First time indie game developer – Lessons From Georgina Ovassapian of Winter Schloss Studios:
Most first-time indie game developers are told to start small, play it safe, and build something they can finish quickly. Georgina Ovassapian did not ignore that advice exactly, but she also did not let it flatten the scope of what she actually wanted to make. Night Shift: 1999, her debut game developed under Winter Schloss Studios, is a branching narrative visual novel with five main characters, multiple storylines, and around three hundred and fifty thousand words of content. That is not a small project for a first-time developer working alone.
Georgina joined Dan Long, podcast host for IndieGameBusiness®, for a conversation about how she went from fine arts and installation work to solo game development, what the grant application that started all of this actually looked like, the tools and habits that kept her moving when the work felt overwhelming, and the lessons she would pass on to anyone building their first game.
How a Fine Arts Background Led to a Game Development Grant:
Georgina’s path into games did not start with a plan to make games. She has a fine arts background and was working in installation art, showing work at institutions like La Trobe Art Institute in Australia. She was looking for grants to support her installation practice when she came across the Emerging Game Makers Fund hosted by Screen Australia.
She saw the grant three days before the deadline. She had carried the core concept behind Night Shift since 2019, which was a story about a vampire who moves to Sydney and navigates the ordinary experiences of settling into a new country, partly inspired by her own move from Switzerland to Australia. She had programming experience in JavaScript from previous work. She had a portfolio of installation and fine arts work. She pulled everything together, submitted, and was awarded the grant.
Her reflection on the application process is honest: three days is not enough time, take more time if you have it. But the concept had been developing in her head for years. The application was an articulation of something that already had shape, even if the art assets were mostly mood boards and references rather than finished game materials. She was essentially asking funders to believe in her portfolio and her vision, and it worked.
Why a Visual Novel Made Sense for a First time indie game developer:
When Georgina decided to act on the grant and actually build the game, the format choice was not arbitrary. She had loved visual novels as a player for a long time and believed they were an underappreciated medium. She also had a realistic read on what she could actually build as a first-time developer.
She had made Flash games before. A browser game felt like a step that was already behind her. A full mechanics-driven game felt like too large a leap in a single project. A visual novel sat at the right intersection: a format she understood and respected as a player, technically accessible enough to be buildable by one person, but rich enough as a form to fully contain the story she wanted to tell.
Visual novels also respond to how a player engages with them. That interactivity was something she could not get from writing the concept as a novel, which had been her original instinct in 2019. The game format let the story become something a player shapes rather than simply reads, and that distinction mattered to her.
What She Spent the Most Time Learning and What Surprised Her:
C# was the thing Georgina decided she needed to learn when she started building in her chosen engine. It felt daunting before she started. Once she was into it, the experience was different than she expected.
The initial intimidation did not reflect the actual difficulty. She was watching YouTube tutorials, testing things, running into problems, working through them, and finding that progress came faster than the idea of learning a programming language had suggested it would. Her frame for getting past the early barrier was simple: a lot of people have done this before me, which means it is not as inaccessible as it feels from the outside. Getting past the perfectionism and just starting was the actual requirement.
The larger skill she brought in from her arts and academic background was not programming. It was project decomposition. Breaking a large, intimidating undertaking into its smallest possible components until each individual task feels manageable. Instead of sitting with the pressure of making the whole game, she would identify the specific next thing: draft a character sprite, write a section of dialogue, figure out how a background needed to look. That granularity is what kept the project moving forward rather than stalling in the face of its full scale.
The Tools That Made the Work Possible:
Georgina mentioned a few specific tools that made meaningful differences at different stages of development:
- Twine. Used to map out the branching narrative structure of the game before it was built in the engine. When she realized she needed to track how choices connected across a complex story, Twine gave her a visual way to see the structure and catch contradictions before they were baked into the game.
- YouTube tutorials. Used extensively throughout the C# learning process and for solving specific technical problems. She described the availability of detailed, accessible tutorials as something current developers take for granted but that genuinely changes what is possible for a solo developer learning as they build.
- Reddit. Used specifically to get tool recommendations from other developers when she was trying to figure out how to handle branching narrative structures. Finding the right community resource and asking a specific question saved her significant time at a decision point that could have sent the project in a less effective direction.
- Community Discord servers. Used throughout development for feedback, problem-solving, and staying connected to other developers. She pointed to the IndieGameBusiness® Discord, which has over 11,800 members, as the kind of resource she wished she had known about and accessed earlier in the process.
The Hardest Lesson Night Shift Taught Her:
Project scope was the hardest lesson. She knew going in that scope creep was a real risk. She had watched it happen in her installation and exhibition work. She tried to be strict with herself: five main characters, no new major plot additions, a clear sense of what the game was and what it was not.
Despite that, Night Shift grew. Not because she kept adding features or characters beyond the original plan, but because telling the story she actually wanted to tell required more than she had initially anticipated. Three hundred and fifty thousand words is a substantial body of writing. That is not the result of a developer who lost discipline. It is the result of a developer who was honest about what the story needed once she was actually inside it.
The practical consequence was that she had to do significant retroactive editing. When new story elements introduced information that contradicted earlier writing, she had to go back and revise. When branching paths that seemed independent turned out to have overlapping logic, she had to trace back through the whole structure to make sure nothing broke.
The lesson she draws from this:
- Write a complete outline before you start building, not a rough overview but a full structural map of the story from start to finish
- Branching narratives are exponentially more complex than linear ones. The number of decision points does not tell you how much editing you will do. Every branch affects every other branch.
- Time spent in the drafting stage before production is not time lost. It is time saved many times over during the build and revision stages.
- Scope will almost always be larger than you initially estimate. Building in more pre-production planning does not prevent that. But it gives you a framework to manage it rather than discovering it in the middle of production.
What She Would Do Differently if She Started Over:
The answer was immediate: she would write a complete outline of the entire game before touching anything in the engine.
Not a rough set of bullet points. Not a general sense of where the story goes. A full structural outline covering every major branch, every character arc, every ending, and how they all connect. The broad strokes were always there. The specific connections between them were what caused the most rework.
The challenge with branching narrative specifically is that decisions made late in writing can contradict decisions made early on in ways that are hard to spot until you are reading through everything looking for exactly that kind of inconsistency. Having the full architecture mapped before you start writing scenes means you can catch those contradictions before they are embedded in tens of thousands of words of finished text.
She was clear that even with a full outline, the project would still have grown. Night Shift became a large game because the story needed to be that large. But the experience of building it would have been meaningfully different with a stronger structural foundation to work from.
Why She Would Still Tell First-Time Developers to Try Something Ambitious:
Despite everything the project taught her about scope and planning, Georgina was not willing to walk back the central point: your first game does not have to play it safe.
The conventional advice to start with something tiny and mechanical, finish it quickly, and move on is useful guidance for managing risk. It is not the only valid path. She had a concept she had been carrying since 2019, a medium she genuinely loved, skills that were adjacent to what the project required, and a grant that gave her the space to build it seriously. Treating that combination as something that needed to be downsized significantly before it was worth attempting would have produced a weaker game and a less meaningful development experience.
Her actual advice for developers at the beginning of their first project:
- Take what you already have, skills, interests, a concept you have been thinking about for a long time, and build toward it rather than away from it
- Get the right tools for each part of the problem rather than trying to solve everything with a single workflow
- Break the project into its smallest components and work on one component at a time rather than sitting with the weight of the whole thing
- Do not let the fear of a programming language or a technical skill stop you from starting. Most of what feels inaccessible from the outside becomes manageable once you are inside it
- Find your community before you need it, not after. Other developers are the most useful resource available, and most of them are willing to help with questions that feel basic or embarrassing to ask
The Single Most Important Piece of Advice She Has for New Developers:
When Dan asked for one piece of advice, Georgina said it without hesitation: talk to your peers.
She came into game development without knowing anyone in the industry. Finding other developers, connecting with them at events or online, building a community around the work, is what made the experience less isolating and what opened up help and feedback she would not have found on her own.
Her specific suggestion was to go to in-person events where possible, or to organize your own if none are available nearby. The IndieGameBusiness® Discord at discord.gg/indiegamebusiness is one of the largest and most active communities for indie developers and is somewhere she pointed to directly as the kind of resource that changes what early-stage development feels like.
The framing she used was direct and worth repeating: it does not matter how small the question is or how basic it seems. Someone has asked it before. People will not judge you for asking it again.
Want more insights like this?:
Join us for our IndieGameBusiness Sessions, taking place on September 30th from 9am – 5pm Eastern or hop into the IndieGameBusiness® Discord to connect with Georgina and other industry pros.
The IndieGameBusiness® podcast drops new episodes regularly, covering the business side of making and selling games. Subscribe to the newsletter to get episodes, Discord events, and industry news straight to your inbox. Subscribe now
