How to Start an Indie Game Studio the Right Way:
Figuring out how to start an indie game studio is one thing. Doing it without repeating the mistakes that sink most first attempts is something else entirely. Rob Carroll, CEO of Rollcraft, came to game development through construction project management and an environmental sciences degree, which is not the typical origin story. What he carried from that background, a producer’s instinct for logistics, timelines, and people management, turned out to be exactly what the games industry rewards.
Rob joined Dan Long on the IndieGameBusiness podcast to walk through the decisions that shaped Rollcraft, the mistakes that cost him real time and money, and what he wishes someone had told him before he started. What came out of the conversation was a grounded, specific set of lessons for anyone who is thinking seriously about building a studio from scratch.
How Rob Got Into the Games Industry:
Rob’s entry into games was not planned. He was working as a construction project manager in San Diego when friends who had started a video game company invited him to join their community. He started writing for their game, got to know the team, and when they needed a producer to manage growth, he made the switch. The studio was called Sojourn Development. The game was called Glimpse. Like many indie projects, it built something genuinely interesting and then ran out of money before it reached players.
That experience gave Rob something most first-time founders do not have: a firsthand understanding of exactly how a studio can fail even when the people building it are capable and motivated. He was not starting Rollcraft from theory. He was starting it from a specific set of hard lessons.
What Actually Prompted the Launch of Rollcraft:
Rollcraft did not start with a clean decision to found a company. Rob was working at a transmedia development company, one with an ambitious vision of integrating games, television, film, and books into a unified experience. He had built and was running the video game group there. Then the CEO decided that transmedia no longer included games. The video game group was cut. Rob and his co-founder found themselves out of a job on the same day.
The response was immediate. They had enough experience to back their own judgment, and the frustration of having something they built taken away from them was fuel. They decided to do it themselves. That kind of origin, forced rather than chosen, is more common in the games industry than the clean founding narrative most people present publicly. It is also, in many cases, the better foundation. There is less romanticism and more clarity about what actually needs to get done.
The First Real Decision – Choosing the Right Platform:
When developers ask how to start an indie game studio, the conversation usually jumps quickly to funding, team structure, or tools. Rob’s first real decision was about platform, specifically where to distribute the game, and it shaped everything that followed.
Steam and mobile were both options. Both were rejected, not because they are bad platforms, but because the current conditions on both make it genuinely difficult for a new studio to get traction without existing visibility or a significant marketing budget. The discoverability problem on Steam is well documented. Mobile requires either a substantial user acquisition spend or luck that most studios cannot plan around.
Rollcraft chose the web. HTML5 gaming, built for browser play and distributed through web portals, offered a different set of conditions. The portals Rob’s team had relationships with included:
- Armor Games, which Rob’s team has worked with directly and describes as a strong partner
- Crazy Games, which has approximately fifty million monthly active users and is actively growing
- Poki, which has stated it has over one hundred million users, runs exclusively on advertising rather than in-app purchases, and has a specific demographic skew toward younger players
- Congregate, which is rebuilding its platform and represents an opportunity to get in early on a relaunching portal with an existing audience
Each portal operates differently. Most require developers to run payment processing through the portal’s own system, with the portal cutting a check on collected revenue. Poki has no in-app purchasing at all, which means any game published there needs a separate branch without purchase mechanics. Each portal also has its own SDK, its own testing requirements, and its own approval process.
Crazy Games runs a two-week testing and approval process. Poki allows iterative playtesting with groups of ten, then requires a five-hundred-person playtest before wider release. Critically, Poki records gameplay during those sessions, which gives developers footage showing exactly where players got confused, missed a mechanic, or stopped engaging. That kind of direct behavioral feedback is something most developers pay significant sums to gather through third-party playtesting services.
The Most Common Mistakes Founders Make When Starting a Studio:
Rob was asked directly about the mistakes he sees most often in founders setting up studios for the first time. His answer covered both the obvious and the overlooked.
On co-founders:
- Do not pick co-founders based on availability or convenience
- You are going to be working with this person every day, relying on their judgment, and trusting them with decisions that affect the company’s survival
- The relationship needs to exist before the company does, not get built alongside it
- Too many decision-makers at the founding stage creates paralysis, not better outcomes
On infrastructure:
- Choose your technology stack as if you are going to be scaling it, not just shipping a demo
- Do not build on a platform or tool that has a realistic chance of being deprecated or discontinued
- Switching infrastructure mid-development does not just cost money, it burns the development time you already spent and forces you to rebuild what you thought was done
- Rob’s team learned this directly from the Flash deprecation. Everything built in Flash had to be rebuilt from scratch when Adobe shut it down
On contracts and legal structure:
- Get legal agreements in place with co-founders before you need them
- Intellectual property ownership, equity splits, and decision-making authority all need to be documented
- A handshake agreement between people who trust each other feels fine until the company is worth something or a disagreement arises
- An entertainment or games-specific attorney is worth the cost. General practice lawyers frequently miss the specifics that matter in this industry
Why Infrastructure Decisions Made Early Have Long Consequences:
One of the more practically valuable parts of the conversation was Rob’s breakdown of technology choices and why getting them right early matters so much. His current studio uses Heroic Labs for backend infrastructure. Getting there was not straightforward. The first backend provider they used did not work out, and migrating everything from one provider to another meant essentially throwing away a significant portion of the development work they had already completed.
The principle he drew from that experience:
- Work with third-party tools and providers that are built to scale with a growing company, not just to get the first build out the door
- Evaluate whether a tool or platform has a realistic long-term future before committing your architecture to it
- Build systems that will be supplemental to future development, not obstacles that have to be torn out and replaced
- Avoid building anything you already know you will have to throw away later. Those are burned cycles that produce nothing durable
The engine choice follows the same logic. Whether a studio builds in Unity, Unreal, Godot, or HTML5 is a decision that shapes every technical choice made afterward. Changing engines mid-development is rarely a clean process. Rob’s team made their engine decision with the long-term in mind and has not had to revisit it.
Scaling the Team and What Changes When You Do:
When a studio is small, culture is not a policy. It is a product of the specific people in the room and how they interact with each other every day. Rob’s observation is that this works well at small scale precisely because everyone knows what everyone else is doing and the team’s shared values do not need to be written down to be real.
Scaling changes that. When new people join, they are not inheriting culture through proximity. They are learning it through what they observe, what gets rewarded, and what leadership models. Rob’s recommendation is to be deliberate about culture before it needs to be formalized, not after.
Beyond culture, there are legal and HR thresholds that vary by location. In many jurisdictions, crossing certain headcount thresholds triggers requirements around HR policies, health insurance, and other corporate compliance obligations. Rob’s practical advice:
- Know what the thresholds are in your company’s jurisdiction before you hire near them
- Consider bringing on independent contractors to handle capacity needs rather than expanding the full-time headcount beyond a threshold that creates compliance overhead you are not ready to manage
- This is not about avoiding responsibility to workers. It is about understanding what each stage of growth actually costs and planning accordingly
How Rollcraft Raised Its First Round:
Rollcraft raised its first round of funding through WeFunder, a crowdfunding platform that allows community members and independent investors to take equity stakes in early-stage companies. For a studio that had spent time building a community around its game, this approach had a specific appeal: the people most invested in seeing the game succeed could become actual stakeholders in the company.
Rob described the WeFunder experience positively and noted that Rollcraft was actively raising its next round through the same platform at the time of the podcast. For developers who are researching how to start an indie game studio without institutional venture backing, community-based equity raises represent a viable path, particularly for studios that have already built some audience or community presence to draw from.
The campaign is live at wefunder.com/rollcraft for developers or investors who want to follow or participate.
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