The Creator of the Smash Indie Game Animal Well Is Already Working on His Next Project

Billy Basso was glued to his computer. It was launch day for the Chicago developer’s debut solo game, a surreal Metroidvania called Animal Well, and he couldn’t stop reading reviews online and watching people play the game. He’d pulled off the impossible: breaking through a turbulent industry to create a hit game that would grow to be a critical and commercial success. He just didn’t realize how big of one it would be quite yet.

Most successful video games are made by teams of people that vary in size from a half dozen to somewhere in the hundreds. Basso had made Animal Well entirely on his own, start to finish. Music, art, story—it was all his, dictated by the singular goal to finish the ...