In 2021, I decided to start an indie game studio. Not because I had a brilliant business plan or funding lined up—I just had too many game ideas and nowhere to put them.
Three years later, Lost Rabbit Digital has shipped multiple games across different platforms, built a small team, and taught me more about game development than any tutorial ever could.
Why "Lost Rabbit Digital"?
Everyone asks about the name. The truth is less exciting than you'd hope: I really like rabbits, and I'm perpetually lost in too many projects at once.
Also, most good studio names were taken.
The First Game
Our first project was a disaster. A beautiful, educational disaster.
I tried to build an open-world multiplayer survival game with procedural generation, dynamic weather, and crafting systems. As a solo developer. In six months.
Spoiler: it didn't work.
What I learned: scope kills indie games faster than bad code ever will. After three months of spinning my wheels, I scrapped it and started over with something smaller.
That's how Tiny Village was born—a minimalist village builder you can play in 20 minutes. Small scope, focused mechanics, actually finishable.
Building a Team (Without Money)
When you're starting out, you can't pay competitive salaries. Sometimes you can't pay salaries at all. So how do you build a team?
The answer: find people who are as crazy about games as you are.
I started by reaching out to art and design students looking for portfolio pieces. I offered credits, revenue sharing, and the promise of shipping actual games. Some said yes. Most said no. That's fine—you only need a few good collaborators.
The key is treating people well even when you can't pay well. Clear communication, realistic deadlines, and actual respect for their work goes a long way.
The Cloud Engineering Advantage
Here's where my day job at HailBytes became incredibly valuable.
Running game servers, managing databases, handling user accounts—these are all cloud infrastructure problems. And I solve those problems professionally every day.
When Towers of Boba needed a persistent progression system, I spun up a PostgreSQL instance and built a simple REST API in a weekend. When we needed automated build pipelines, I already knew how to configure EC2 instances and set up CI/CD.
The technical skills from cloud engineering translated directly to game development infrastructure. Not everyone needs to know AWS to make games, but it certainly helps when you're bootstrapping a studio.
Mistakes I Made (So You Don't Have To)
Mistake #1: Announcing games too early. I tweeted about Tumblefire six months before it was remotely playable. Bad idea. Now people keep asking when it's coming out, and I keep saying "soon." Don't announce until you have something to show.
Mistake #2: Ignoring marketing. I thought good games would market themselves. They don't. You need to talk about your games constantly—on social media, in dev logs, at game jams. It feels self-promotional because it is. Do it anyway.
Mistake #3: Building for everyone. My first few games tried to appeal to everyone. That's impossible. Now I build games for specific audiences: people who like absurd humor, people who enjoy emergent gameplay, people who think potatoes should have passports. Niche is good.
Mistake #4: Perfectionism. I spent way too long polishing features nobody asked for. Ship early, get feedback, iterate. A finished game is better than a perfect game that never ships.
What Success Actually Looks Like
Lost Rabbit Digital isn't a billion-dollar company. We're not even a million-dollar company. But we ship games people enjoy, we're building a community, and we're sustainable.
That's success for an indie studio: making enough to keep going, learning with every project, and slowly getting better.
Some metrics that matter to me:
- People actually play our games (and some even finish them!)
- We've shipped on multiple platforms
- Our team is growing, slowly but steadily
- Revenue covers server costs and modest development budgets
- I'm not burnt out (yet)
Advice for Starting Your Own Studio
Start small. Your first game should take 3-6 months, not 3-6 years. Finish something. Anything. Then do it again.
Keep your day job. Unless you have significant savings or funding, don't quit to go full-time indie. The pressure to make money immediately will kill your creativity.
Find your niche. Don't try to compete with AAA studios. Find the weird, specific thing only you can make.
Build in public. Share your progress, your failures, your code. The indie game community is incredibly supportive if you show up consistently.
Ship imperfect games. Seriously. Ship them. Learn from them. Make better games next time.
What's Next
Lost Rabbit Digital is still small, still scrappy, still figuring things out. But we're shipping games, building cool stuff, and having fun doing it.
Tumblefire is getting closer to launch (for real this time). Spud Customs is in active development. And I've got about seven other ridiculous ideas in my notes app.
The journey from "I want to make games" to "I run a game studio" isn't glamorous. It's late nights debugging, rejected pitches, and games that don't quite work. But it's also the most rewarding thing I've ever done.
If you're thinking about starting your own studio: do it. Start small, ship often, and don't be afraid to build weird things.
The indie game world needs more weird things.