problem also got solved by having enough funding to work with awesome artists.

Operationally, the biggest challenge was marketing and discoverability. Our professional backgrounds prepared us well for building software, running projects, and shipping products, but not for selling games in a saturated market. We've addressed this by treating marketing as part of development rather than an afterthought: building demos early, collecting data, talking to players, and iterating not just on mechanics, but on how we present them.

Finally, there's the emotional challenge. In a corporate job, a failed feature or project rarely feels personal. In indie development, your game is your baby, your work, your ideas, and often your identity. Learning to separate critical feedback from self-worth and to see failure as feedback rather than defeat has been one of the most important long-term skills we have developed.

Early on, collaboration was mostly constrained by budget. We did as much as possible ourselves, which meant making compromises, especially in areas like art. With a consistent cash flow, we were able to start working with truly excellent artists. That shift had a massive impact, not just on visual quality, but on the overall appeal and clarity of our games.

We've also become more comfortable asking for help. As developers coming from corporate backgrounds, we were used to having specialists available. In indie development, that initially translated into trying to handle everything ourselves. Now we're more pragmatic. When something is outside our core strengths and has a high impact on the final product, outsourcing or partnering is often the better decision.

Beyond the basics like version control, our most important tool is Codecks. It allows us to embed a feedback system directly into our games and link player feedback straight to our ticket system. That tight integration means feedback doesn't get lost in Discord threads, spreadsheets, or screenshots, it arrives as actionable tasks that we can immediately prioritize in our backlog.

This setup is especially powerful during demos and playtests. We can see what players experienced, what they struggled with, and what they enjoyed, all in context. For a small team, that kind of signal clarity is far more valuable than complex automation elsewhere, because it directly improves design decisions and iteration speed.

Conclusion

Over the next few years, our focus is less on rapid growth and more on stability and sustainability. We don't have a strong desire to scale into a large team. Instead, we see Thunderrock Innovations remaining a small core studio with 2-3 new team members joining over the next few years, supported by trusted external collaborators where it makes sense.

That structure allows us to stay flexible, keep communication simple, and avoid the overhead that often comes with growth for its own sake. What we think the broader indie community may be underestimating right now is the growing influence of mobile game design and economics on the PC indie market.

Over the last few months, we've noticed a clear rise in very fast-developed games, often built in three-month cycles, with relatively simple mechanics and familiar patterns that closely resemble what we've seen on mobile platforms for years. To compensate for the lower development effort and shorter production timelines, these games are frequently priced very aggressively.

The result is a market that, at least in parts, is starting to feel more "mobile-like" in its expectations around price, scope, and perceived value. That shift has real implications for discoverability and sustainability, especially for developers building deeper, more systemic games that require longer iteration cycles.

As players ourselves, this is something we're cautious about. One of the strengths of the PC market is its diversity, its ability to support niche genres, complex systems, and gameplay that rewards time and mastery. We believe preserving that depth and variety is important, even if it runs counter to some short-term market pressures.

Thunderrock Innovations

Interview conducted by 80 Level