indie game garden

Ben Naulls is a programmer, game developer, and educator with over 2 decades of experience working with people and technology. We connected online after I had a look at the cool work he’s currently doing on Project Mammut, an HTML5 engine designed for games such as visual novels and motion comics. However, after reviewing his portfolio in doing research for this interview, I was absolutely blown a...

Today on Indie Game Garden, we have a very special treat. The Theropods team, called Lost Token, is joining us from all across the world to discuss their scintillating new point and click adventure. As listeners know, I have a soft spot for the genre, especially modern takes happening here in 2026. Theropods fits that bill and absolutely smashes any expectations I could have had coming in. A wordl...

Inklingwood Studios is the wife and husband team of Sophie (lead programmer) and David (writer, director, and producer) Younger. In November, 2025, they released their first commercial project, a point & click adventure called Foolish Mortals after four years of development. Sophie and David have described Foolish Mortals as Monkey Island 2 + Broken Sword , with a “merry & macabre” tone. T...

Scott is the founder of Wacol Studios, an indie gamemaker specializing in visual novels based in Phoenix, Arizona. After learning how to program in high school and joining a few game jams before going on to study IT in college, Scott wanted to challenge himself by working on a commercial visual novel. In 2024, he created Wacol Studios to do just that – and began work writing and programming Prince...

Today I’m joined by Osama Dorias, a veteran game designer and one of the co-founders and Creative Director of HeartLoop Games, an indie studio Osama helped bring to life in 2025. Osama has spent more than two decades in the games industry, working at well-known development studios like Gameloft, Ubisoft, Warner Brothers Montreal, Unity, Blizzard, and Brass Lion. He’s also spent years teaching game...

Dan DiIorio is the solo game developer behind Luck Be a Landlord, Maze Mice, and What’s the Password? Dan is a generous soul who loves games and sharing in the collective play experiences they have the unique capability of creating. Find everything we talked about on the show and more on Dan's website :) https://trampolinetales.com

Badger Punch Games was founded by Ricki Sickenger and Henning Ludvigsen back in 2011. Both Ricki and Henning are Norwegian game developer veterans and have worked and had fun together since they met in the Amiga Demo scene way back in 1993. Now they are creating games they love for the retro platforms they grew up with, like the Commodore 64 and Amiga line of computers. They also make modern games...

Before Scott Christian was making games, he helped bring musical theater productions to life. A composer, pianist, conductor and musical director, Scott built a career across the Canadian performing-arts scene, with credits ranging from Once, Shrek and The Addams Family to original musical theater and work in composition for stage, film and other media. He also trained in piano and composition at...

Yann Margan, who is also known by his solo development studio name–Goloso Games– is an independent game developer from France who focuses on making narrative adventure games. His most recognizable character in this genre is Inspector Waffles, a hardboiled cat detective whose games feature creative puzzles, accessible clue-finding missions, and plenty of feline puns. Yann has also expanded the Insp...

Mike Bithell is an independent gamemaking titan who I am absolutely honored to get to talk to today. In 2010, he created the prototype for his breakout game, Thomas Was Alone, which saw a commercial release in 2012. Thomas is my favorite PS Vita game that I still play to this day, a graphically simple and philosophically layered platformer that shows what indie video games can be. When Thomas took...

Doot is an indie game dev working on small cute games. He and his partner Blibloop are the developers behind Froggy’s Battle, Minami Lane, Kabuto Park, and the upcoming Milki Delivery, in addition to many more freeware games. In Milki Delivery, the player is tasked with rebuilding a community alongside their pet cow Milki. To do so, players will gather resources and upgrade their barn, then bike a...

Melanated Game Kitchen is a co-op studio and collective of BIPOC game creators focused on the creation and curation of unique interactive experiences revolving around culture. Fittingly, they run a game jam series called "Culture Bytes.” Every quarter they host the jam, and the theme of each jam is something that is relevant to members of the connected diasporas they represent. It’s an honor to ha...

Francisco González has been making adventure games since 2001. His Ben Jordan: Paranormal Investigator series became a cult hit on AGS forums and beyond, and once he finished the series in 2012, he decided to make games professionally. His first game, A Golden Wake, was published in 2014 by Wadjet Eye Games. He released his second game, Shardlight,  in 2016. In 2018, he released Lamplight City, pu...

Julia Minamata is an artist and solo indie dev. She’s best known for The Crimson Diamond, an EGA text parser mystery adventure game where you play as mineralogist/reluctant detective Nancy Maple as she investigates increasingly mysterious happenings at The Crimson Lodge, a stately old house in the middle of a ghost town. EGA, for folks who don’t know, stands for Enhanced Graphics Adapter, which wa...

Lage Bergman is the solo game developer behind Chesto: A Chess-Like Adventure . Heavily inspired by the Professor Layton DS games, Chesto allows players to explore a cozy town and challenge its residents in a chess-inspired game with custom pieces. Lage describes it as “Professor Layton but instead of everyone being really into puzzles, they’re really into chess.” You collect new pieces with stran...

Piotr Bunkowski is a solo game dev from Gdańsk, Poland that works on various FMV projects. He created his first game “A Trip to Yugoslavia,” an experimental interactive film, in 2016 while he was still in high school. Then, he worked on “Purgatorium: A Family Torn Apart,” a moody murder mystery about tense family dynamics and drug abuse. Now, after a 5 year hiatus, Piotr is back working on a game....

Willy Picard, AKA Bushmonkey, is a hobbyist developer of free detective mystery games, but that doesn’t quite do him or his interactive experiences justice. Inspired by games like Type Help, Return of the Obra Dinn, The Case of the Golden Idol, and Immortality, Will meticulously crafts experiences that challenge players to make deductive leaps that feel meaningful while not being overly obtuse. Wi...

Mateus is from Brazil. He’s the solo developer behind Kusppy Studios and only started programming about 8 months ago, which is wild to me considering that his new game The Last Lodge is a polished work of narrative video game mastery. In it, you complete chores at a medieval inn while uncovering a spooky secret. I won’t say more than that but...wow. It’s replayable, utterly stylish, and very well-...

Tyler McCarthy, who goes by Zzox online, is a solo game dev and musician who has completed over 25 game projects during his 8+ years of development. His most recent release is called good . It’s a game which depicts a day in the life of a typical american teenage boy who plays sports and stumbles around a world rendered in quirky 2D pixel art. The linear story has plenty of emotional punch, while...

Adrian Vaughan might just be the most interesting video game guest I can think of, and I’m not just saying that. I invited Adrian on the show after being absolutely stunned by his work on The Drifter, in which he voices multiple characters – none more impactful than the main character, Mick Carter. Listening to Adrian voice Mick changed my perspective on the value, cathartic joy, and emotional res...

Fer is the solo developer behind the chaotic and flow-state-inducing delivery roguelike Tossdown. The way I’ve heard Fer describe his game is the stylistic flair of Jet Set Radio meets the action arcade gameplay of Crazy Taxi, and if that’s not fuel for the soul then I don’t know what is. I’m super excited to sit down with Fer to discuss his experience as a Nigerian game developer and how he came...

Matt Fister is an indie game developer based in Boston, Massachusetts. He goes by the tag Freezebeam and is known for creating surreal bitscapes across genres and modes of play in his games. I’m a particular fan of his shmups: Unseelie Chorus and Escape Wizard. His game Towerbound is perhaps the most clever take on tower defense I’ve seen to date, featuring small tweaks to the tried-and-true formu...

Pete is part of a two-person development team called Chaystar Unlimited. They are the developers of Asbury Pines, an expansive, narrative-driven idle game about a small town through the ages. In Asbury Pines, Pete's unique perspective on game design and storytelling comes through in a way that you have to experience to believe. Join us for a conversation about games writing, making independent pro...

Dave Lloyd’s video games inspire me more than any other pieces of media I’ve consumed in recent memory. Dave is a champion of the adventure game genre, having explored everything from pulpy thrillers to high fantasy adventures through the art form that has become a bit of a dying breed in games. Since the heyday of LucasArts adventure games that spanned from the late 1980s to the early 2000s, the...

Nic Tringali is a game designer and director at Bithell Games, an independent game studio that specializes in sci-fi stories. Nic works at Bithell’s Lunar Division label. They are most known for The Banished Vault, John Wick Hex, and Sun Dogs, and have a particular interest in science fiction, tabletop and analog designs, and rich interactions between players and game systems. Nic’s most recent ga...