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

For four years, Basso worked on a primitive version of Animal Well in his free time, supporting himself with his day job. “It was very clearly a self-indulgent side project for myself,” he told me in an interview. But as the game grew more sophisticated, and Basso invested more time into it, he started to think of it differently. “It gradually started to seem more like something I could actually release, that I could maybe make a living off of,” he says.

Basso gathered his confidence and plotted an exit from his day job. His family didn’t quite understand his ambitions. “My dad didn’t want me to quit my job to work on it,” Basso says. “They were worried that I should keep a full-time job.”

Animal Well fans peppered Basso with questions.

Photograph: Darrell Jackson

They also listened attentively.

Photograph: Darrell Jackson

Then, in 2021, a turning point: Basso got in touch with Dan Adelman, an industry vet known on the business development side, for help. “I was kind of an introverted person that doesn’t feel very comfortable posting things online and marketing the game,” Basso says. Adelman is well known for running Nintendo of America’s indie program and championing small developers. “Luckily enough, he was into the project,” Basso says. “He wanted to start working together and then, from that point forward, I felt like I just became a much luckier person.”

Basso and Adelman began applying to events like Day of the Devs, an indie showcase, to let people see the game. Their efforts paid off, with Bigmode—the publisher run by YouTuber videogamedunkey—signing Animal Well. “A little less than a year after working with Dan, I had saved up enough money and had a road map to finishing the game,” Basso says. He quit his job to focus on Animal Well full-time. “It ended up still being about three years until it was done,” he says.

Over the many years of Animal Well’s development, friends urged him to release what he had when interest seemed to be high. “I knew where the quality bar was for myself and what people expect out of a game,” Basso says. He didn’t like the idea of “cashing out” on what he felt wasn’t a complete project, despite the long years that had gone into it. “It was hard to explain how much work actually goes into releasing a polished game,” Basso says. “You can’t just kind of put pencils down at any point and click the release button on Steam.” How his game debuted mattered. If people like it, “they’ll trust you in the future to buy one of another game.”

During his GDC talk, Basso walked through the years of development that went into Animal Well.

Photograph: Darrell Jackson