The Guts of Indie with Animal Well's Billy Basso

We're hyped to talk secrets with Billy Basso, creator of the award-winning smash Animal Well. Beginning with educational and medical games he went on to solo develop Animal Well, which delivers a huge game in less than 40 MB. Surgery, celebrity and an ARG - this week!

TIMESTAMPS

[0:00:00] Intro: Billy Basso
An introduction to Billy Basso, developer of Animal Well.

[0:07:54] Choosing film school over game dev
Billy reveals he went to film school because he "deep down wanted to make video games" but didn't think it was a viable career path — setting up the arc of his whole story.

[0:12:28] Checking out the entire company repo: Billy’s first game job
On his first day at Phosphor Games, Billy accidentally locked every art asset the company had ever made by checking out the entire source control depot

[0:15:30] How making games for doctors shaped his design philosophy
Billy reflects that working on educational games deeply informed how he thinks about game design: what has the player learned, and are you testing them along the way?

[0:21:17] Mobile games felt like casino design
After years making monetization-heavy mobile games, Billy describes realizing he was building "a casino game, not a video game,” which became his motivation to make Animal Well.

[0:34:57] Animal Well started as a side project at Level X
Billy reveals he was already prototyping Animal Well during his Level X job interview, getting up a few hours early every morning for years to chip away at it before going to work.

[0:45:43] Tunic raised the bar and stressed him out
When Tunic launched while he was mid-development, Billy saw major parallels to what he was building. While it was inspiring, it was also intimidating.

[0:51:21] Cold-emailing Dan Adelman changed everything
After watching a documentary about Axiom Verge, Billy sent a cold email to industry veteran Dan Adelman (one of the only times in his life he's done that), which became the turning point for getting Animal Well to market.

[1:06:25] Dunkey's announcement brought 100K wishlists in a day
When Dunkey announced Animal Well as Bigmode's first game, it generated 100,000 Steam wishlists in a single day — after Billy had spent years slowly building to 25,000.

[1:16:27] Outro: Wrapping Up

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