PS5 Exclusive Animal Well Interview: “I'm just tired of games doing the same things again & again”

Revealed earlier this week on PlayStation Blog along with many other upcoming PS4/PS5 indie games, Animal Well is a title that even its creator Billy Basso - former Associate Software Engineer at Netherrealm Studios - and Dan Adelman - indie game business and marketing man extraordinaire - have a hard time describing. We recently invited to pair onto The Duel Screens Podcast to share more about details about this enigmatic PS5 console exclusive.

[Michiel1989]

That's kind of the curse of AAA games, even though a lot of them are great, barely any of them are revolutionary in terms of game design. That's where indies come in to push the industry forward. It not that bad of a symbiotic relationship actually. No big company wants to gamble 50m+ if it will turn out good or not, and a lot of these indies gets crowdfunded/investor money so the risk isnt as big either.

[Scissorman82]

While a number of indies could turn to crowdfunding - it takes a lot to get there. I've spoken to hundreds of indie game developers and a lot of them give up a coushie job with a big AAA dev to go solo, invest their own life-savings into making their game, and sometimes are broke right up until release. It's inherently way more riskier than most imagine.

[S2Killinit]

“The biggest challenge we’re gonna face in the marketing side of things is screenshots won’t do this justice – even short video snippets don’t do it justice!, says Adelman – who’s worked on indie games such as Axiom Verge, Chasm, Mages of Mystralia, and is now working alongside side Basso.

Now I’m curious.

[Scissorman82]

I would definitely give the full interview a listen. It's really refreshing listening to a developer that's trying to do something different with a genre so established like a metroidvania.

[jznrpg]

Most indie games are just copies of other indie games in some way or another so it’s no different than AAA . There are occasional unique games but not many

[CBaoth]

you get disagrees but kinda true. I started messing around with the Gunk recently and it feels like a poor man's Kena. Same premise, one's supernatural, the other alien biological - both have you reclaiming the environment. One feels like an actual game and the other feels like a billboard for social commentary.

[FinalFantasyFanatic]

There are some really great indies, but for every great one, you have to sift through a dozen or so mediocre or bad indies. But the great ones tend to be very different from anything AAA games are doing.

[aaronaton]

Games were cheaper to make back in the good old days, so companies took more risks and even survived really bad reviews/launches. Nowadays, games consist of 100-1000 man development teams, all with the quest to bring high graphical fidelity.... thus, far too expensive. So less riskier trends are now followed (BF2042 is a prime example)